Classic Sermon Outlines (continued)
Christ the Suffering Substitute many actual transgressions. We have all gone astray from God our rightful Owner, alienated ourselves from Him, from the ends He designed us to move toward and the way He appointed us to move in.
B. The Nature of It.
We have gone astray like sheep which are apt to wander and are not apt, when they have gone astray, to find the way home again. That is our true character; we are bent to wander from God, but altogether unable of ourselves to return to Him. This is mentioned not only as our infelicity (that we go astray from the green pastures and expose ourselves to the beasts of prey), but as our iniquity. Sinners have their own iniquity, their beloved sin, which does most easily beset them; their own evil way of which they are particularly fond.
1. It is a wandering from God.
2. It is iniquity.
C. The Seriousness of It.
We affront God in going astray from Him, for we turn aside everyone to his own way and thereby set up ourselves and our own will in competition with God and His will; which is the malignity of sin. Instead of walking obediently in God's way we have turned wilfully and stubbornly to our own way, the way of our own heart, the way in which our own corrupt appetites and passions lead us. We have set up for ourselves to be our own masters, our own carvers, to do what we will and to have what we will.
1. We insult God.
2. We are wilfully disobedient to God.
II. GOD'S PROVISION.
A. The Appointment of Christ By the Will of the Father.
Our Lord Jesus was appointed to make satisfaction for our sins and to save us from the penal consequences of them by the will of His Father, for "the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." God chose Him to be the Savior of poor sinners and would have Him to save them in this way, by bearing their sins and the punishment of them; not the same that we should have suffered, but that which was more than equivalent for the maintaining