The Highway Forums General Discussion Devotional Quotes The fault at the root of all our other faults

The fault at the root of all our other faults, is that our attitude to ourselves is wrong. Read the Diary of a M’Cheyne or the Confessions of an Augustine and you meet a man whose attitude to himself is disconcertingly different from that which you meet with typically in others. These great Christians viewed themselves with a sharply critical eye. They distrusted their every thought, motive and imagination. They each kept guard over themselves as a gaoler watches over his criminal inmates. They were out of love with themselves and knew themselves to be desperately sinful. They saw God, and nothing less, as supremely desirable. They felt holiness to be essential, even to Christian service.

‘I am persuaded that I shall obtain the highest amount of present happiness, I shall do most for God’s glory and the good of man, and I shall have the fullest reward in eternity, by maintaining a conscience always washed in Christ’s blood, by being filled with the Holy Spirit at all times, and by attaining the most entire likeness to Christ in mind, will and heart, that is possible for a redeemed sinner to attain to in this world’. So begins M’Cheyne’s ‘Personal Reformation’. ‘I am tempted to think that I am now an established Christian. . . This is a lie of Satan’. ‘I ought to pray and labour for the deepest sense of my utter weakness and helplessness that ever a sinner was brought to feel. I am helpless in respect of every lust that ever was, or ever will be, in the human heart.

~ Maurice Roberts [Banner of Truth]

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:7-14