MY DEAR—,
I am greatly concerned to hear that you are so extremely ill, and pray you to look straight in the face at your present state before God. For, why need you fear, if you look to Jesus? If our meetness for salvation depended in the least degree on any one thing in sinners good or suitable to God, we might have just grounds for alarm; and just grounds indeed we have so far as we are concerned.
But how does God feel? And how does He act? It is a word of cheering comfort which He sends to the sinner who trembles because of the iniquity that presses on his soul. On the one hand He looks for nothing of us; He tells me there is nothing in me but what is evil. On the other hand He sends me this message to answer all such questionings of conscience: "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." It is His love that saves us by Christ Who died and rose again, not our love by our dying to evil in us. Yet as believers we died to sin with Christ.
It is true that the known love of God draws out our hearts in response of affection toward Him: "We love him because he first loved us." Still at no time is it true that my love to Him gives me peace or makes me secure. Blessed be God! He has given us a stronger foundation than anything within us. So far from being the ground of peace with God, what tries the true Christian most is the meagerness of his love toward One so unselfishly, so divinely, gracious as has been the Lord to us. Moreover in our love there is too often an admixture for the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. Ever while we are in the body is there the presence of a nature thoroughly and irreparably evil.
Now salvation, in order to be God's sure salvation for a sinner, must rest on a perfect basis. Where can we find it? Nowhere but in Him Who died and rose again to this very end; nowhere but in the cross of Christ.
For even what the blessed Spirit works in God's children is constantly mingled with our imperfections and worse, This therefore cannot give peace, and was not intended by God to give it. But the peace of which God now speaks in the gospel is a peace already made. Christ made it by the blood of His cross.' Hence is peace with God for him who believes. May you believe in the Lord Jesus; and it is yours! Oh how wondrous His grace and ways! Who but God could have conceived the glad news that salvation hangs on the fitness, worth, and all-overcoming victory, not of the saved, but of the Savior? All, all is God's free gift to the soul that believes in Christ. Thenceforward he may and ought to reckon himself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
That renewed affections and godly conduct characterize the Christian is clear; but it is by life in Christ the soul is furnished thus. With those you have nothing to do till you have, the root, the only root, of all that is good, even Christ. Then assured of the great love wherewith God loves you, His Spirit keeping Christ before you will produce fruit acceptable to Him through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Praying that God may give you to receive His glad tidings simply and thankfully, like a hungry babe its best food, I am ever, affectionately yours,