ALL OF GRACE 7

7. By Grace Through Faith

 “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” --Ephesians 2:8

I think it well to turn a little to one side that I may ask my reader to observe adoringly the fountainhead of our salvation, which is the grace of God. “By grace you have been saved.” Because God is gracious, sinful men are therefore forgiven, converted, purified, and saved. It is not because of anything in them, or that ever can be in them, that they are saved; but because of the boundless love, goodness, pity, compassion, mercy, and grace of God. Wait for a moment, then, at the source of the well. Behold the pure river of water of life, as it proceeds out of the throne of God and of the Lamb!

What a bottomless well the grace of God is! Who can measure its breadth? Who can fathom its depth? Like all the rest of the divine attributes, it is infinite. God is full of love, for “God is love.” God is full of goodness; the very name “God” is short for “good.” Unbounded goodness and love enter into the very essence of the Godhead. It is because “His mercy endures forever” (Psalm 136) that men are not destroyed; because “His compassions fail not” (Lamentations 3:22) that sinners are brought to Him and forgiven.

Remember this; or you may fall into error by fixing your minds so much upon the faith that is the channel of salvation as to forget the grace that is the fountain and source, even of faith itself. Faith is the work of God’s grace in us. No man can say that Jesus is the Christ but by the Holy Spirit. “No one can come to Me,” Jesus says, “unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44). So that faith, which is coming to Christ, is the result of divine drawing. Grace is the first and last moving cause of salvation; and faith, essential as it is, is only an important part of the machinery that grace uses. We are saved “through faith,” but salvation is “by grace.” Sound forth those words as if it were the archangel’s trumpet: “By grace you have been saved.” What glad tidings for the undeserving!

Faith occupies the position of a channel or conduit pipe. Grace is the fountain and the stream; faith is the aqueduct through which the flood of mercy flows down to refresh the thirsty sons of men. It is a great pity when the aqueduct is broken. It is a sad sight to see around Rome the many noble aqueducts that no longer transport water into the city because the arches are broken and the marvelous structures are in ruins. The aqueduct must be kept intact to transport the current; and, even so, faith must be true and sound, leading right up to God and coming right down to ourselves, that it may become a serviceable channel of mercy to our souls.

Still, I remind you again that faith is only the channel or aqueduct, and not the fountainhead, and we must not look so much to it as to exalt it above the divine source of all blessing that lies in the grace of God. Never make a Christ out of your faith, nor think of as if it were the independent source of your salvation. Our life is found in “looking unto Jesus,” not in looking to our own faith. By faith all things become possible to us; yet the power is not in the faith, but in the God upon whom faith relies. Grace is the powerful engine, and faith is the chain by which the boxcar of the soul is attached to the great locomotive power. The righteousness of faith is not the moral excellence of faith, but the righteousness of Jesus Christ which faith grasps and makes its own. The peace within the soul does not come from the thoughtful meditation of our own faith; but it comes to us from Him who is our peace, the hem of whose garment faith touches, and virtue comes out of Him into the soul.

You see then, dear friend, that the weakness of your faith will not destroy you. A trembling hand may receive a golden gift. The Lord’s salvation can come to us though we have only faith as a grain of mustard seed. The power lies in the grace of God, and not in our faith. Great messages can be sent along slender wires, and the peace-giving witness of the Holy Spirit can reach the heart by means of a thread-like faith that seems almost unable to sustain its own weight. Think more of Him to whom you look than of the look itself. You must look away even from your own looking, and see nothing but Jesus, and the grace of God revealed in Him.

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s classic, All of Grace, has been edited in Modern English by Jon Cardwell. A chapter or two will be posted each Friday.]

