Dear Friends,
It’s fascinating to look back at history as see concerning one man “He got it,” and see concerning another “He did not.” Today’s devotional goes back in English history to reveal to us a man who got it. Do you? God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Romans 8:1 (ESV)

  There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

“Perhaps the most versatile of all the great Elizabethans was Sir Walter Raleigh: courtier, soldier, sailor, explorer, scientist, poet, author, historian. It was his misfortune that he outlived the great queen when she died in March 1603. Four months later, he was suddenly imprisoned on a very doubtful charge of treason. His trial took place in the following November: he was condemned to death, and the scaffold was set up in the grounds of the Tower of London. He wrote what he believed would be his last letter to his wife; a poem followed. He had denied the charge of high treason….but in the Tower he could only look up to the ‘bribeless hall’ of heaven where the King’s attorney is none other than Christ Himself:

‘And when the grand twelve-million jury

Of our sins, with direful fury,

Against our souls black verdicts give,

Christ pleads His death, and then we live.’

Raleigh’s fate was postponed, and his execution did not take place until 1616; but when at last he was required to die beneath the axe, he met his death with an unfaltering faith and courage. He had grasped in essence the great fundamental meaning of the Pauline theology of grace: ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.’” [Marcus Loane, The Hope of Glory: An Exposition of the Eighth Chapter in the Epistle to the Romans, (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1968), p. 15-16 citing Norman Lloyd Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh, p. 209]