Ryle on Wednesday – 20

…let us all awake to a sense of the perilous state of many professing Christians.  Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord (Hebrews 12.14); without sanctification, there is no salvation.  Then, what an enormous amount of so-called religion there is which is perfectly useless!  What an immense proportion of church-goers and chapel-goers are in the broad road that leadeth to destruction!  The thought is awful, crushing, and overwhelming.  Oh, that preachers and teachers would open their eyes and realize the condition of souls around them!  Oh, that men could be persuaded to “flee from the wrath to come”!  If unsanctified souls can be saved and go to heaven, the Bible is not true.  Yet, the Bible is true and cannot lie!  What must the end be!

…let us make sure work of our own condition, and never rest till we feel and know that we are sanctified ourselves.  What are our tastes and choices and likings and inclinations?  This is the great testing question.  It matters little what we wish and what we hope and what we desire to be before we die.  What are we now?  What are we doing?  Are we sanctified or not?  If not, the fault is all our own.

From: Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots by J. C. Ryle; reprint (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 1979), p. 30.  Originally published in 1879.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 19

The Lord Jesus forbids everything like an unforgiving and revengeful spirit.  A readiness to resent injuries, a quickness in taking offense, a quarrelsome and contentious disposition, a keenness in asserting our rights – all, all are contrary to the mind of Christ.  The world may see no harm in these habits of mind.  But they do not become the character of the Christian.  Our Master says, “Resist not evil.”  (Comment on Matthew 5.38-48)

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 18

We must be holy because this is the only sound evidence that we have a saving faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.  The Twelfth Article of our Church says, truly, “Although good works cannot put away our sins and endure the severity of God’s judgment, yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ and do spring out of a true and lively faith insomuch that, by them, a lively faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by its fruits.”  James warns us there is such a thing as a dead faith – a faith which goes no further than the profession of the lips and has no influence on a man’s character (James 2.17).  True saving faith is a very different kind of thing.  True faith will always show itself by its fruits – it will sanctify, it will work by love, it will overcome the world, it will purify the heart. 

I know that people are fond of talking about “death-bed evidences.”  They will rest on words spoken in the hours of fear and pain and weakness, as if they might take comfort in them about the friends they lose.  But, I am afraid, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, such evidences are not to be depended on.  I suspect men, generally, die just as they have lived.  The only safe evidence that you are one with Christ, and Christ in you, is a holy life.  They that live unto the Lord are, generally, the only people who die in the Lord.  If we would die the death of the righteous, let us not rest in slothful desires only.  Let us seek to live His life.  It is a true saying of Traill’s “that man’s state is naught and his faith unsound that finds not his hopes of glory purifying to his heart and life.”

From: Living or Dead?: A Series of Home Truths by J. C. Ryle (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1852), pp. 191-192.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 17

Furthermore, it is a full and complete forgiveness.  It is not like David’s pardon to Absalom – a permission to return home but not a full restoration to favor (2 Samuel 14.24).  It is not, as some fancy, a mere letting off and letting alone.  It is a pardon so complete that he who has it is reckoned as righteous as if he had never sinned at all.  His iniquities are blotted out.  They are removed from him as far as the east and the west (Psalm 103.12).  There remains no condemnation for him.  The Father sees him joined to Christ and is well pleased.  The Son beholds him clothed with His own righteousness and says, “Thou art all fair; there is no spot in thee” (Song of Solomon 4.7). 

Blessed be God that it is so.  I verily believe if the best of us all had only one blot left for himself to wipe out, he would miss eternal life.  If the holiest child of Adam were in Heaven, all but his little finger, and to get in depended on himself, I am sure he would never enter the kingdom.  If Noah, Daniel, and Job had had but one day’s sins to wash away, they would never have been saved.  Praise be to God that, in the matter of our pardon, there is nothing left for man to do.  Jesus does all, and man has only to hold out an empty hand and receive.

From: Living or Dead?: A Series of Home Truths by J. C. Ryle (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1852), pp. 138-140.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 16

The case of Nicodemus is deeply instructive.  It shows us how small and weak the beginning of true religion may be in the soul of man.  It shows us that we must not despair of anyone because he begins with a little, timid, secret inquiry after Christ.  It shows us that there are wide differences and varieties in the characters of believers.  Some are brought into full light at once and take up the cross without delay.  Others attain light very slowly and halt long between two opinions.  It shows us that those who make the least display at first sometimes shine brightest and come out best at last.  Nicodemus confessed his love to Christ when Peter, James, and Andrew had all but run away.  What need we have for patience and charity in forming an estimate of other people’s religion!  There are more successors of Nicodemus in the church of Christ than we are aware of.  We may see some marvellous changes in some persons if we live with them a few years.  The strongest, hardiest trees are often the slowest in growth.  He who sets down men and women as graceless and godless if they do not profess full assurance of hope the first day they take up religion and hear the Gospel forgets the case of Nicodemus and exhibits his own ignorance of the ways of the Spirit.  All God’s elect are led to Christ, undoubtedly, but not all at the same speed or through the same experience.  Comment on John 19.38-42.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 15

