absolute justification is needed
to give the sinner a start. He must have the certainty of 'no
condemnation' of being, without reserve or drawback, right with God
through God's gracious act in Christ, before he can begin to live the
new life."... "_It is not by denying the gospel outright, from the
very beginning, that we are to guard against the possible abuse of
it._"... "To try to take some preliminary security from the sinner's
future morality before you make the gospel available for him, is not
only to strike at the root of assurance, it is to pay a very poor
tribute to the power of the gospel. The truth is, morality is best
guaranteed by Christ, and not by any precautions we can take before
Christ gets a chance, or by any virtue that is in faith except as it
unites the soul to Him."... "If it is our death that Christ died on
the cross, there is in the cross the constraint of an infinite love;
but if it is not our death at all--if it is not our burden and doom
that He has taken on Himself there, then what is it to us?"... "He
who has done so tremendous a thing as to take our death to Himself has
established a claim upon our life. We are not in the sphere of
mystical union, of dying with Christ and living with Him; but in that
of love transcendently shown, and of gratitude profoundly felt."...
"But this can only come on the foundation of the other; it is the
discharge from the responsibilities of sin involved in Christ's death
and appropriated in faith, which is the motive power in the daily
ethical dying to sin."... "The new life springs out of the sense of
debt to Christ."... "It is the knowledge that we have been bought with
a price which makes us cease to be our own, and live for Him who so
dearly bought us."... "But when its certainty, completeness, and
freeness are so qualified or disguised that assurance becomes suspect
and joy is quenched, the Christian religion has ceased to be."...
"This is why St. Paul is not afraid to trust the new life to its own
resources, and why he objects equally to supplanting it by legal
regulations afterwards, or by what are supposed to be ethical
securities beforehand. It does not need them, and is bound to repel
them as dishonoring to Christ. To demand moral guarantees from a
sinner before you give him the benefit of the atonement, or to impose
legal restrictions on him after he has yielded to its appeal, and
received it through faith, is to make the atonement itself of no
eff