When guilt is raised up, take heed of getting it allayed in any way but by Christ’s blood: that will tend to hardening. Make Christ your peace; “for He is our peace” (Eph 2:14); not your duties and your tears. Christ your righteousness, not your graces. You may destroy Christ by duties, as well as by sins. Look at Christ, and do as much as you will. Stand with all your weight upon Christ’s righteousness. Take heed of having one foot on your righteousness, another on Christ’s. Till Christ come and sit on high upon a throne of grace in the conscience, there is nothing but guilt, terrors, secret suspicions; the soul hanging upon hope and fear, which is an ungospel-like state. Thomas Willcox
The heart is so deceitful that it will find rest in Christ plus about any good thing. This is because of the way the heart is, yes, but also because of the lack of discriminating teaching and preaching. The heart will think it is resting in Christ alone unless someone is used by God to teach the person the subterfuges of the heart and how it trusts and rests in so many things while using differing words about it. The Gospel of Christ is all about grace alone and nothing a man does can contribute and how man is not to contribute anything to the Gospel. But the heart is always looking for something that it can do.
The danger of resting in Christ plus something is that we will always be looking to that something else and in reality that is what we are really trusting in. It hardens the heart because it is a great sin of unbelief not to look to Christ alone when one has the guilt of sin upon it. What other place should a person look when one has the guilt of sin upon his or her soul? Can anything but the blood of Christ wash that sin away? Can anything or anyone but Christ actually take that guilt away?
An external repentance cannot actually take the guilt of sin away. An act or acts of religious activity cannot take the guilt of sin away. No amount of works can take the guilt of sin away. No amount of belief or faith can take the guilt of sin away. Only Christ, the propitiation for sin set forth by God, can take away the guilt of sin. All the duties in the world and all the tears and sorrows in the world cannot take the guilt of sin away. There is no peace in the soul with the guilt of sin other than by hardening (not a true peace, but a pseudo peace) or a real peace by Christ. The hardened soul can sleep at night by drowning his or her guilt in the pleasures of the world or by religious activity, but that does not take it away. It only hides it from the eyes of the soul long enough for the soul to be hardened by sin.
This is such a danger in both justification and sanctification. The depravity of the heart is such that it is constantly wanting to trust in something that it can do for self rather than Christ alone. It is so easy for the person that is truly converted to begin to look to the graces received and lived rather than Christ alone. The soul must learn to examine itself and be brutal in one sense to itself in an effort to expose all of the idols of the heart that it is trusting in. It is so easy to go from seeking a grace being an evidence of life to trusting in a grace or gift itself. It is easy for a person to trust in a gift of speaking as if that is the same thing as a gift of preaching and so trust in that as an evidence for salvation. It seems easy for people to trust in themselves that they are kind and good and make those things out to be evidence for true love.
It must become a habit of the heart to distrust itself and how it views itself and its gifts and graces. Those things are to be used as instruments in the hand of God to glorify Him and manifest Christ, but they are not to be used as stools upon which we rest our salvation or sanctification. The deceitful heart, once again, will twist and turn in an effort to take the eyes of the soul off of Christ and His righteousness. The deceitful heart is driven by self and pride will always want to look to itself and trust in something of that self, but this must not be. The heart must learn to take the side of God and cry out to God against itself and the things it is trusting in. The heart must learn to ask God to open his or her eyes to the deceptions of self and cry out for grace to repent of them rather than excuse those things away. The deceptive heart not only wants to excuse itself for sin it carries out in deeds and in the thoughts, but also excuse itself in the things it trusts rather than Christ. It is so difficult to be broken off of the things of self and the things that self trusts in that this is a Divine work in the soul. However, one of the deceptions that many fall for is that the soul can get by without this examining work. One that has truly repented will be one that keeps repenting his or her whole life. It is a necessary work.
God Loves... Himself 
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