ALL OF GRACE 6

6. Concerning Deliverance and Sinning
 

In this place I would say a plain word or two to those who understand the method of justification by faith which is in Christ Jesus, but whose trouble is that they cannot cease from sin. We can never be happy, restful, or spiritually healthy until we become holy. We must be rid of sin. Yet, how is this done? This is the life-or-death question for many. The old nature is very strong, and they have tried to curb and tame it; but it will not be restrained, and they find themselves, though anxious to be better, if anything they grow worse than before. The heart is so hard, the will is so obstinate, the passions are so furious, the thoughts are so volatile, the imagination is so ungovernable, the desires are so wild, that the man feels that he has a den of wild beasts within him, which will eat him up sooner than be ruled by him. We may say of our fallen nature what the Lord said to Job concerning Leviathan: “Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you leash him for your maidens?” (Job 41:5). A man might as well hope to hold the north wind in the hollow of his hand as expect to control those boisterous powers by his own strength which dwell within his fallen nature. This is a greater achievement than any of the fabled labors of Hercules: God is wanted here.

“I could believe that Jesus would forgive sin,” says one, “but then my trouble is that I sin again, and that I feel such awful tendencies to evil within me. As surely as a stone, if it is thrown up into the air, soon comes down again to the ground, so do I, though I am sent up to heaven by earnest preaching, I return again to my insensible state. Sadly, I am easily fascinated with the serpent’s eyes of sin, and am therefore held as under a spell, so that I cannot escape from my own foolishness.”

Dear friend, salvation would be a sadly incomplete matter if it did not deal with this part of our fallen condition. We want to be purified as well as pardoned. Justification without sanctification would not be salvation at all. It would call the leper clean, and leave him to die of his disease; it would forgive the rebellion and allow the rebel to remain an enemy to his king. It would remove the consequences but overlook the cause, and this would leave an endless and hopeless task before us. It would stop the stream for a time, but leave an open fountain of defilement, which would sooner or later break forth with increased power. Remember that the Lord Jesus came to take away sin in three ways; He came to remove the penalty of sin, the power of sin, and, at last, the presence of sin. At once you may reach to the second part-- the power of sin may immediately be broken; and so you will be on the road to the third, namely, the removal of the presence of sin. We “know that He was manifested to take away our sins” (1 John 3:5).

The angel said of our Lord, “You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Our Lord Jesus came to destroy in us the works of the devil. That which was said at our Lord’s birth was also declared in His death; for when the soldier pierced His side immediately blood and water came forth, to set forth the double cure by which we are delivered from the guilt and the defilement of sin.

If, however, you are troubled about the power of sin, and about the tendencies of your nature, as you well may be, here is a promise for you. Have faith in it, for it stands in that covenant of grace that is ordered in all things, and certain. God, who cannot lie, has said in Ezekiel 36:26,

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

You see, it is all “I will,” and “I will.” “I will give,” and “I will take away.” This is the royal style of the King of kings, who is able to accomplish all His will. No Word of His shall ever fall to the ground.

The Lord knows quite well that you cannot change your own heart, and cannot cleanse your own nature; but He also knows that He can do both. He can cause the Ethiopian to change his skin, and the leopard his spots. Hear this, and be astonished: He can create you a second time; He can cause you to be born again. This is a miracle of grace, but the Holy Spirit will perform it. It would be a very wonderful thing if one could stand at the foot of Niagara Falls, and could speak a word which should make the river Niagara begin to run up stream, and leap up that great cliff over which it now rolls in astounding force. Nothing but the power of God could achieve that marvel; but that would be more than a fit parallel to what would take place if the course of your nature were altogether reversed. All things are possible with God. He can reverse the direction of your desires and the current of your life, and instead of going downward from God, He can make your whole being reach upward toward God. That is, in fact, what the Lord has promised to do for all who are in the covenant; and we know from Scripture that all believers are in the covenant. Let me read the words again:

“Then I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within them, and take the stony heart out of their flesh, and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19).

What a wonderful promise! And it is yes and amen in Christ Jesus to the glory of God by us. Let’s hold on to it; receive it as true, and set it apart as our very own. Then it shall be fulfilled in us, and we shall have to sing, throughout the days and years, of that wondrous change which the sovereign grace of God has performed in us.

