Monday Quote : Thomas Chalmers - Sanctification by Faith

"The best practical recipe I can give you, my brethren, for becoming holy, is to be steadfast in the faith. Believe that Christ's righteousness is your righteousness, and His graces will become your graces. Believe that you are a pardoned creature, and this will issue in your becoming a purified creature. Take hold of the offered gift of heaven, and you will not only enter after death on the future reversion of heaven's triumphs and heaven's joys, but before death - nay, even now, will you enter upon the participation of heaven's feelings, and the practice of heaven's moralities. Go in prayer with the plea of Christ's atonement and His merits, and state, in connexion with this plea, that what you want is that you be adorned with Christ's likeness, and that you be assisted in putting on the virtues which signalized Him; and you will find the plea to be omnipotent, and the continued habit of such prayer, applied to all the exigencies of your condition, will enable you to substantiate the example of your Saviour throughout all the varieties of providence and of history. In a word, faith is the instrument of sanctification. And when you have learned the use of this instrument you have learned the way to become holy upon earth now, as well as the way to become eternally happy in heven hereafter. The believing prayer that God will aid you in this difficulty, and counsel you in this perplexity, and enable you to overcome in this trial of charity and of patience, and keep up in your heart the principle of godliness, amid the urgency of all those seducing influences by which you are surrounded - this you will find, my brethren, to be the sure stepping-stone to a right acquittal of yourselves in all the given circumstances of your condition in the world. And let the repeated experience of your constant failures, when you had nothing but the power and the energies of nature to trust to, shut you up unto the faith."

-Lectures on Romans Vol. 2 Pp 99-100