Paul says in Romans 5:6 that ‘while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.‘ Despite all our achievements as humans, when it comes to living a righteous life, we fail, or as Paul says, ‘We are weak.’ This is because we have broken our ties with God, our Creator, and this has made us forfeit what God wished for us to have in order to be authentically human. Paul says that of our own efforts we cannot come out of this predicament. We stand guilty before God, deserving of his punishment, and then Paul says in verse 8, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.'
I was once speaking to a small group of people about the death of Christ and there was a lady there to whom this message seemed very strange. Her reaction was similar to the reaction of a lot of people when they are told that Jesus died for them: ‘How could someone else die for me, how could someone else be punished for the wrong I’ve done? If any one should be punished shouldn’t it be me?‘ This lady had a son with a marked limp because he had contracted polio when he was a little boy. I asked her, ‘When your son was very sick did anyone think it was unfair or strange that you stayed up night after night making tremendous personal sacrifices in order to care for him?’ ‘Well,‘ she said, ‘no.’ Then I told her, ‘That’s what our Creator did for us. When he saw our hopeless condition he sent his Son to make the supreme sacrifice for us.' After the meeting this lady told a colleague of mine she now understood the message of the death of Christ.
Ajith Fernando: BBC Radio 4 Service
Taken from the 2011 Keswick Convention Ministry Book “Word to the World”
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