1. The idea of salvation by the merit of our own works is exceedingly insinuating. When it gains the least foothold, it soon makes great advances. The only way to deal with it is to stamp it out. War to the knife. No surrender.
2. This error is exceedingly plausible. Said to encourage virtue. But where will you find a devout and upright man who glories in his own works?
3. Self-righteousness is natural to our fallen humanity. Hence it is the essence of all false religions.
4. This erroneous idea arises partly from ignorance:
(1) of the law of God;
(2) of what holiness is;
(3) of themselves.
5. It arises also from pride.
6. And from unbelief.
7. It is evidently evil, for it makes light of sin.
8. No comfort in it for the fallen. It gives to the elder son all that his proud heart can claim, but for the prodigal it has no welcome. What, then, is to become of the guilty? (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Frustration of the grace of God
1. He that hopes to be saved by his own righteousness rejects the grace or free favour of God, regards it as useless, and in that sense frustrates it. If we can keep the law and claim to be accepted as a matter of debt, it is plain that we need not turn supplicants and crave for mercy. Grace is a superfluity where merit can be proved
2. He makes the grace of God to be at least a secondary thing. Many think they are to merit as much as they can, and that God will make up for the rest by His grace. Every man his own saviour, and Jesus Christ and His grace make-weights for our deficiences.
3. He who trusts in himself, his feelings, his works, his prayers, or in anything except the grace of God, virtually gives up trusting in the grace of God altogether. God will never share the work with man’s merit. You must either have salvation wholly because you deserve it, or wholly because God graciously bestows it though you do not deserve it.
4. This doctrine takes off the sinner from confidence in Christ. So long as a man can maintain any hope in himself, he will never look to the Redeemer.
5. This doctrine robs God of His glory. If man can save himself, then the glory is his own, not God’s. What an awful crime, then, is this doctrine of salvation by human merit. It is a sin so gross that even the heathen cannot commit it.. They have never heard of the grace of God, and therefore they cannot put a slight upon it: when they perish it will be with a far lighter doom than those who have been told that God is gracious and ready to pardon, and yet turn on their heel and wickedly boast of innocence, and pretend to be clean in the sight of God. It is a sin which devils cannot commit. With all the obstinancy of their rebellion, they can never reach to this. They have never had the sweet notes of free grace and dying love ringing in their ears, and therefore they have never refused the heavenly invitation. What has never been presented to their acceptance cannot be the object of their rejection. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
I. Two great crimes are contained in the doctrine of self-righteousness.
1. The frustration of the grace of God. The self-righteous
(1) reject it as baseless;
(2) make it at least a secondary thing;
(3) virtually give up trusting in it;
(4) renounce their confidence in Christ;
(5) rob God of His glory.
2. The making of Christ to be dead is vain.
(1) Christ’s finished work is rendered imperfect;
(2) the covenant sealed with Christ’s death is rejected;
(3) each person in the Trinity is sinned against;
(4) fallen man is sinned against, who can have no mercy but; through Christ;
(5) the saints are sinned against, who have no hope but through Christ.
II. The two crimes are committed by manypeople. By--
1. Triflers with the gospel.
2. The senseless as to guilt.
3. The despairing.
4. Those who have misgivings about the power of the gospel.
5. Apostates.
III. No true believer will be guilty of these crimes. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Folly of human righteousness
How can a man trust in his own righteousness? It is like seeking shelter under one’s own shadow. We may stoop to the very ground; and the lower we bend, we still find that our shadow is beneath us. But if a man flee to the shadow of a great rock, or of a widespreading tree, he will find abundant shelter from the rays of the noonday sun. So human merits are unavailing; and Christ alone can save. (Dr. Medhurst.)
Rejection of God’s grace
The rejection of the grace of God may take place
(1) by a denial of the perfect satisfaction of Christ;
(2) by setting alongside of it our own merits, worthiness and righteousness, as popery does in doctrine, and many Protestants do in fact;
(3) by abusing this grace to favour presumption, and to supersede sanctification;
(4) when even sincere souls, in the feeling of their unworthiness, are much too timorous to appropriate grace to themselves, and think they must first have arrived at this or that degree of holiness, before grace can avail them anything;
(5) when tempted ones from a lack of feeling conclude that they have fallen out of grace again. (Starke.)
Righteousness
I. The insufficiency of the law to promote righteousness.
1. It was never instituted for that purpose.
(1) It is a standard of righteousness,
(2) and therefore a constant and irritating reminder of unrighteousness, and
(3) has no moral power.
2. Men have never found righteousness by the law.
(1) All have sinned and broken it.
(2) The best morality falls below its requirements.
3. On the assumption of its sufficiency
(1) God’s grace is frustrated;
(2) Christ is dead in vain.
II. Hence the necessity of some better provision for the promotion of righteousness.
1. Men yearn after it.
2. It is God’s will that man should be righteous or He would never have made him so.
3. Righteousness is the law and harmony of the universe which sin has broken.
III. God has made this provision in the death of Christ.
1. That death has atoned for sin, and when accepted by faith past unrighteousness is remitted and man is justified (Rom_3:25).