It is well worthy of consideration that when the Lord takes away the stony heart, that deed is done; and when that is once done, no known power can ever take that new heart away which He gives, and that right spirit which He puts within us. “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29); that is, without repentance on His part; He does not take away what He once has given. Let Him renew you and you will be renewed. Man’s reforms and clean-ups soon come to an end, just as the dog returns to his own vomit; but when God puts a new heart into us, the new heart is there forever, and will never harden into stone again. He who made it flesh will keep it so. Herein we may rejoice and be glad forever in that which God creates in the kingdom of His grace.

To put the matter very simply-- did you ever hear of Mr. Rowland Hill’s illustration of the cat and the sow? I will tell it in my own way, to illustrate our Savior’s expressive words-- “You must be born again” (John 3:7). Do you see that cat? What a clean creature she is! How clever she is to wash herself with her tongue and her paws! It is quite a pretty sight! Did you ever see a sow do that? No, you never did. It is contrary to its nature. It prefers to wallow in the mud and muck. Go and teach a sow to wash itself, and see how little success you would have. It would be a great sanitary improvement if swine would be clean. Teach them to wash and clean themselves as the cat has been doing! Useless task. You may wash that sow by force, but it runs back to the muck, and is soon as disgusting as ever. The only way that you can get a sow to wash itself is to transform it into a cat; then it will wash and be clean, but not until then! Suppose that transformation to be accomplished, and then what was difficult or impossible is easy enough; the swine will be suitable, from now on, to sit in your living room and your clean carpets. So it is with an ungodly man; you cannot force him to do what a renewed man does most willingly; you may teach him, and set before him a good example, but he cannot learn the art of holiness, for he has no mind to it; his nature leads him another way. When the Lord makes a new man of him, all things have a different perspective. This change is so huge, that I once heard a convert say, “Either all the world is changed, or else I am.” The new nature follows after right as naturally as the old nature wanders after wrong. What a blessing to receive such a nature! The Holy Spirit can only give this.

Has it ever occurred to you what a wonderful thing it is for the Lord to give a new heart and a right spirit to a man? You have seen a lobster, perhaps, which has fought with another lobster, and lost one of its claws, and a new claw has grown to replace the lost one. That is a remarkable thing; but it is a much more astounding fact that a man should have a new heart given to him. This, indeed, is a miracle beyond the powers of nature. There is a tree. If you cut off one of its limbs, another one may grow in its place; but can you change the tree; can you sweeten sour sap; can you make the thorn bear figs? You can graft something better into it and that is the analogy which nature gives us of the work of grace; but absolutely to change the vital sap of the tree would be a miracle indeed. Such a extraordinary wonder and mystery of power God works in all who believe in Jesus.

If you yield yourself up to His divine working, the Lord will alter your nature; He will restrain the old nature, and breathe new life into you. Put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, and He will take the stony heart out of your flesh, and He will give you a heart of flesh. Where everything was hard, everything shall be tender; where everything was vicious, everything shall be virtuous: where everything tended downward, everything shall rise upward with spontaneous force. The lion of anger shall give place to the lamb of meekness; the raven of uncleanness shall fly before the dove of purity; the vile serpent of deceit shall be crushed under the heel of truth.

 

I have seen with my own eyes such marvelous changes of moral and spiritual character that I don’t despair at all. I could, if it were fitting, point out those who were once unchaste women who are now pure as the driven snow, and blaspheming men who now delight all around them by their intense devotion. Thieves are made honest, drunkards sober, liars truthful, and scoffers zealous. Wherever the grace of God has appeared to a man it has trained him to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present evil world: and, dear reader, it will do the same for you.

“I cannot make this change,” says one. Who said you could? The Scripture which we have quoted speaks not of what man will do, but of what God will do. It is God’s promise, and it is for Him to fulfill His own appointments. Trust in Him to fulfill His Word in you, and it will be done.

“But how is it to be done?” What business is that of yours? Must the Lord explain His methods before you will believe Him? The Lord’s working in this matter is a great mystery: the Holy Spirit performs it. He who made the promise has the responsibility of keeping the promise, and He is quite up to the task. God, who promises this marvelous change, will assuredly carry it out in all who receive Jesus, for He gives power to them to become the Sons of God. Oh that you would believe it! Oh that you would do the gracious Lord the justice to believe that He can and will do this for you, great miracle though it will be! Oh that you would believe that God cannot lie! Oh that you would trust Him for a new heart, and a right spirit, for He can give them to you! May the Lord give you faith in His promise, faith in His Son, faith in the Holy Spirit, and faith in Him, and to Him shall be praise and honor and glory forever and ever! Amen.

