Dear Friends,
We sing zestfully the grand old hymn, “Redeemed, how I love to proclaim
it,” but do we know exactly what we are talking about? It’s so easy to
use a word with only a fuzzy idea of what it means. Today’s attached
devotional will help you be clear in your mind and thus more grateful in
your heart for redemption. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• I Peter 1:18-19 (ESV)

  18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

“No one needed any…explanation when Peter said that Christ redeemed us. In Peter’s day the world was one-half slave. Men were constantly being bought and sold, and that regardless of color. When a man was held in bondage as a slave or as a captive, his family or some kindhearted friend, if he had the means to do so, would redeem the man from slavery with gold or silver or precious stones. This is the meaning that lies back of this great, word. Christ paid the price of our redemption. And how great and high the price was! Nothing less than His own precious blood! He came, He said, not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to lay down His life ‘a ransom for many.’…

One of the greatest of English novels, George Eliot’s Romola, centers around a cultivated Greek, Tito Melema, who, with his father, had been waylaid by pirated in the Mediterranean. When the son managed to escape, the father put into his hands the precious stones with which, when he reached a place of safety, he was to redeem his father from slavery. But the selfish and pleasure-loving son used those precious stones for his own comfort and his own advancement in the world, and forsook and forgot his father who was help in slavery. But how different the act of our faithful friend, our elder brother, who, on the cross, paid the price for our redemption.” [Clarence Edward Macartney, The Greatest Texts of the Bible, (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1992), p. 119-120]