“Faith does not come to Calvary to do anything.
It comes to see the glorious spectacle of all things done, and to accept this completion without a misgiving as to its efficacy.
It listens to the ‘It is finished!’ of the sin-bearer, and says, ‘Amen.’
Where faith begins, there labour ends,—labour, I mean, for life and pardon.
Faith is rest, not toil.
It is the giving up all the former weary efforts to do or feel something good, in order to induce God to love and pardon; and the calm reception of the truth so long rejected, that God is not waiting for any such inducements, but loves and pardons of His own goodwill, and is showing that goodwill to any sinner who will come to Him on such a footing, casting away his own poor performances or goodnesses, and relying implicitly upon the free love of Him who so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.
Faith is the acknowledgment of the entire absence of all goodness in us, and the recognition of the cross as the substitute for all the want on our part.
Faith saves, because it owns the complete salvation of another, and not because it contributes anything to that salvation.
There is no dividing or sharing the work between our own belief and Him in whom we believe. The whole work is His, not ours, from first to last.
Faith does not believe in itself, but in the Son of God. Like the beggar, it receives everything, but gives nothing.
It consents to be a debtor for ever to the free love of God.
Its resting-place is the foundation laid in Zion.
It rejoices in another, not in itself.
Its song is, ‘Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by His mercy He saved us.’
Christ crucified is to be the burden of our preaching, and the substance of our belief, from first to last.
At no time in the saint’s life does he cease to need the cross.”
–Horatius Bonar, The Everlasting Righteousness; or, How Shall a Man be Just with God? (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1874/1993), 116-117.
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