Men talk bravely of believing whilst whole and sound; few know it. Christ is the mystery of the Scripture; grace the mystery of Christ. Believing is the most wonderful thing in the world. Put any thing of your own to it, and you spoil it. Christ will not so much as look at it for believing. When you believe and come to Christ, you must leave behind you your own righteousness, and bring nothing but your sin: (Oh, that is hard!) leave behind all your holiness, sanctification, duties, humblings, and so on; and bring nothing but your wants [lacks] and your miseries, or else Christ is not fit for you, nor you for Christ. Christ will be a pure Redeemer and Mediator, and you must be an undone sinner, or Christ and you will never agree. It is the hardest thing in the world to take Christ alone for righteousness; that is to acknowledge Him Christ. Join anything to Him of your own, and you un-Christ Him. Thomas Willcox
God is always doing all for His own glory and not because of anything found in the sinner. When sinners understand from the heart that God saves to His own glory and not for any merit or work found in the creature, they see salvation as by grace alone. When sinners seek the face of God, they must also realize that God seeks His own glory and He only does this by grace. Holiness does not come because sinners seek to be holy, but because by grace God shares His holiness in the sinners and sinners become partakers of His holiness (Heb 12:14). This is why sinners must “leave behind all their own holiness, sanctification, duties, humblings, and so on and bring nothing but what they lack and their miseries to Christ. God has no use for what they have worked up in their sinful hearts and flesh, but instead is only pleased with what comes from Him and through Christ.
This is so hard for sinners to understand and to grasp and love. Whatever the commandment is it tells us what we must do rather than what we can do. The commandment tells us that we must have Christ as our propitiation (sacrifice that removes wrath), but also we must have the life of Christ in us to keep the commandment. No one has the capacity to understand the depths of the commandments or the ability or faculty or power to keep it from the depths. The Lord Jesus Christ alone can do that. As the Pharisees were extremely wicked in their thinking they could keep the commandments after they watered them down to where they could keep them, so men in our day have watered down the commandments of Christ in order to keep them without Christ. As this led the Pharisees to be proud in their self-righteousness, so men are proud in their self-righteousness today despite their orthodox creed and conservative stances. Working up our own holiness and sanctification is a repugnant to God as anything, even though we may call it something else. We must live by grace and by the perfect righteousness of Christ or we are wicked people seeking to build up our own self-righteousness, and the wickedness is precisely at the point of trying to obtain and appear righteous before God and others based on the morality and works of self.
For a person (sinners) to come to Christ it means for a person to come to the true Christ in all that He is. Every person is a sinner by birth and by practice. The most religious people (but not true Christians) may be worse than all others in the sight of God as they are setting out to obtain some righteousness of their own. As long as a person has Adam as his or her head, that person will never have the slightest bit of righteousness in truth but will only have a self-righteousness which is as fool’s gold. It only has the appearance of righteousness and will fool those who don’t know real gold, but in the eyes of God there is no real righteousness but His own. Coming to the real Christ, who is the real righteousness of all who are in Him, means that sinners must cast down all of their own works, worth, merit, holiness, and righteousness. Christ is the only way to the Father, but in order to come by His way one has to leave his or her own way.
In order to have Christ one must have Him by grace alone and that means one must cast aside all of his or her own holiness in order to have His. In order to have Christ alone by grace alone one must have Christ as his or her sanctification rather than have any of his own. In order to have Christ alone by grace alone one must give up all hope in his or her duties and rest in the grace of Christ alone. In order to come to Christ alone by grace alone one must give up on the humility of self and all of the inward and outward things that one things may have earned or merited something in the eyes of God. In a way that is backwards to human reasoning and human thinking on morality, if we come to Christ with anything but what we lack and our sin and misery, we are not fit for Christ. Even more, when we come to Christ in some way without our own righteousness (even if very small), in truth Christ is not fit for us either. Christ is fit for those who have no righteousness and instead look to Him for it all. Christ is fit for the worst of sinners who will bow to grace and grace alone. We cannot add to His perfection.
God Loves... Himself 
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