HOLINESS-MEANS-EFFORT
[God]
makes provision for our holiness, but He gives us the responsibility of using
those provisions.
Jerry Bridges
Copied
from The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges, © 1996, p. 80. Used by
permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com. All rights
reserved.
People do not
drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate
toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the
Lord. We drift toward compromise and
call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift
toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost
self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude
ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness
and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
Reflections, Christianity Today, 7-31-00.
Is it wise
to proclaim in so bald, naked, and unqualified a way as many do, that the
holiness of converted people is by faith only, and not at all by personal
exertion? Is it according to the proportion of God’s Word? I doubt it. That
faith in Christ is the root of all holiness…no well-instructed Christian will
ever think of denying. But surely the Scriptures teach us that in following
holiness the true Christian needs personal exertion and work as well as faith.
J.C. Ryle
Holiness, James Clarke and Co., 1952, p.
viii.