Simply a Sinner

Charles Spurgeon once said that you come to Christ as a sinner, and as nothing else. You do not come as a repentant sinner – only a sinner. Repentance is necessary to forgiveness; without repentance, there is no forgiveness. But your repentance does not make you less hideous to God. You are only acknowledging how hideous you are. That is the sinner Christ embraces and loves. Somehow, God is the kind of person who can look on his creature, see them for the evil they are, and deeply love that creature, in their evil.

John Owen tells us to “[m]ix not foundation and building work together. . . . Our foundation in dealing with God is Christ alone, mere grace and pardon in him. Our building is in and by holiness and obedience, as the fruits of that faith by which we have received atonement. And great mistakes there are in this matter, which bring great entanglements on the souls of men. Some . . . will be bringing their obedience duties, mortification of sin, and the like, unto the foundation. These are precious stones to build with, but unmeet to be first laid, to bear upon them the whole weight of the building. The foundation is to be laid . . . in mere grace, mercy, pardon in the blood of Christ. This the soul is to accept of and to rest in merely as it is grace, without the consideration of any thing in itself, but that it is sinful . . . . This is finds a difficulty in, and would gladly have something of its own to mix with it. It cannot tell how to fix these foundation-stones without some cement of its own endeavors and duty . . . . [But i]f any thing of our own be mixed with grace in this matter, it utterly destroys the nature of grace. [Those who do mix] go on with all kinds of uncertainties, and without any kind of constant peace.” Works 6:564-65.

I am most struck by the self/Christ dichotomy here. We have an innate tendency to do it ourselves, for ourselves; or at least to help. Self, self, self; it is our inheritance from Adam, and we feel terrified to simply trust Someone else. But there is no other way. I certainly went for a long time as a Christian before being taken up out of myself, my spirituality, my longing to be “used by God” – taken out of my religious self before Jesus Christ, my righteousness.