Golden HYMNS Of The FAITH : Nothing But The Blood

A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

- W. Somerset Maugham, 1874-1966.

When we were not worthy to die for, Jesus of Nazareth died for us ... to make us worth dying for! While other religions are still encouraging their adherents to earn their particular deities' or gods' favour by sheer hard work, transcendental meditation, ancestral worship, praying six times per day, memorising and reciting their holy scriptures or relying on an exemplary life and the individual virtue of personal merit and commendable 'spirituality', all we have as our claim to Salvation (by GRACE) is the blood and sacrifice of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary.
I have already, in 1993 if I'm not mistaken, given up trying to be 'perfectly holy' after decades of futile and laughable efforts to improve my 'spiritual and moral performance'. My point of departure? If I was (am) not sanctified by the blood of Christ, I'm not ever going to be sanctified enough for Heaven ... period. Our legal position in Christ is the that we have been sanctified by His sacrifice and death on the cross, and we are alive today because He had actually physically, literally, risen from the grave (Death, where is thy sting!). The just shall live by FAITH in the work, efforts and accomplishments of Christ ... not ours.
By now the reader must surely have realised that I do not subscribe to a metaphorically-only risen-Christ (the way the 'Jesus Seminar' crowd would have it) but to a real, physically risen-Christ (the way the Bible would have it). So, let's leave the infantile philosophising about the deity of Christ and the silly counting out of little black, red, grey and orange beads for the 'Jesus Seminar' guys and their agnostic, and atheist-evolutionist cronies. Let their philosophers and 'seminary theologians' preach creatively and innovatively from Thomas Paine, Stalin, Hitler, Marx, Voltaire, Richard Dawkins, Dan Brown, Frank Yerby, Mao's Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, The Origin of the Species, obscure ancient Gnostic texts, the Apocrypha and the Government Gazette for all I care. It's a free country, so let them preach and teach the anti-gospel (bad news) of the Theology-of-Tolerance, Secular Humanism and Universal Religious Syncretism: We have chosen to stick to the Rock of Ages and the BIBLE (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth).
Obviously the injunction for Christians to live a holy life committed and dedicated to the cause of Christ remains valid, and obviously it should be every Christian believer's aim to crank up his or her moral condition onto a level par with his/her legal position (Justified ... 'Just-If-I-Had-Never-Sinned') in Christ. That we'll do if time, strength and tenacity permit, for the simple reason that we have been called to edify the Church (the 'Ecclessia') and be of positive use to the Kingdom. But if (or rather when) we fail, for we are not hyper-faith supermen and superwomen, nothing but the BLOOD (the SACRIFICE of Christ as exemplified by the blood) remains to wash away our sin and make us whole again. Jesus died for us because we could not save ourselves by lifting ourselves by our own spiritual bootstraps ... as our Creator (the Son of God) and the human offspring of Mary (the Son of Man) He had enormous respect for human frailty.
A humble American pastor, Alvin Rogness, once wrote that, if we were important enough for God to have us weighed and considered as candidates for eternal damnation, we were also important enough for God to have us weighed and considered as candidates for God's GRACE. Do the math ... without a judge, judgment and absolute guilt before the law, no amnesty (GRACE) could be possible. In a sound justice system, amnesty is generally offered only to those guilty before the law. It's the very horror of the threat of the Great White Throne Judgment that, in the end, provides the saving legal substance in the Gospel of GRACE culminating from Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Christ did not die to make God's Law obsolete, but to satisfy the demands of God's Law and release us from the curse of those harsh demands.

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Nothing But The Blood

(Robert Lowry, 1826-1899)

What can wash away my sin?

Nothing but the blood of Jesus;

What can make me whole again?

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

For my pardon this I see ‒

Nothing but the blood of Jesus;

For my cleansing, this my plea ‒

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Nothing can for sin atone ‒

Nothing but the blood of Jesus;