1. CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS.
He did all that is included in the great word save. He did not come to induce us to save ourselves, or to help us to save ourselves, or to enable us to save ourselves. He came to save us, and, therefore, His name was called Jesus—because He should save His people from their sins. The glory of our Lord, surpassing all His other glories to usward, is just that He is our actual and complete Saviour; our Saviour to the uttermost. Nothing that we are and nothing that we can do enters in the slightest measure into the ground of our acceptance with God. Jesus did it all, and by doing it all He became in the fullest and widest and deepest sense the word can bear, our Saviour. For this end did He come into the world, to save sinners; and nothing short of the actual and complete saving of sinners will satisfy the account of His work given by His own lips and repeated from them by all His apostles. It is in this great fact, indeed, that there lies the whole essence of the gospel, for let us never forget that the gospel is not good advice but good news. It does not come to us to make known to us what we must do to earn salvation for ourselves, but proclaiming what Jesus has done to save us. It is salvation, a completed salvation, that it announces to us; and the burden of its message is just this—that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.—Prof. B. B. Warfield, Princeton Theological Seminary, U.S.A.