"I had not long been in the house, that morning when I found the Savior, before one who had been anxious about me, said, 'There is a change come over my son;' and a delicate question was put, which soon drew out of me the confession that I had looked to Christ, and that I was lightened.
"Why, they could all see in my face the evidence of the change that had been wrought; there was all the difference between bondage and liberty, or between despair and delight; and it was because I had been with Christ that I had, in a moment, leaped out of nature's darkness into his marvellous light.
"So, now, whenever anybody says to me, 'Your view of the atonement, you know, is very old-fashioned, the doctrine of substitution is quite out of date;' I am not at all shaken in my belief.
"The gentlemen of the modern-thought school, who have been to Germany for their theology, do not like that glorious doctrine of substitution. They think that the atonement is a something or other, that in some way or other, somehow or other, has something or other to do with the salvation of men; but I tell them that their cloudy gospel might have surrounded me till my hair grew grey, but I should never have been any the better for it. I should never have found peace with God, nor come to love the Lord at all, if it had not been that I distinctly saw that he, who knew no sin, was made sin for me, that I might be made the righteousness of God in him.
"When I realized that, although I had gone astray from God, and broken his righteous law, he had laid on Christ my iniquity, and punished him in my stead, my soul found rest at once; and, to this day, it cannot rest under any other explanation of the atonement of Christ. So I bear my own personal witness, and many of you can heartily join with me in bearing similar testimony. You have been with Christ, so you can speak of the power of his substitutionary sacrifice as begetting peace in your soul."
-- C.H. Spurgeon
This excerpt is from "Christ's Past and Present Witnesses," a sermon preached Sunday Evening 7 March 1880 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
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