HOLINESS AND FAITH Part 3
The wisdom of the fathers
HOLINESS AND FAITH????Part 3
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We know how faith acts, and what its great hindrances are, in the matter of justification. It is good to remind ourselves that there are the same dangers in the exercise of sanctifying as of justifying faith. Faith IN GOD stand opposed to trust IN SELF, especially to its willing and working. Faith is hindered by every effort to do something ourselves. Faith looks to God working and yields itself to His strength as revealed in Christ through the Spirit. It allows God to work both to will and to do. Faith must work, for without works it is dead and by works alone can it be perfected. (James 2.20-22) In Jesus Christ, as Paul says, nothing matters but "faith working through love". (Gal. 5.6)
But these works, which faith in God's working inspires and performs, are very different form the works in which a believer often puts forth his best efforts, only to find that he fails. The true life of holiness - the life of those who are sanctified in Christ - has its root and strength in an abiding sense of utter powerlessness, in the deep restfulness that trusts to the working of a divine power and life, in the entire personal surrender to the loving Savior, and in that faith that to be nothing so that He may be all. It may appear impossible to discern or describe the difference between the working that is of self and the working that is of Christ through faith. But if we but know that there is such a difference, if we learn to distrust ourselves and to count on Christ working, the Holy Spirit will lead us into this secret of the Lord too. Faith's works are Christ's works.
And as by effort, so faith is also hindered by the desire to see and feel. "If you would believe, you would see." (John 11.40) The Holy Spirit will seal our faith with divine experience, and we will see the glory of God. But this is His work. Ours is, when all appears dark and cold, in the face of all that nature or experience testifies, still each moment to believe in Jesus as our all - sufficient sanctification in whom we are perfected before God.
(from "Holy in Christ" by Andrew Murray)