Miscellaneous
if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace.
But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work (Romans 11:16) [Reader,] you must go to Him with all your wrinkles, and all your foulness, and everything else that is hideous and say, “Lord, I have no beauty, I have no merit, nothing to plead, nothing to urge, but my guilt. ‘Heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee.’” Then you shall be saved. When a man cannot pay to God a penny [on the dollar] of all his debts, then he will be frankly forgiven all; but as long as he promises that he will make [restitution], and do his best to pay what he owes to divine justice, in the [vain] hope that Jesus Christ will make up the rest, there is no hope for him [Proverbs 20:22]. The Lord Jesus Christ will not be a mere make-weight for you. Do you think that you are to get onto the scale, with your ‘beautiful righteousness’, and that you are to be accounted somebody of great importance, and that Christ is to do the little that you cannot do?—that is to be “Christ and Company,” or rather, “Self and Company,” and that you are to be the head of the firm, and Christ to be a kind of [silent] partner? He will not do it; it would be a disgrace to Christ to yoke you with Him in such a fashion. You might as soon yoke a gnat with an archangel as think of your going in to help Christ save you. To join a filthy rag from off a dunghill with the golden garments of the King cannot be permitted [Isaiah 64:6-9]. Christ will be everything, or else He will be nothing; you must be saved wholly by mercy, or else not at all. There must not be even a trace of the fingers of self-righteousness upon the acts and documents of divine grace. It must be all of grace; “And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work” (Romans 11:6). There can be no more mingling of the two together as the ground of hope than oil will mix with water, or fire will burn beneath the sea. [Reader,] you cannot be saved by your own merits.