There are perhaps more souls lost through a false confidence of salvation than by any other deceit the Devil makes use of. I do not mean those notorious sinners, but among the more decent formalists, who because they have never fallen into any foul, gross sins, or because their lives are somewhat reformed, and they practice some outward duties, make no doubt of the safety of their state. Yet they have no union with Christ by faith; the great renovating change has never been wrought in them; their natures are still unrenewed, their hearts unsanctified; they never saw and bewailed their own vileness; they never felt their real need of a Savior, in a way of renunciation of their own righteousness. They do not pant and labor after higher degrees of grace and holiness, like a true child of God, who can never rest contented with his present attainments [of grace]. They [the deceived] keep plodding on in the same beaten track, vainly thinking to divide their hearts between God and the world and content themselves with a formal, lifeless, luke-warm religion, which only tends to their greater delusion. Thus they go on dreaming of heaven till they awake in hell. Sir Richard Hill
This great paragraph by Hill points out the great difference between all religions and true Christianity. It has to do with the source of morality and religion. The whole world thinks of salvation or heaven in terms of good works or refraining from immoral acts, but that is also true of false forms of Christianity. Even worse, it is also true of those who are deceived within true Christianity. Those who are deceived use the name of Christ and orthodox creeds to bolster their deception, but while they believe they have faith and they believe in the words about union with Christ, they are not united to Christ. They believe that they have faith, but they are deceived about the source of their faith which comes from their fleshly nature.
Within Christianity there appears to be many formalists, which means these people can have the same intellectual beliefs and the same morality in terms of the externals. This is one reason that it is so easy for the evil one to deceive them. They have the same appearance as true Christians. But true Christians have Christ and are united to Christ because He gives them a real faith by a real grace, which is to say that these things are not just intellectual ideas to have intellectual beliefs about. This true and vibrant grace which comes from the resurrected Savior actually changes hearts and renovates them so that Christ is united to them and they are new creatures in Christ. Their morality is really holiness and it comes from Christ Himself by His Spirit. Yet for the deceived person there has been no real change of heart, but instead that person lives for self and all his or her religion and morality is for self rather than love for God.
The formalist is a person that will confess sin, but this person has never really seen and felt the vileness of his or her heart. This person may know that s/he is depraved by the intellect, but this person has never felt the stabbing and awful pain of realizing that s/he is a sinner by nature and all that s/he has ever done in religion was out of self-love rather than love for God. The formalist sees that what a person does is sin, but this person is not gripped with the fact that s/he is a sinner by nature. The formalist may be sad about sin or about being caught in sin, but this person does not recognize with pain in the heart that the very best thing s/he has ever done was as a filthy menstrual cloth in the eyes of God. The formalist is quite satisfied with being comfortable with the externals and perhaps just a little deeper, but this is not a person who sees self as utterly and totally ruined in the eyes of God. This person does not see or understand just how unsanctified s/he is with a wicked heart. Oh how blind they are to the true nature of sin because they don’t see the wickedness of their own hearts.
The formalist is a person that does not really see the need for Christ in all ways. This person knows that s/he needs Christ to be saved, but s/he does not see or understand how much s/he needs Christ. Every person must have Christ or s/he will perish because of the wickedness and vileness of the best deeds they have done and the most religious acts that they have done. These people want Christ to save them from the worst of their outward sins, but they don’t see the need for Christ to save them from all that they are and have done. The doctrine of regeneration is indeed nothing more than an intellectual argument that they give assent to, but they miss the fact that they are dead in sins and trespasses and that they need to be make alive so that anything they do will come from a new heart that is united to Christ. Oh how deceptive the evil one is because so many are bound fast in the bondage of sin, of darkness, and of formalism.
God Loves... Himself 
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