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s classic, All of Grace, has been edited in Modern English by Jon Cardwell. A chapter or two will be posted each Friday.]

ALL OF GRACE 5

5. Just and the Justifier

We have seen the ungodly justified, and have considered the great truth, that only God can justify any man. We now come a step further and ask this question: How can a just God justify guilty men? Here we are met with a full answer in the words of Paul, in Romans 3:21-26. We will read six verses from the chapter in order to get the full context of the passage:

“But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

Allow me here to give you a bit of personal experience. When I was under the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to other people, became to me an unbearable burden. It was not so much that I feared hell, but that I feared sin. I knew myself to be so horribly guilty that I remember feeling that if God did not punish me for sin He should do so. I felt that the Judge of all the earth should condemn the kind of sin that mine was. I sat on the judgment seat, and I condemned myself to perish, because I admitted that if I were God I could have no other choice but to send such a guilty creature as I was down to the lowest chamber of hell. The whole time, a deep concern was on my mind for the honor of God’s name, and the integrity of His moral government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I could be forgiven unjustly. The sin I had committed must be punished. But then there was the question of how God could be just, and yet justify me who had been so guilty. I asked my heart: “How can He be just and yet the justifier?” I was worried and wearied with this question. I couldn’t see any answer to it. Certainly, I could never have invented an answer that would have satisfied my conscience.

The doctrine of the atonement is, to my mind, one of the most certain proofs of the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel? This isn’t some teaching of human mythology, or a poetic dream of the imagination. This method of atonement is only known among men because it is a fact; fiction could not have devised it. God Himself ordained it; it is not a matter that could have been imagined.

I had heard the plan of salvation by the sacrifice of Jesus since I was a young boy; but I did not know any more about it in my innermost soul than if I had been born and bred a savage in the most secluded part of the earth. The light was there, but I was blind; it was of necessity that the Lord Himself should make the matter plain to me. It came to me as a new revelation, as fresh as if I had never read in Scripture that Jesus was declared to be the propitiation for sins that God might be just. I believe it will have to come as a revelation to every newborn child of God whenever he sees it; what I mean is that glorious doctrine of the substitution of the Lord Jesus. I came to understand that salvation was possible through vicarious sacrifice; and that provision had been made in the first establishment and arrangement of things for such a substitution. I was made to see that He who is the Son of God, co-equal, and co-eternal with the Father, from eternity past, had been made the covenant Head of a chosen people so that in that capacity He might suffer for them and save them. Inasmuch as our fall was not a personal one at first, for we fell in our federal representative, the first Adam, it became possible for us to be recovered by a second representative, even by Him who has undertaken to be the covenant head of His people, so as to be their second Adam. I saw that before I actually sinned I had fallen in sin by my first father’s sin; and I rejoiced that therefore it became possible in point of law for me to rise by a second head and representative. The fall by Adam left a loophole of escape; another Adam can undo the damage made by the first. When I was anxious about the possibility of a just God pardoning me, I understood and saw by faith that He, who is the Son of God, became man, and in His own blessed Person bore my sin in His own body on the Cross of wood. I saw the punishment that brought me peace was laid on Him, and that with His stripes I was healed. Dear friend, have you ever seen that? Have you ever understood how God can be fully just, not remitting penalty nor blunting the edge of the sword, and yet can be infinitely merciful, and can justify the ungodly that turn to Him? It was because the Son of God, supremely glorious in His matchless Person, undertook to vindicate the law by bearing the sentence that should be mine; that God is able, therefore, to pass by my sin. The law of God was more vindicated by the death of Christ than it would have been if all transgressors had been sent to Hell. For the Son of God to suffer for sin was a more glorious establishment of the government of God, than for the whole race to suffer.

