The Ways of Grace
"It is a serious thing, while full of comfort and warning to our souls as well, that there is nothing that so condemns sin as grace. The law condemns it, no doubt, but the law, in itself, never judges the nature. It condemns acts. If applied by the Spirit of God, it leads one to gather what the tree must be from the fruit. It infers what the nature is, but it does not directly, and immediately, and entirely deal with it. Grace does:
"what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son (that is grace) in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin (as a sacrifice for it), condemned sin in the flesh."
God condemned the nature, root and branch; executed His sentence upon all that man is in his best estate. No disguises could stand now; no excuses: all was brought into the full light of God Himself, and all condemned. It is the same thing from first to last. Grace is that which strips off all the thin veils which the flesh would cover itself with, in order that we should not learn what we are. Grace, while it puts away what we are, yet gives us the privilege of learning it — puts us on God's side, to execute his judgement upon it: enables us to deal with it, with an unsparing hand, just because we have a new nature given from God. We can afford to mortify the old nature; because we have a new and divine life that death and Satan cannot touch. And therefore it is you will find that in those parts of scripture, where grace is most fully brought out, there we have the closest exhortations to holiness. Consequently, wherever souls are afraid of grace, they avoid the only thing which can produce real holiness, they avoid the only thing which can detect and destroy the vain show in which they are walking themselves.
But there is another and a very serious thing for those who have received the grace of God, and who profess to stand in it. It is this:
"God is not mocked."
He will not allow that the name of His Son should ever be allied with evil. He will never allow that His grace should be pleaded as an excuse for sin. Grace has stretched out his hand, and has plucked us from hell, to carry us straight from the jaws of death into heaven itself: no less than this is done in principle, when we receive the Lord Jesus. We are taken out of the net of the spoiler and set in the hand of the Father and of the Son, whence none shall pluck us. But if this be so, what is the practical purpose of God in it? What does He intend that we should do under the shelter of this almighty grace, which has wrought such marvels for us? Assuredly that we should never allow the natural evil of our hearts; that we should watch for God and be jealous for Him against ourselves. We are taken out of ourselves, transplanted into Christ. We become, therefore, (if we have faith in Him, if it be a real work of the Holy Ghost), identified in feeling with the Lord: we are put in the interests of God, if I may so say, against our own corrupt nature; against evil everywhere, but above all wherever the name of Christ is named. We have nothing directly to do with the corrupt world outside, but we have every thing to do with our own corrupt nature; much to do with watching against it, judging it, dealing with it for God, wherever it dares to show itself."
Excerpt from The Ways of Grace
"Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth" (Col. 3:3).
"If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body ye shall live" (Rom 8:13).
