Oswald Chambers – My Utmost for His Highest – Monday, 30
December 2013 “And Every Virtue We Possess”
All my fresh springs shall be in Thee.(Psalm 87:7 (P.B.V.))
Our Lord never patches up our natural virtues, He re-makes the
whole man on the inside. "Put on the new man," i.e., see that your
natural human life puts on the garb that is in keeping with the new life. The
life God plants in us develops its own virtues, not the virtues of Adam but of
Jesus Christ. Watch how God will wither up your confidence in natural virtues
after sanctification, and in any power you have, until you learn to draw your
life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are
going through a drying-up experience!
The sign that God is at work in us is that He corrupts
confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are
going to be, but remnants of what God created man to be. We will cling to the
natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us into contact with
the life of Jesus Christ which can never be described in terms of the natural
virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people in the service of God depending
on that which the grace of God never gave them, depending on what they have by
the accident of heredity. God does not build up our natural virtues and
transfigure them, because our natural virtues can never come anywhere near what
Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can
ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every bit of our bodily life into
harmony with the new life which God has put in us, He will exhibit in us the
virtues that were characteristic of the Lord Jesus.
"And every virtue we possess is His alone."
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