Jesus has suffered the death penalty on our behalf. Behold the wonder! There He hangs upon the Cross! This is the greatest sight you will ever see. Son of God and Son of Man, there He hangs, bearing pains unutterable, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. Oh, the glory of that sight! The innocent punished! The Holy One condemned! The Ever-blessed made a curse! The infinitely glorious put to a shameful death! The more I look at the sufferings of the Son of God, the more sure I am that they must meet my case. Why did He suffer, if not to turn aside the penalty from us? If, then, He turned it aside by His death, it is turned aside, and those who believe in Him need not fear it. It must be so, that since atonement is made, God is able to forgive without shaking the basis of His throne, or in the least degree blotting the statute book. Conscience gets a full answer to her tremendous question. The wrath of God against iniquity, whatever that may be, must be terrible beyond all conception. Moses said it quite well: “Who knows the power of Your anger?” (Psalm 90:11). Yet when we hear the Lord of glory cry, “Why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46), and see Him yielding up the spirit, we feel that the justice of God has received abundant vindication by obedience so perfect and death so terrible, rendered by so divine a Person. If God Himself bows before His own law, what more can be done? There is more in the atonement by way of merit, than there is in all human sin by way of demerit.

The great gulf of Jesus’ loving self-sacrifice can swallow up the mountains of our sins, every single one of them. For the sake of the infinite good of this one representative Man, the Lord may well look with favor upon other men, however unworthy they may be, in and of themselves. It was a miracle of miracles that the Lord Jesus Christ should stand in our stead and...

Bear that we might never bear

His Father’s righteous ire.

But He has done so. “It is finished” (John 19:30). God will spare the sinner because He did not spare His Son. God can pass by your transgressions because He laid those transgressions upon His only begotten Son nearly two thousand years ago. If you believe in Jesus (that is the point), then your sins were carried away by Him who was the scapegoat for His people.

What is it to believe in Him? It is not merely to say, “He is God and the Savior,” but to trust Him completely and entirely, and take Him for all your salvation from this time forth and forever-- your Lord, your Master, your all. If you will have Jesus, He has you already. If you believe on Him, I tell you that you cannot go to hell; for that would be to make the sacrifice of Christ of pointless. It cannot be that a sacrifice should be accepted, and yet the soul should die for whom that sacrifice has been received. If the believing soul could be condemned, then why a sacrifice? If Jesus died in my stead, why should I die also? Every believer can claim that the sacrifice was actually made for him: by faith he has laid his hands on it, and made it his own, and therefore he may rest assured that he can never perish. The Lord would not receive this offering on our behalf, and then condemn us to die. The Lord cannot read our pardon written in the blood of His own Son, and then smite us. That would be impossible. Oh that you may have grace given to you at once to look away to Jesus and to begin at the beginning, even at Jesus, who is the Fountainhead of mercy to guilty man!

“He justifies the ungodly.” “It is God who justifies,” therefore, and for that reason only, it can be done, and He does it through the atoning sacrifice of His divine Son. Therefore it can be justly done-- so justly done that no one will ever question it-- so thoroughly done that in the last tremendous day, when heaven and earth shall pass away, there shall be none that shall deny the validity of the justification. “Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died. Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies” (Romans 8:34, 33).

Now, poor soul! will you come into this lifeboat, just as you are? Here is safety from the wreck! Receive the sure deliverance. “I have nothing with me,” say you. You are not asked to bring anything with you. Men who escape for their lives will leave even their clothes behind. Leap for it, just as you are.

I will tell you this thing about myself to encourage you. My sole hope for heaven lies in the full atonement made upon Calvary’s Cross for the ungodly. On that I firmly rely. I do not have even the shadow of a hope anywhere else. You are in the same condition as I am; for neither of us have anything of our own worth as a ground of trust. Let us join hands and stand together at the foot of the Cross and trust our souls once and for all to Him who shed His blood for the guilty. We will be saved by one and the same Savior. If you perish trusting Him, I must perish too. What can I do more to prove my own confidence in the gospel that I set before you?

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon's classic, All of Grace, has been edited in Modern English by Jon Cardwell. A chapter or two will be posted each Friday.]