for he shall save his people from their sins

 

 

And She 

 

 

"shalt call his name Jesus;

for he shall save his people

from their sins."Matthew 1:21

"I would help some to understand

what Jesus came from the home of our Father to be to us

and do for us."

"I presume there is scarce a human being who,

resolved to speak openly,

would not confess to having something that plagued him,

something from which he would gladly be free,

something rendering it impossible for him,

at the moment,

to regard life

as an altogether good thing. "

....

"The causes of their discomfort are of all kinds,"

"from simple uneasiness

to a misery

such as makes annihilation

the highest hope of the sufferer"

"Some, to escape it,

leave their natural surroundings behind them,

and with strong and continuous effort

keep rising in the social scale,

to discover at every new ascent

fresh trouble," "awaiting them,"

"whereas in truth

they have brought the trouble with them.

Others, making haste to be rich,

are slow to find out that the poverty

of their souls,

none the less that their purses are filling,

will yet keep them unhappy.

Some court endless change,

nor know that on themselves

the change must pass

that will set them free.

Others expand their souls with knowledge,

only to find that content will not dwell

in the great house they have built."..

"All seek the thing whose defect appears

the  cause  of their misery," 

"The real cause of his trouble

is a something the man has not perhaps recognized"

"he is not yet acquainted with its true nature."

However absurd the statement may appear 

to one who has not yet discovered the fact for

himself,
the cause of every man's discomfort is evil,
moral evil

first of all,
evil in himself,
his own sin,
his own wrongness,
his own unrightness;

and then, 

evil in those he loves:"

"the only way to get rid of it,
is for the man to get rid of his own sin."

"but evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance,
the source of its necessity,"

"Foolish is the man,
and there are many such men,
who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort
by setting the world right,
by waging war on the evils around him,

while he neglects that integral part
of the world where lies his business,
his first business namely, his own
character and conduct.

Were it possible"...
"that the world should
thus be righted from the outside,
it would yet be impossible for the man
who had contributed to the work,
remaining what he was,
ever to enjoy the perfection
of the result;

himself not in tune with the organ he had tuned,
he must imagine it still 

a distracted, jarring instrument.

The philanthropist who regards the wrong as in the race,
forgetting that the race is made up of conscious and wrong individuals,
forgets also that wrong is always generated
in and done by an individual;

that the wrongness exists in the individual,

and by him is passed over,

as tendency,

to the race;

and that no evil can be cured in the race,

except by its being cured in its individuals: "

"There is no way of making three men right

but by making right each one of the three;

but a cure in one man who repents and turns,

is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race."

(Hope of the Gospel, George MacDonald)