Robert Crawford McQuilkin

“ This is true, but have we realized, as a clear-sighted Bible teacher has pointed out, that a much greater part of the New Testament is devoted to telling Christians how to live after they are saved than how to be saved? Have we asked ourselves why this is so? Have we realized what a sad commentary on the Gospel is the man who claims that Christ has saved him completely from the penalty of his sins, yet in whose life is plainly seen, and habitually, the unbroken power of sin? ”

“ Yes, the Church of Christ is largely robbing him to-day of the only offering he cares for—ourselves as living sacrifices. We are indeed bought with a price, the precious blood of Christ, we are not our own, we belong to him. Have you acknowledged this ownership in every detail, not with your lips alone, but with your life, in its every action? That is the first requirement for Victory. And Victory will never be enjoyed until the surrender question is settled. An earnest young Christian woman was in defeat and distress because there was something she would not yield. ”

“ But there are not two ways of obtaining salvation or eternal life. For when a sinner works, he works sin; and the wages of sin is death. Life is never earned. Death is. Life must be given. So the free gift of God, the only author of life, is eternal life. We are saved by Grace, not by works, for the least particle of “works” would make Grace void.
There are two ways of seeking after the Victorious Life, present freedom from the law of sin—working for it, striving and struggling after it, or receiving it as a free gift, without effort. There are not two ways of obtaining Victory. ”

“ Sin should always be a tragedy. It is not an accident nor an incident. But if the man is not responsible, but has something in him that makes sin necessary, then he cannot regard sin as a preventable tragedy.
But it is not possible for God to sin, and yet he can be good. Here we come to the heart of our confusion regarding a Christian’s goodness. God not only can be good, He himself is goodness. He is holy in a way that no man ever was or ever can be. For man’s holiness is never absolute in this sense, but always relative. ”

“ Have you, shed abroad in your heart, the love that suffers long and is kind, that envies not, that vaunts not itself, is not puffed up, does not behave itself unseemly, seeks not its own, is not provoked?
Do you enjoy in actual experience the fruit of the Spirit, in its nine-fold variety: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control? ”

“ The Victorious Life gives no cause for boasting of spiritual attainment. Grace excludes boasting. It gives us no holiness of our own. The holiness and the victory are His, and the most mature saint in the walk of faith needs the same secret of Victory as the young Christian just entering into the Life. His strength is ever made perfect in weakness. My weakness is never made stronger, though as I learn more of the Bible teaching of what faith is I may get more and more established in acting by faith. ”

“ Christian Science says, “Reckon yourselves dead unto sin: because sin has no real existence, and since it is a creation of the wrong thinking of mortal mind, the way to think it out of existence is to reckon yourself dead to it. As you reckon, as you believe, you are dead to sin, and for you it has no reality or existence.”
Faith Does Not Create Facts
The Word of God says, “Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin.” Not because sin does not exist. It does. Not because sin is not real. There is nothing more real in the universe. ”

“ Why should one be any more a temptation than the other, provided I am in victory over all sin?”
Careful distinction must be made between temptation itself and the form that the temptation may take. The appeal to a man’s natural desires may change its form, but always, in every part of his nature, he will be tempted while he is in this mortal body. The desire for beer which leads to intemperance and sin is an appeal to a natural appetite. Sin is moral, and does not reside in the physical appetites, which are merely the channels for the temptation and sin. ”

“ There is ever before the Christian the possibility of falling. There is no state of grace from which he may not, before some temptation, step into awful sin. But God’s Word, which cannot be broken, stands pledged to us that in every temptation there is “the way of escape.” And our Lord Jesus is “the Way.” Victory over temptation was won by Christ. Satan is an already defeated foe. Defeat in temptation came to Adam. It is for every man, and every Christian, to decide whether he will share the first Adam’s defeat or the last Adam’s victory. ”

