Thoughts From Horatius Bonar

Dear Friends,

If you are like me, you may have had a bad experience in the past with churches that stressed “holiness.” Not because churches shouldn’t, but because the focus was placed on outward conformity to externalisms, or a prescribed set of moralism’s that sucked the atmosphere of grace out of the church. In fact, the more effort-based versions of “holiness” are stressed, the more grace disappears – and the vacuum left in its wake is filled with even more rigid standards of morality and law-based duties – driving all who truly struggle with sin into hiding or pretending.

And of all the books I have ever read on holiness (or godliness) none (in my opinion) hold a candle to “God’s Way of Holiness” by the Scottish minister Horatius Bonar (1808-1889). A book I have given to numerous people to read. If you were one who was turned off, or wounded, by a form of holiness based on what Bonar calls, “constrained externalism” or self-effort, I offer you this selection as a taste of what you will find in Bonar's book. Enjoy.

“Groping after righteousness, yet not knowing what righteousness is, nor how it comes to us, some have built themselves up in self-righteousness. Professing to seek holiness, without understanding its nature, they have snared themselves in delusions which bring no purity. Bent, as they say, upon “mortifying the flesh,” falsely identifying “the flesh” with the mere body, and working upon the theology which teaches that it is the body which ruins the soul, they lay great stress on weakening and weakening the corporeal frame, not knowing that they are thus feeding sin, fostering pride, making the body less fit to be the helpmeet of the soul, and thereby producing unholiness of the darkest type in the eye of God.

By rules of no gentle kind – by terror, by pain, by visions of death and the grave, by pictures of a fiercely flaming hell, by the denial of all certainty in pardon, they have sought to terrify themselves into goodness. By long prayers, by bitter practices of self-denial, by slow chants at midnight, or early morning in dark cathedrals, by frequent sacraments, and the cold of wintry solitude, and multiplied deeds of merit and will-worship, they have thought to expel the demon, or eradicate the ineradicable taint of sin. But success does not come in this way.

In all this there is not one thought of GRACE or DIVINE FREE LOVE.
No recognition of FORGIVENESS as the ROOT OF HOLINESS.

Man’s philosophy and man’s religion have never suggested this. It would seem as if man could not trust himself with this and could not believe that God would trust him with it. He is slow to learn that all legal deterrents are in their very nature irritants, with no power to produce or enforce anything but a constrained externalism. The interposition of forgiving love, in absolute completeness and freeness, is resisted as an encouragement to evil-doing. And, at the most, only in a very conditional and restricted form is grace allowed to come into play.

The dynamics of grace have never been reduced to a formula. They are incapable of being so set down. That God should act in any other character than as the rewarder of the deserving and the punisher of the undeserving; that He should go down into the depths of a human heart and there touch springs which were reckoned perilous to deal with; that His Gospel should throw itself upon something nobler than man’s fear of wrath, and begin by proclaiming pardon as the first step to holiness — this is so incredible to man, that, even with the Bible and the Cross before his eyes, he turns away from it as foolishness. Nevertheless this is “the more excellent way,” and the true and only way of getting rid of sin.

Forgiveness of sins, in believing God’s testimony to the finished work of Christ on the cross, is not simply indispensable to a hold life (in the way of removing terror and liberating the soul from the pressure of guilt) but of imparting an impulse, and a motive, and a power, which nothing else could do.

Forgiveness at the end, or in the middle, a partial forgiveness, or an uncertain forgiveness, or a begrudging forgiveness, would be of no avail. It would only tantalize and mock. But a complete forgiveness, presented in such a way as to carry its own certainty along with it to everyone who will take it from the hands of God — this is a power in the earth, a power against self, a power against sin, a power over the flesh, a power for holiness – such as no amount of suspense or terror could create.”

In the first church I went to after coming to faith, it was suggested that the key to “holiness” was self-effort. We were saved by grace, through faith, but sanctified by self-effort. It was hard to escape the sense we were always being evaluated, and that certain people in the congregation were “the fruit inspectors.” In fact, the pastor once told us that was one of his appointed tasks. What a difference it made when I realized (in keeping with Scripture) that Bonar was right in saying that, “Christ’s Gospel threw itself upon something nobler than man’s fear of wrath, and began by proclaiming pardon as the first step to holiness.”

Thankful for His All-sufficient Grace, Pastor Jeff