Life through death.

G. Campbell Morgan on the Lord’s self-giving death.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

In preparation for my Easter sermon this past Sunday, I took some time to read through a sermon on Jesus’s words in John 10:11 by renowned British orator G. Campbell Morgan. The Lord’s declaration that he is “the good shepherd” who “lays down his life for the sheep” prompts Morgan to consider the self-giving death of the Christ of God through which the dead are raised to life. I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a few lines for your benefit. Morgan says:

I see in this dying that appalls me, this great Cross that shocks me, first, that Jesus knew and foretold it; second, that He went toward it, choosing it; and third, that He died of His own will, and authority, and power. And in that death of Christ, which He — to use the word used in connection with the Holy Mount — accomplished, I have at last touched some secret spring of life. This death is not the ordinary death of other men. It is different, removed, supreme, and marvelous beyond all dying. So that the dying of Christ at the end of His life has in it qualities, quantities, virtues, values, that can be in no other dying . . .

He died for the destruction of the destroyer, but He rose again, and in His rising He took back His life, not to hold it, but to give it; not to possess it, but to pass it on to others. And today I believe in Him, and have His very life, so that I, who could not have victory over the wolf in my own strength, but in His strength, have received the very nature that triumphs over the wolf; and I am made master of the things that mastered me by the thrill and the throb of the very life of the Shepherd Who died and rose again. (215–16)

As the apostle John writes in his first New Testament letter, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). Consequently, Satan’s scheme to keep sinners ensnared by his false promises of fulfillment is sufficiently upended by Christ’s self-surrender. His sacrificial death on the cross not only accomplishes our salvation but also serves as the unfathomable reservoir from which we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). May we continually live in the incandescent light and hope of Jesus’s passion and resurrection for us.

Grace and peace.

Works cited:

G. Campbell Morgan, The Westminster Pulpit: The Preaching of G. Campbell Morgan, Vols. 1–10 (Fincastle, VA: Scripture Truth Book Co., 1954).