February 4 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree" (1 Pet. 2:24).

Devotional

Blessed announcement! Our sin is no less hateful, or hated, because it is forgiven and entirely blotted out. Oh no! Let the Lord touch your heart, Christian reader, with a sense of his pardoning love, with the assurance of his forgiveness, and then you will go and hate and mortify and forsake it even more resolutely and energetically than ever.

And must the Son of God become man that those who are by nature children of wrath might become the sons of God? Must God, the eternal God, the high and lofty One, stoop so low as to become incarnate, and that for sinners; for me, a poor worthless sinner? In order to save me from eternal woe, must the Son of Man suffer, agonize, and die—die in my place, die for my sins, die an accursed death?

Ah! Lord, what must sin be? What must my sin be? How little I have thought of it. How little I have mourned for it. Still less have I hated it as I ought to have hated it! O Lord, how vile, how unutterably vile I am! Oh hated sin! Do you forgive it, Father of all mercy? This only makes sin more hateful still.

My sins, my sins, my Savior!
They take such hold on me,
I am not able to look up,
save only, Christ, on thee;
in thee is all forgiveness,
in thee abundant grace,
my shadow and my sunshine
the brightness of thy face.

My sins, my sins, my Savior!
Their guilt I never knew
till with thee in the desert
I near thy passion drew;
till with thee in the garden
I heard thy pleading pray'r,
and saw the sweat-drops bloody
that told thy sorrow there.

Therefore my songs, my Savior,
e'en in this time of woe,
shall tell of all thy goodness
to suff'ring man below;
thy goodness and thy favor,
whose presence from above
rejoice those hearts, my Savior,
that live in thee and love.

(John S.B. Monsell, 1863)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2025.