ye in Christ
Jesus, who of God is made unto us sanctification.' Under its first
aspect faith says, I know I am in Him, and all His Holiness is mine; in
its second aspect it speaks, I trust in Him for the grace and the
strength I need each moment to live a holy life.

And yet, it need hardly be said, these two are one. It is one Jesus who
is our sanctification, whether we look at it in the light of what He is
made for us once for all, or what, as the fruit of that, He becomes to
our experience day by day. And so it is one faith which, the more it
studies and adores and rejoices in Jesus as made of God unto us
sanctification, as Him in whom we have been sanctified, becomes the
bolder to expect the fulfilment of every promise for daily life, and the
stronger to claim the victory over every sin. Faith in Jesus is the
secret of a holy life: all holy conduct, all really holy deeds, are the
fruit of faith in Jesus as our holiness.

We know how faith acts, and what its great hindrances are, in the matter
of justification. It is well that we remind ourselves that there are the
same dangers in the exercise of sanctifying as of justifying faith.
Faith _in God_ stands opposed to trust _in self_: specially to its
willing and working. Faith is hindered by every effort to do something
ourselves. Faith looks to God working, and yields itself to His
strength, as revealed in Christ through the Spirit; it allows God to
work both to will and to do. Faith must work; without works it is dead,
by works alone can it be perfected; in Jesus Christ, as Paul says,
nothing avails but 'faith _working_ by love.' But these works, which
faith in God's working inspires and performs, are very different from
the works in which a believer often puts forth his best efforts, only to
find that he fails. The true life of holiness, the life of them who are
sanctified in Christ, has its root and its strength in an abiding sense
of utter impotence, in the deep restfulness which trusts to the working
of a Divine power and life, in the entire personal surrender to the
loving Saviour, in that faith which consents to be nothing, that He may
be all. It may appear impossible to discern or describe the difference
between the working that is of self and the working that is of Christ
through faith: if we but know that there is such a difference, if we
learn to distrust ourselves, and to count on Christ working, the Holy
Spirit will lead us into this secret of the Lord to