“ That is what the struggle of the seventh chapter of Romans means. That is a struggle under law, the picture of a man who has been brought under condemnation by the law. The law is a great mirror let down from heaven in which a man may see himself as he is. That is why the law brings condemnation and death. It is a curse,—not because the law is not holy, but because it convicts the man of his unholiness. Law does this in the New Testament as well as the Old, and with infinitely more searching terribleness because of the high spiritual interpretation of the inner meaning of the outward commands. ”

“ The reason for this life of defeat is that Christians mingle law and grace, and this makes complete victory an impossibility. When we are in defeat it is because we are under the Old Covenant, which can make nothing perfect. It may be that we are clear intellectually on the distinction between law and grace, but it is the mingling of them in daily experience that results in defeat before sin. The secret of victory, then, is to get entirely from under law and get wholly under grace for the needs of the present moment. ”

“ If the life of victory does not flow out in service, it is a counterfeit, and cannot be maintained. There is a reason why a passion for foreign missions will be found at the heart of all the conferences that teach the life of victory in Christ. These two are inseparable, Christ as the supply of our individual needs and Christ the sufficiency for the world’s need.
Let our testimony to the Victorious Life be far more in loving, humble, unselfish service to those about us and those in the ends of the earth, than it is in the words of our lips. ”

“ There are many motives by which the Lord lovingly urges us to seek complete victory in him. We long for a life of joy and peace that we do not have. We long to be rid of a life of struggle against “besetting sins.” Or we are eager to have power in service and get results for Christ that are largely absent in our experience. By this or that motive the Spirit leads us to an earnest seeking of God’s secret of the life of faith. But beyond all these motives is that supreme desire to be well pleasing to the Lord Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. ”

“ There is needed to-day a great challenge to be thrown at an unbelieving world, a testimony that cannot be answered,—Christians walking at liberty, men and women living in the midst of these awful days of stress with the “freedom indeed” which belongs only to sons of God. But instead of that an unbelieving world is constantly face to face with the puzzling spectacle of professing Christians who are bondservants of sin, who do not know the meaning of liberty. ”

“ When a Christian wholly yields his life to the mastery of the Lord Jesus he has still the desire to enjoy things, the desire to get things, and the desire to accomplish things. Christ does not kill the natural desires. It is the old self-life that Christ wants to put to death. That is why a Christian must share in present experience the crucifixion-death of his Lord before he can share his victory over temptation. This is what surrender of self means for the Christian who desires victory. He must, moment by moment, reckon himself to be dead unto sin. ”

“ A generation ago there were very many earnest Christians who thought it presumptuous to be sure of their salvation. They may have been saved and been blessed with all spiritual blessings in Christ, but they were not, and some Christians to-day are not, enjoying assurance of salvation. Even so defeated Christians, who walk now and then after the flesh and fall into sin, are not enjoying the freedom that Christ purchased for them. They are not living up to their privileges in the Lord. The word of freedom has not been benefiting them, because it has not been united by faith with them that heard. ”

“ It is a disastrous thing not to make distinction between these two things. With one stroke we would blot out the difference between light and darkness if we class together the act of a Christian who with a heart full of love pours out his petition in imperfect words for some needy one, and the act of a man who with his heart full of hate runs a dagger through the heart of that same needy one. ”

“ The spirit of Satan, then, finds its climax in the worship of man, rather than the worship of God. Here is the heart of all sin. This is the central lie of Satan by which he deceives men. The final religion of man, before the coming of the Lord Jesus to earth again, will be the religion of humanity, the worship of man as the only deity. Paul brings all men who reject God’s revelation under this condemnation: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.” ”

“ With Christian Science, thinking a thing true makes it true, or rather, “thinking right” removes the error which has resulted only because the thinking has been wrong. But real faith rests always on facts. We believe, not in order to make a fact true, but because it is true.
So startling is the parallel between what Christian Science offers and what the Victorious Life in Christ guarantees, that a number who have read articles in The Sunday School Times have written to ask if the Victorious Life teaching and Christian Science were not practically the same. ”

