"Yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness." Romans 6:13-22
I cannot save and sanctify myself; I cannot atone for sin; I cannot
redeem the world; I can not make right what is wrong, pure what is
impure, holy what is unholy. That is all the sovereign work of God.
Have I faith in what Jesus Christ has done? He has made a perfect
Atonement, am I in the habit of constantly realizing it? The great need
is not to do things, but to believe things. The
Redemption of Christ is not an experience, it is the great act of God
which He has performed through Christ, and I have to build my faith
upon it. If I construct my faith on my experience, I produce that most
unscriptural type, an isolated life, my eyes fixed on my own whiteness.
Beware of the piety that has no pre-supposition in the Atonement of the
Lord. It is of no use for anything but a sequestered life; it is
useless to God and a nuisance to man. Measure every type of experience
by our Lord Himself. We cannot do anything pleasing to God unless we
deliberately build on the pre-supposition of the Atonement. The Atonement of Jesus has to work out in practical,
unobtrusive ways in my life. Every time I obey, absolute Deity is on my
side, so that the grace of God and natural obedience coincide.
Obedience means that I have banked everything on the Atonement, and my
obedience is met immediately by the delight of the supernatural grace
of God. Beware of the piety that denies the natural life, it is a
fraud. Continually bring yourself to the bar of the Atonement - where
is the discernment of the Atonement in this thing, and in that?
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