When we come to God, we must bring nothing but Christ with us. Any ingredients, or any previous qualifications of our own, will poison and corrupt faith. He that builds upon duties, graces, etc., knows not the merits of Christ. This makes believing so hard, so far above nature. If you believe, you must every day renounce as dung and dross (Phil 3:7-8) your privileges, your obedience, your baptism, your sanctification, your duties, your graces, your tears, your meltings, your humblings, and nothing but Christ must be held up. Every day your workings, your self-sufficiency must be destroyed. You must take all out of God’s hand. Christ is the gift of God (John 4:10). Faith is the gift of God (Eph 2:8). Pardon, a free gift (Isa 45:22). Ah, how nature storms, frets, rages at this, that all is of gilt [superficial brilliance or gloss] and it can purchase nothing with its actings and tears and duties, that all workings are excluded, and of no value in heaven. Thomas Willcox
It is something like a nuclear bomb to the religious thought in the modern world to assert that when we come to God we can (must) only bring Christ with us. If we try to bring anything but Christ with us, Christ will not be with us. This is a magnificent way of setting out the truth that the Gospel and all Christian activity is Christ and Christ alone and that by grace alone. The next statement, however, is also quite the bombshell itself in terms of what it is saying. The soul that tries to rest or trust or look to any of its own qualifications will poison and corrupt faith. It is not just that the faith is not less pure, but it is that it is poisoned and corrupted.
The idea that faith can be poisoned and corrupted may not sound quite right to some, but upon thinking through it from the view of Scripture it becomes a frightful truth. Romans 4:16 teaches that the reason that salvation is by faith is so that it may be by grace alone. Whatever faith is and whatever it is intended to do, it is to make room for grace and grace alone. When works are added to faith, then, faith is not doing what it was intended to do which was to save sinners by grace alone. Faith that is not attached to grace alone is not true faith because true faith and true grace go together. The ingredients of works do indeed poison and corrupt faith.
We also see this same teaching in Romans 11:6 where it is taught that grace is not grace when works are mixed in. This is a tremendous teaching when we see that the Gospel is not just some grace or mostly grace, but that the Gospel is a pure and undiluted grace or it is not grace at all. God saves to the praise of the glory of His grace and not to the glory of His grace and human works. The pure grace of God will not stand to be mixed with works and/or merit because that makes grace no longer to be grace. Clearly, then, we can see that the ingredients of works and merit do poison and corrupt true faith because true faith will only look to true grace.
Another passage of Scripture that weighs in heavily on this reads like this: “Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4). Pride and faith are opposites. Where there is pride, there is not pure faith. The soul of the proud person is not right within him and yet the only way a soul is right in a person is by grace alone. As other Scriptures state (James 4:6; I Peter 5:5), God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. What these teach us with great clarity is that true faith can only come from a humble heart and that means that pride and faith are in direct opposition to each other.
The proud heart is a heart that loves self and lives by self. The proud heart is all about self. This shows us that the proud heart, though indeed it may try hard to be humble and deceive itself into thinking it is humble, does not receive grace alone. Oh how pride is destructive and poisonous to true faith and will exalt a false faith. Pride blinds people to the nature of true faith and to the presence of pride. The soul that looks to its own works and merit rather than Christ or in addition to Christ is a proud soul. Pride opposes pure grace and even stands in opposition to pure grace. How men and women need to look at their own hearts and pray that God would open their eyes and hearts to see if they have a pure grace or whether they are resting in a false grace (mixed with other things) and blinded to that by pride. One can even know that any ingredients of pride and works will mean grace is not pure and yet knowing it in the brain is not good enough. One must actually be emptied of self and pride. This actually being emptied of self and pride is where most people will stop. They want to know it, but they don’t want to be emptied of it. However, grace will not be given to the proud. It is that serious.
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