When I speak of growth in grace, I only mean increase in the degree, size, strength, vigor, and power of the graces which the Holy Spirit plants in a believer’s heart.  I hold that every one of those graces admits of growth, progress, and increase.  I hold that repentance, faith, hope, love, humility, zeal, courage, and the like, may be little or great, strong or weak, vigorous or feeble, and may vary greatly in the same man at different periods in his life.  When I speak of a man growing in grace, I mean simply this – that his sense of sin is becoming deeper, his faith stronger, his hope brighter, his love more extensive, his spiritual-mindedness more marked.  He feels more of the power of godliness in his own heart.  He manifests more of it in his life.  He is going on from strength to strength, from faith to faith, and from grace to grace.  I leave it to others to describe such a man’s condition by any words they please.  For myself, I think the truest and best account of him is this – he is growing in grace.

From: Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots; reprint (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 1979), p. 83.  Originally published in 1879.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 14

The honor of God’s holy law was frequently defended by Christ during the time of His ministry on earth.  Sometimes, we find Him defending it against man-made additions, as in the case of the Fourth Commandment.  Sometimes, we find Him defending it against those who would lower the standard of its requirements and allow it to be transgressed, as in the case of the law of marriage.  But, we never do find Him speaking of the law in any terms but those of respect.  He always “magnified the law and made it honorable” (Isaiah 42.21).  Its ceremonial part was a type of His own gospel and was to be fulfilled to the last letter.  Its moral part was a revelation of God’s eternal mind and was to be perpetually binding on Christians.  Comment on Luke 16.13-18.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 13

There is, in the gospel, a complete provision for all the wants of man’s soul.  There is a supply of everything that can be required to relieve spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst.  Pardon, peace with God, lively hope in this world, glory in the world to come, are set before us in rich abundance.  It is “a feast of fat things.”  All this provision is owing to the love of the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord.  He offers to take us into union with Himself, to restore us to the family of God as dear children, to clothe us with His own righteousness, to give us a place in His kingdom, and to present us faultless before His Father’s throne at the last day.  The gospel, in short, is an offer of food to the hungry, joy to the mourner, a home to the outcast, a loving friend to the lost.  It is glad tidings.  God offers, through His dear Son, to be at one with sinful man.  Let us not forget this: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4.10). – Comment on Matthew 22.1-14.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 12

The foundation of the true church was made at a mighty cost.  It needed that the Son of God should take our nature upon Him and, in that nature, live, suffer, and die, not for His own sins, but for ours.  It needed that, in that nature, Christ should go to the grave, and rise again.  It needed that, in that nature, Christ should go up to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, having obtained eternal redemption for all His people.  No other foundation could have met the necessities of lost, guilty, corrupt, weak, helpless sinners.

That foundation, once obtained, is very strong.  It can bear the weight of the sins of all the world.  It has borne the weight of all the sins of all the believers who have built on it.  Sins of thought, sins of the imagination, sins of the heart, sins of the head, sins which everyone has seen, and sins which no man knows, sins against God, and sins against man, sins of all kinds and descriptions – that mighty rock can bear the weight of all these sins and not give way.  The mediatorial office of Christ is a remedy sufficient for all the sins of all the world.

To this one foundation, every member of Christ’s true church is joined.  In many things, believers are disunited and disagreed.  In the matter of their soul’s foundation, they are all of one mind.  Whether Episcopalians or Presbyterians, Baptists or Methodists, believers all meet at one point.  They are all built on the rock.  Ask where they get their peace and hope and joyful expectation of good things to come.  You will find that all flows from that one mighty source: Christ, the mediator between God and man, and the office that Christ holds as the High Priest and Surety of sinners.

From: Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots by J. C. Ryle; reprint (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 1979), p. 215.  Originally published in 1879.

 

Ryle on Wednesday – 11

Let us ask ourselves whether there is any work of grace in our own hearts.  Are we resting satisfied with a few vague wishes and convictions or do we know anything of a gradual, growing, spreading, increasing, leavening process going on in our “inward man”?  Let nothing short of this content us.  The true work of the Holy Ghost will never stand still.  It will leaven the whole lump.  Comment on Luke 13.18-21.