All my fresh springs shall be in Thee.

     — Psalms 87:7

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 renmants 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.""

On this day...

• Romans 13 - 2024
• Beatitude - 2024
• Having less to fix later - 2012
• Man's natural enmity against God - 2012
• Spiritual groanings - 2012
• Through them have vindicated my holiness in the sight of many nations - 2011
• I am in the right, and God has taken away my right - 2011
• The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth - 2011
• The LORD is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works - 2011
• Amen - 2011