The Holiest of All By Andrew Murray

280 abe Dolfest ot 2W
In Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant they are offered and
secured to us in their fulness, in the power of an endless life.
But our experience of this depends upon our knowledge, our
faith, our surrender. And it is because our understanding
and acceptance and experience of the two first blessings is so
defective that our fellowship with God, our entrance into the
holy presence, and our abiding there, is still so much in Old
Testament failure But they continued not. Let us try and
realise this.
Take the first of the three covenant blessings
: I will be
merciful to their iniquities, and their sins will I remember no
more. In more than one respect the Christian s thought of
what this pardon is may be defective. With some it is nothing
more than the remission of punishment. They think only of
acquittal ; they know not that it implies acceptance, complete
restoration to the favour, to the heart and the home of the
Father. They are content with pardon, as the escape from a
great danger of the surrender
; to, and the life abiding in the
love that pardoned, they know little. With others the thought
of pardon is mostly connected with individual or with daily
sin. They have no conception of the entire and eternal putting
away of sin out of God s sight and thought, which is assured
to us in the words : Their sins will I remember no more. And
with still
others, whose views may be more accurate, the pardon
of God exercises so little
power, because it has been accepted
more with the mind than the heart. They consent to and
claim what God s word says of it; but have never, mostly
owing to the want of any deep sense of sin, or any powerful
workings of the Holy Spirit, realised the overwhelming glory
of God s
mercy as they came to Himself to receive from His
own mouth the pardon of their sins. In all these cases the