We're thinking this week about the work of Christ, what he's done for us. The author

of Hebrews, you remember, tells us that he is able to save us completely. But if this

is true, then what Christ has done for us, what we often refer to as his work, must

meet our needs. But here we should pause. I suspect some people assume they know what

their needs are, and the danger of that assumption is that we then begin to assess Christ's

work in terms of our understanding of our own needs. We actually need to turn things

around and assess our needs in the light of what Christ has done, because we only really

understand our needs when we see what he had to do in order to meet them. So for the

rest of the week, I want to think about four new testament words that help us to understand

our needs and Christ's work. The first is propitiation. Paul uses it in Romans 3 verse 25,

God put Christ forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith, and John

uses it in 1 John chapter 2 verse 2, Christ is the propitiation for our sins and not only

for ours, but for the sins of the whole world. But what does propitiation mean? It's not

a word family that we use much today. Well, it's the idea of doing something that avert

or exhausts the anger or the wrath of another. So when Colin John speak about the Lord Jesus

as a propitiation, they're thinking back to the temple sacrifices that were made in recognition

that because of human sin and rebellion, the people were exposed to the wrath of God and

a sacrifice needed to be made. Maybe that's the reason we don't speak much today about

propitiation. We don't much like thinking about the wrath of God, and we like even less

thinking that we are under that wrath. I actually have noticed that when people are awakened

to the dangerous condition they're in, they tend to say things like, I need to do better,

but even if they were to be perfect from that point on, they'd still not escape the wrath

...