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If God announces the gift of righteousness apart from works,
why do you keep mourning over your bad works, your
failures?
DO you not see that it is because you still have hopes in these
works of yours that you are depressed and
discouraged by their
failure? If you truly saw and believed that God is reckoning
righteous the ungodly who believe
on Him, you would fairly
hate your struggles to be "better"; for you would see that your
dreams of good works have not
at all commended you to God,
and that your bad works do not at all hinder you from believing
on Him,--that justifieth
the ungodly!
Therefore, on seeing your failures, you should say, I am
nothing but a failure; but God is dealing
with me on another
principle altogether than my works, good or bad,--a principle
not involving my works, but based only
on the work of Christ
for me. I am anxious, indeed, to be pleasing to God and to be
filled with His Spirit; but I am
not at all justified, or accounted
righteous, by these things. God, in justifying me, acted wholly
and only on Christ's
blood-shedding on my behalf.
Therefore I have this double attitude: first, I know that Christ
is in Heaven before
God for me, and that I stand in the value
before God of His finished work; that God sees me nowhere
else but in this
dead, buried, and Risen Christ, and that His
favor is toward me in Christ, and is limitless and eternal.
Then, second,
toward the work of the Holy Spirit in me, my
attitude is, a desire to be guided into the truth, to be obedient
thereto,
and to be chastened by God my Father if disobedient;
to learn to pray in the Spirit, to walk by the Spirit, and to be
filled
with a love for the Scriptures and for the saints and
for all men.
Yet none of these things justifies me! I had
justification
from God as a sinner, not as a saint! My saintliness does not
increase it, nor, praise God, do my failures
decrease it!
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