Righteousness

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)

November 13, 2012

It has been shown that the primary limitation imposed upon you as man, in order that you may be in the likeness of your Maker and bear the image of the invisible, is that of total dependence upon God – in that your behavior, to be godly, must derive directly and exclusively from God’s activity in you and through you.  Any activity, therefore, in which you may engage, no matter how nobly conceived, which does not stem from this humble attitude of dependence upon God, violates the basic principles of your true humanity and the role for which you were created.  By independence (or the absence of faith), you eliminate God, the source of your own “godliness.”  But only God has the right to be the source of His own godliness, so that however unwittingly, you are acting as your own god!

You will still believe or pretend that you are worshiping God; but as the object of your imitation, even Christ Himself may only be an excuse for worshiping your own ability to imitate – an ability vested in yourself.  And this is the basis of all self-righteousness!

It is startling to discover that even God may be used as an excuse for worshiping yourself, demonstrating again the satanic genius for distorting truth and deceiving man – for it was to this temptation that Adam and Eve fell in the Garden!

– Ian Thomas –
The Mystery of Godliness, p187