The Fruits of Cheap Grace
For wherever this doctrine of easy grace is received, it leaves no place for holiness. It forbids all such exhortations as might excite a desire for holiness. Nay, it makes men afraid of personal holiness, afraid of cherishing any thought of it. For they fear that any step toward holiness might be a denial of the faith, and a rejection of Christ and His righteousness.
So that, instead of being “zealous for good works,” good works are a stench to their nostrils. In short, they are infinitely more afraid of the works of God, than of the works of the devil.
Here is Satan’s masterpiece! We are to believe that men are holy, without a grain of holiness in them! Holy in Christ, however unholy in themselves. They are supposedly in Christ, although they have not one jot of the mind that was in Christ. They are “complete in Him,” although they are as proud, as vain, as covetous, and as lustful as ever. They think they can continue in unrighteousness because Christ has “fulfilled all righteousness.”
Oh ye simple ones, do not be deceived. For as surely as the Lord lives, “neither fornicators nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
“Such” indeed “were some of you. But you are washed, but you are sanctified,” as well as “justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9-11). You are really changed! You are not only accounted as righteous, you are made righteous.
The inward power of the Spirit has made you free – really, actually free -from the law or power “of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2). This is liberty, true gospel liberty, experienced by every true believer.
This is not freedom from the law of God, or the works of God, but from the law of sin and the works of the devil. See that you stand fast in this real, not imaginary, liberty. Take heed that you “be not entangled again,” by means of these vain boasters, “in the yoke of ‘that vile “bondage to sin,” from which you have cleanly escaped. (Gal. 5:1).
I testify unto you, that if you still continue in sin, Christ shall profit you nothing. That Christ is no Savior to you, unless He saves you from your sins. And that unless it purifies your heart, faith shall profit you nothing.
Oh, when will you understand, that to oppose either inward or outward holiness, under color of exalting Christ, is directly to act the part of Judas, to “betray the Son of man with a kiss?”
What? Make Christ destroy His own kingdom? Set Christ against holiness? Talk of Christ as saving His people in their sins? It is no better than to say, He saves them from the guilt, but not from the power, of sin. Will you make the righteousness of Christ a cover for the unrighteousness of man? So that by this means, “the unrighteous” of every kind “shall inherit the kingdom of God!”
Stop! Consider! What are you doing? You did run well. Who has bewitched you? Who has corrupted you from the simplicity of Christ, from the purity of the gospel? John Wesley