“ For the surrendered life is not necessarily the Victorious Life. Surrender is our part. The supernatural work of Victory is God’s part. God is doing his part as soon as we yield ourselves, and we get the benefit of it when we believe that fact. This is Victory by faith. “Faith does nothing. Faith believes that God is doing it all.” Faith is just believing the word of God. Those marvelous promises, or rather “facts” of God’s Grace which have been quoted above can only be received by the Christian who is holding nothing back from God. ”

“ It is strange that this should be thought a necessity when we know that Satan sinned, and Adam sinned, when they were sinless and had never been tainted with any impurity. If it were not possible for this new creature to sin, he would be a machine; his very humanity would need to be destroyed. If we accept as the alternative of this kind of Christian a Christian who is provided with something in him which causes the sin, we arrive at exactly the same conclusion with this difference: we have a machine which cannot do anything except sin. ”

“ Justification, in the sense of “declaring righteous,” is dead apart from the miracle of cleansing and regeneration which makes righteous. And we need righteousness, just as the naked and hungry man needs clothing and food, now in this life. There is no hope held out for any future provision of freeing from sin. There is still a part of our redemption from sin and its results that is future, but very distinctly are we told that this concerns the redemption of our body, not the purifying of the soul. ”

“ So there is no way of discovering what a true man is like except by looking at Jesus. He is the only “man,” in the true sense of the word, who has lived since sin entered the human race. Through the fall man lost the image of God, and from that day until our Lord came there was no example of man as God intended him to be.
A mistaken notion, encouraged by the poets, prevails quite commonly, that to sin is human; to forgive, divine. Whatever the measure of truth in the little sentiment, the error in it is more dangerous. To sin is not human ”

“ One who calls himself by the name of Christ, but does not have the fulness of the Spirit, and yet says that he has no desire for this deeper experience, is confessing that there is no evidence he has ever been born again. For while a Christian may live below the standard Christ desires he cannot be comfortable in doing it; the Spirit of God within him is longing for the driving out of everything contrary to the life of Christ.
The heart of the Spirit-filled life is freedom from sin. A normal Christian is a man who does not sin. ”

“ We must be one with the Lord Jesus in his death and burial before we can be one with him in resurrection life. The blood of the Lord Jesus must be kept always at the heart of the teaching and the experience of the Victorious Life. ”

“ Many a young Christian in the first flush of joy over new-found victory has somehow felt that this glorious new liberty was indeed freedom from temptation. For certain temptations have been taken completely out of the life. ”

“ And as though this were not enough, the New Testament epistles, after the death and resurrection, when the dispensation of law was fully over, show us that to break the law of God at one point makes us guilty of all: “Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well: but if ye have respect of persons, ye commit sin, being convicted by the law as transgressors. For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all. ”

“ It sounds reasonable when a Christian says, “Of course, I am sure that Christ will always be faithful to his part, but the failure will come because of my weakness.” When a Christian says that, he is not in victory; he has missed the very heart of the Victorious Life. ”

“ Man’s Part in Victory Over Sin
If God does everything in the matter of my obeying the law, what is my part? To do nothing. The human side of this New Covenant is to see that self is kept from doing anything, so that Grace may work. It is the effort of the self life, the human struggle described in Romans 7:7-24, which prevents the victory of Grace.
But surely Grace on God’s part needs something on man’s side if it is to be brought into touch with man. Yes, it needs to be told to man so that he may hear it as a message of good tidings. ”

“ Now if the work is wholly Christ’s it cannot be presumptuous to be certain that that work is complete and is satisfactory to the Father. Then there is the belief that salvation from death and hell depends on our holding on to Christ, and since we may fail and thus fall away, we are never entirely sure of salvation until death comes or until the Lord comes to claim us. These teachings present a subtle mixture of works and grace. If we are saved by grace, if redemption is entirely the work of Christ, then may we indeed have assurance of eternal salvation. ”