Our Lord never “patches up” our natural virtues, that is, our
natural traits, qualities, or characteristics. He completely remakes a
person on the inside— “. . . put on the new man . . .” (Ephesians 4:24).
In other words, see that your natural human life is putting on all that
is in keeping with the new life. The life God places within us develops
its own new virtues, not the virtues of the seed of Adam, but of Jesus
Christ. Once God has begun the process of sanctification in your life,
watch and see how God causes your confidence in your own natural virtues
and power to wither away. He will continue until you learn to draw your
life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if
you are going through this drying-up experience!
The sign that God is at work in us is that He is destroying our
confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what
we are going to be, but only a wasted reminder of what God created man
to be. We want to cling to our natural virtues, while all the time God
is trying to get us in contact with the life of Jesus Christ— a life
that can never be described in terms of natural virtues. It is the
saddest thing to see people who are trying to serve God depending on
that which the grace of God never gave them. They are depending solely
on what they have by virtue of heredity. God does not take our natural
virtues and transform them, because our natural virtues could never even
come close to 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 part of our natural bodily life into harmony with the new
life God has placed within us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that
were characteristic of the Lord Jesus.
And every virtue we possess
Is His alone.
Is His alone.
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