The Reality of the Redemption

The following is from Billy Graham's devotional Unto the Hills:

"What stirs God most is not physical suffering but sin.  All too often we are more afraid of physical pain than of moral wrong.

"The cross is the standing evidence of the fact that holiness is a principle for which God would die.  God cannot clear the guilty until atonement is made.  Mercy is what we need and that is what we receive at the foot of the cross.

"In her book, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, Hannah Whitall Smith tells us:  '. . . what we need is to see that God's presence is a certain fact always, and that every act of our soul is done right before Him, and that a word spoken in prayer is really spoken to Him, as if our eyes could see Him and our hands could touch Him.   Then we shall cease to have such vague conceptions of our relations with Him, and shall feel the binding force of every word we say in His presence.'"