2. By that death the Holy Spirit is secured who makes man actually righteous, and gives the power to fulfil all righteousness.
The frustration of God’s grace
If people can make themselves good by doing what is called their duty, then the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus Christ constitute the greatest mistake that ever was made in the universe. If a man can be really good, can make himself all that God can possibly desire him to be, of his own motion and will and by the resources of his own invention and energy, then the mediation of Jesus Christ was a great and generous expenditure of pain and life and sorrow, and an expenditure that ended in nothing. (J. Parker,D. D.)
Divine grace does not dispense with conditions but with merit
While in the case of two mutinous seamen who, having long resisted every effort on the part of the captain to reform them, have at last, through their continued intemperance, fallen overboard, one grasps the rope thrown out by his master’s mercy, and is saved, while the other rejects it, or depends on his own efforts and is drowned; has the former ground to boast that he is his own saviour? There was assuredly more mad wilfulness in his hardened companion who refused the proffered aid; but the recklessness of the latter imparts no merit to the former. While the one can ascribe his deliverence to nothing in himself “moving” his captain “thereunto,” but solely to his master’s compassion, the other had equal mercy shown to him, but his destruction was entirely his own doing. When the prodigal returned would his sense of the entire freeness of his father’s goodness and of his own absolute demerit have been at all diminished by learning that another brother who had run the same course of riot as himself refused to cast himself into those arms by which he himself had been so warmly welcomed? Would the greater obduracy and infatuated perverseness of his brother extenuate, in the pardoned son’s eyes, his own guilt, or lead him less to ascribe his own forgiveness to free unmerited grace? (PrincipalForbes.)
Morality not righteousness
Let the law stand for any attempt at duty doing with a view to self-salvation. I do not say that a man cannot wash his hands; I am not here to reason that it is not possible for a man to put on a good deal of external decoration. I believe that it is quite within his power to say to some of his appetites, “Now you shall be starved for six months. I will touch no intoxicant for the rest of my life, and never more go into any associations which I believe to be corrupting, and will do my best to conform to the highest moral standard. What more can you expect me to do?” Well, what have you done? Outside work; you have washed your hands, but you have not cleansed your heart. As between man and man you have done a good deal. But seeing that the question is not primarily between man and man, but between you and God, you have done nothing but confound righteousness with morality. (J. Parker,D. D.)
The moral consolation that righteousness is not of the law but through Christ
If Satan, the great Judaizer as well as antinomian, tempts us to trust in our own endeavours we fly to the cross. If conscience, the advocate of Sinai, reminds us of our multiplied offences and failures we say, “Were it ten thousand times worse there can be no condemnation.” Hardest of all, if, in times of despondency our innumerable and peculiar sins, not against the law, but against the very gospel that saves from the law, are pressed upon our spirits, we can still take refuge in the cross and think, “I have paid my own debt in Him who died not only to discharge the obligation to clerical law, but also to expiate offences against the gospel itself, who atoned for sins against the atonement, and suffered on the cross for dishonour done to the very cross on which He suffered;” and there is, or will be, a time to every one of us, when amidst the thick darkness that divides time from eternity, we shall find no greater consolation than this: I am crucified with Christ; I do not frustrate the grace of God; Christ hath not died for me in vain. (W. B. Pope,D. D.)
Grace is a free gift
A benevolent rich man had a very poor neighbour, to whom he sent this message: “I wish to make you the gift of a farm.” The poor man was pleased with the idea of having a farm, but was too proud at once to receive it as a gift. So he thought of the matter much and anxiously. His desire to have a home of his own was daily growing stronger; but his pride was great. At length, he determined to visit him who had made the offer. But a strange delusion about this time seized him; for he imagined that he had a bag of gold. So he came with his bag, and said to the rich man, “I have received your message, and have come to see you. I wish to own the farm; but I wish to pay for it. I will give you a bag of gold for it.” “Let us see your gold,” said the owner of the farm. “Look again: I donor think it is even silver.” The poor man looked, tears stood in his eyes, and his delusion seemed to be gone; andhe said, “Alas! I am undone: it is not even copper; it is but ashes. How poor I am! I wish to own that farm; but I have nothing to pay. Will you give me the farm?” The rich man replied, “Yes: that was my first and only offer. Will you accept it on such terms?” With humility, but with eagerness, the poorman said, “Yes: and a thousand blessings on you for your kindness!” (W. S. Plumer,D. D.)
Grace must not be frustrated
I was once invited out to tea by a poor widow, and I took something in my pocket. But I’ll never do it again. It was two cakes; and, when I brought them out and laid them on the table, she picked them up and flung them out into the street, and said, “I asked you to tea; I didn’t ask you to provide tea for me.” And so with Christ. He asks, He provides, and He wants nothing but ourselves; and if we take aught else He’ll reject it. We can only sup with Him when we come as we are. Who will accept salvation? Who’ll say, “I take the blessing from above, And wonder at Thy boundless love”? (J. W. Ackrill.)
