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Posted by Michael Harrison (Member # 6801) on :

[Bible]

When I was a young fellow in college I went in a little for the high jump. I was a proud youngster when I won a prize cup in the freshman games at Yale for the running high jump. But suppose any of us got the idea that, at the time of the rapture, when the trump shall sound and the Lord shall come into the air to meet His saints, we had somehow to use our power to raise ourselves up out of this earth to meet the Lord. Suppose the best high jumpers thought they had a better chance for getting into the proper place to meet the Lord in the air, because of their skill in high jumping. Absurd, you say. Of course. But it isn’t one bit more absurd than the mistake, dear friends, which I made about another part of the work of God’s grace for us.

During the ﬁrst twenty-ﬁve years of my Christian life. I was a saved man for twenty-ﬁve years while I made the mistake of attempting to help God in a work which is exclusively the grace of God—a mistake, just as absurd as to suppose that any strength I used to have in the running high jump will be useful on the day when the Lord calls His Church to meet Him in the air.

How much of that work does God do? The most of it? Pretty nearly all of it? No! All! Grace does not share anything with man. Grace is not a joint effort. Grace is not co-operation. Grace is jealous—as God is a jealous God, grace is absolutely exclusive. Grace means “God does it all!” And it was done for us nineteen centuries before we were born.

Grace shuts out our works, so far as our having any share in the work which grace accomplishes. Grace results in our works, in a most wonderful way, but our works do not help grace a bit.

Excerpts from “Perils of the Victorious Life,” By Charles Trumbull