Righteousness

God or sin must die in me – Oswald Chambers

God or sin must die in me – Oswald Chambers

God or sin must die in me. The one elementary Bible truth we are in danger of forgetting is that the Gospel of God is addressed to men as sinners, and nothing else.

– Oswald Chambers –

Walking as Christ Walked – Andrew Murray

He who seeks to abide in Christ must walk even as He walked. A branch bears fruit of the same sort as the vine to which it belongs. The life of the vine and the branch is so completely identical that the manifestation of that life must be identical too. When the Lord Jesus redeemed us with His blood, and presented us to the Father in His righteousness, He did not leave us in our old nature to serve God as best we could. No. In Him dwelt eternal life, and every one who is in Him receives from Him that same eternal life in its holy, heavenly power. So He that abides in Him must also walk even as He walked.
– Andrew Murray –

Build Upon the Work Within You – George Whitefield

My dear friends beware of resting on your first conversion. You that are young believers in Christ, you should be looking out for fresh discovering of the Lord Jesus Christ every moment; you must not build upon your past experiences, you must not build upon a work within you, but always come out of yourselves to the righteousness of Jesus Christ without you; you must be always coming as poor sinners to draw water out of the wells of salvation; you must be forgetting the things that are behind, and be continually pressing forward to the things that are before. My dear friends, you must keep up a tender, close walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.

– George Whitefield –
from Select Sermons of George Whitefield

Our Need for Jesus Everyday – Robert Murray McCheyne

You need the blood of Jesus as much now as at first. You never can stand before God in yourself. You must go again and again to be washed. Even on your dying bed, you must hide under Jehovah, our righteousness. You must also lean on Jesus. He alone can overcome the sin in you. Draw nearer and nearer to Him every day.

– Robert Murray McCheyne –
from The Best of Robert Murray McCheyne

February 26, 2015

The Christian is the man who no longer seeks his salvation, his deliverance, his justification in himself, but in Jesus Christ alone. He knows that God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him guilty, even when he does not feel his guilt, and God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him not guilty and righteous, even when he does not feel that he is righteous at all. The Christian no longer lives of himself, by his own claims and his own justification, but by God’s claims and God’s justification.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer –
from Life Together, 1939

July 25, 2014

…you should be looking out for fresh discovering of the Lord Jesus Christ every moment; you must not build upon your past experiences, you must not build upon a work within you, but always come out of yourselves to the righteousness of Jesus Christ without you; you must be always coming as poor sinners to draw water out of the wells of salvation; you must be forgetting the things that are behind, and be continually pressing forward to the things that are before. My dear friends, you must keep up a tender, close walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.

– George Whitefield –

September 20, 2013

[The Christian life is] to be like [Christ]. To displace self from the inner throne and to enthrone Him; to make not the slightest compromise with the smallest sin. We aim at nothing less than to walk with God all day long, to abide every hour in Christ, and He and His words in us, to love God with all the heart, and our neighbor as ourselves. . . .  It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at peace amidst pressure, to see the will of God in everything, to put away all bitterness and clamor and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible by unreserved resort to divine power under divine conditions to become strongest through and through at our weakest point. . . . It does not depend on wearisome struggle, but on God’s power to take the consecrated soul and to keep him. . . . Christ [is] our righteousness, upon Calvary, received by faith, is also Christ our holiness, in the heart that submits to Him and relies upon Him. . . . A message as old as the Apostles but too much forgotten: the open secret of inward victory for liberty in life and service through the trusted power of an indwelling Christ; Christ in us for our deliverance from sin, for our emancipation from the tyranny of self, for the conquest of temptation.

– Bishop Moule –
from Thoughts on Christian Sanctity, as quoted in The Keswick Story by John Charles Pollock (CLC Publications, 2006, pages 98-99)