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‘He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest.’
Luk_1:32
I. We should lose the Atonement.—If Jesus be only a man, His death upon the Cross is only an ordinary death—the death of a human being, and nothing more. Christ the Man can set us an example, but Christ the God-man alone can make atonement for transgression.
II. We should lose Christ’s Intercession.—You expect Christ to be the receptacle and the transmitter, as your great High Priest, of the almost infinite number of petitions and intercessions which are being offered at the throne of grace. Do you conceive it possible that any being who was not actually Divine could undertake such an office as this—the office of a hearer of prayer to a universe full of petitioners?
III. We exhaust the Gospel of its power.—If we abandon the doctrine of the Incarnation, we really exhaust the Gospel of the power which it possesses over human hearts—the power of self-sacrificing love.
Nothing on earth shall induce us to surrender our belief in the eternal Sonship of Christ.
—
Prebendary Gordon Calthrop.
Illustration‘ “We are bound,” says Bishop Westcott, “not only to believe that ‘Jesus is Lord,’ but to confess Him before men. For if the message of the Incarnation necessarily transcends our thoughts in its fullness, none the less it comes within the range of our experience as far as our thoughts can reach. It touches life at every point, and we are bound to consider what it means for us, for our fellow-men, and for the world. It is not enough to hold it as an article of our creed; we must openly and in secret prove its efficacy in action. By our reticence, by our habitual reserve in dealing with it as the master-power in shaping and sustaining our thoughts, our purposes, our deeds, we encourage a feeling of secret mistrust as to the validity of the faith.” ’