The work of Christ, made ours by faith, blots it out.
(a) Its influence on conscience and the sense of guilt. The accusations
of conscience are silenced. A red line is drawn across the indictment,
or, as Colossians has it, it is 'nailed to the cross.' There is power
in His death to set us free from the debt we owe.
(b) Its influence on memory. Christ does not bring oblivion, but yet
takes away the remorse of remembrance. Faith in Christ makes memory no
longer a record which we blush to turn over, or upon which we gloat
with imaginative delight in guilty pleasures past, but a record of our
shortcomings that humbles us with a penitence which is not pain, but
serves as a beacon and warning for the time to come. He who has a clear
beam of memory on his backward track, and a bright light of hope on his
forward one, will steer right.
(c) Its influence on character.
We attain new hopes and tastes. 'We become epistles of Christ known and
read of all men,' like palimpsests, Homer or Ovid written over with the
New Testament gospels or epistles.
Christ's work is twofold, erasure and rewriting. For the one, 'I will
blot out as a cloud their transgressions.' None but He can remove
these. For the other, 'I will put My law into their minds and will
write it on their hearts.' He can impress all holy desires on, and can
put His great love and His mighty spirit into, our hearts.
So give your hearts to Him. They are all scrawled over with hideous and
wicked writing that has sunk deep into their substance. Graven as if on
rock are your sins in your character. Your worship and sacrifices will
not remove them, but Jesus Christ can. He died that you might be
forgiven, He lives that you may be purified. Trust yourself to Him, and
lean all your sinfulness on His atonement and sanctifying power, and
the foul words and bad thoughts that have been scored so deep into your
nature will be erased, and His own hand will trace on the page, poor
and thin though it be, which has been whitened by His blood, the fair
letters and shapes of His own likeness. Do not let your hearts be the
devil's copybooks for all evil things to scrawl their names there, as
boys do on the walls, but spread them before Him, and ask Him to make
them clean and write upon them His new name, indicating that you now
belong to another, as a new owner writes his name on a book that he has
bought.