hall be softened by it. So now let me ask you to look with
me, first, at this question--

I. What Paul thought Jesus Christ died for.

'Died _for_ us.' Now that expression plainly implies two things:
first, that Christ died of His own accord, and being impelled by a
great motive, beneficence; and, second, that that voluntary death,
somehow or other, is for our behoof and advantage. The word in the
original, 'for,' does not define in what way that death ministers to
our advantage, but it does assert that for those Roman Christians who
had never seen Jesus Christ, and by consequence for you and me
nineteen centuries off the Cross, there is benefit in the fact of
that death. Now, suppose we quote an incident in the story of
missionary martyrdom. There was a young lady, whom some of us knew
and loved, in a Chinese mission station, who, with the rest of the
missionary band, was flying. Her life was safe. She looked back, and
saw a Chinese boy that her heart twined round, in danger. She
returned to save him; they laid hold of her and flung her into the
burning house, and her charred remains have never been found. That
was a death for another, but 'Jesus died for us' in a deeper sense
than that. Take another case. A man sets himself to some great cause,
not his own, and he sees that in order to bless humanity, either by
the proclamation of some truth, or by the origination of some great
movement, or in some other way, if he is to carry out his purpose,
he must give his life. He does so, and dies a martyr. What he aimed
at could only be done by the sacrifice of his life. The death was a
means to his end, and he died for his fellows. That is not the depth
of the sense in which Paul meant that Jesus Christ died for us. It
was not that He was true to His message, and, like many another
martyr, died. There is only one way, as it seems to me, in which any
beneficial relation can be established between the Death of Christ
and us, and it is that when He died He died for us, because 'He bare
our sins in His own body on the tree.'

Dear brethren, I dare say some of you do not take that view, but I
know not how justice can be done to the plain words of Scripture
unless this is the point of view from which we look at the Cross of
Calvary--that there the Lamb of Sacrifice was bearing, and bearing
away, the sins of the whole world. I know that Christian men who
unite in the belief that Christ's death was a sacrifice and an
atonement div