having
been acquainted with them for years, you know them intimately. So I
believe there are three classes of people to-day in the Christian
Church and out of it: those who know Christ only by reading or by
hearsay, those who have a historical Christ; those who have a slight
personal acquaintance with Him; and, those who thirst, as Paul did,
to "know Him and the power of His resurrection." The more we know of
Christ the more we shall love Him, and the better we shall serve Him.

Let us look at Him as He hangs upon the Cross, and see how He has put
away sin. He was manifested that He might take away our sins; and if
we really know Him we must first of all see Him as our Saviour from
sin. You remember how the angels said to the shepherds on the plains
of Bethlehem, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which
shall be to all people: for unto you is born this day, in the city of
David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." (Luke ii. 10, 11.) Then
if you go clear back to Isaiah, seven hundred years before Christ's
birth, you will find these words: "I, even I, am the Lord; and beside
me there is no Saviour" (xliii. 11).

Again, in the First Epistle of John (iv. 14) we read: "We have seen,
and do testify, that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the
world." All the heathen religions, we read, teach men to work their
way up to God; but the religion of Jesus Christ is God coming down to
men to save them, to lift them up out of the pit of sin. In Luke xix.
10, we read that Christ Himself told the people what He had come for:
"The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." So
we start from the Cross, not from the cradle. Christ has opened up a
new and living way to the Father; He has taken all the stumbling-blocks
out of the way, so that every man who accepts of Christ as his
Saviour can have salvation.

But Christ is not only a Saviour. I might save a man from drowning
and rescue him from an untimely grave; but I might probably not be
able to do any more for him. Christ is something more than a Saviour.
When the children of Israel were placed behind the blood, that blood
was their salvation; but they would still have heard the crack of the
slave-driver's whip if they had not been delivered from the Egyptian
yoke of bondage: then it was that God delivered them from the hand of
the king of Egypt. I have little sympathy with the idea that God
comes down to save us, and then leaves us in priso