telestai = Strong's Greek 5055, "It is finished!"

The other morning when reading My Utmost for His Highest I was delighted to encounter this:

Yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. —Romans 6:13-22

I cannot save and sanctify myself; I cannot atone for sin; I cannot redeem the world; I cannot make right what is wrong, pure what is impure, holy what is unholy. That is all the sovereign work of God. Have I faith in what Jesus Christ has done? He has made a perfect Atonement, am I in the habit of constantly realizing it? The great need is not to do things, but to believe things. The Redemption of Christ is not an experience, it is the great act of God which He has performed through Christ, and I have to build my faith upon it. If I construct my faith on my experience, I produce that most unscriptural type, an isolated life, my eyes fixed on my own whiteness. Beware of the piety that has no pre-supposition in the Atonement of the Lord. It is of no use for anything but a sequestered life; it is useless to God and a nuisance to man. Measure every type of experience by our Lord Himself. We cannot do anything pleasing to God unless we deliberately build on the pre-supposition of the Atonement.

The Atonement of Jesus has to work out in practical, unobtrusive ways in my life. Every time I obey, absolute Deity is on my side, so that the grace of God and natural obedience coincide. Obedience means that I have banked everything on the Atonement, and my obedience is met immediately by the delight of the supernatural grace of God.

Beware of the piety that denies the natural life, it is a fraud. Continually bring yourself to the bar of the Atonement – where is the discernment of the Atonement in this thing, and in that?

The Gospel is believed upon for eternal life and lived upon in earthly life.

The Gospel is not something you believed in once upon a time. You cannot make your ways or words holy now anymore than you could before you believed in Jesus. The Holy Spirit does not enable you now to make yourself holy. This is a work accomplished again by the grace of God.

2 things:

1)       Dear Christian, please enjoy the grace of God today in overcoming your weakness that in Him you might be strong to serve. The Gospel is not merely for your failures accrued before you believed. The Gospel was not a hope you embraced to release you only from your past. You are not now on your own to maintain and upkeep the whiteness that was given to you. The Gospel is your strength today and your hope for tomorrow. It is your perpetual whiteness because it is Christ’s whiteness which can never be stained. It is the main attraction, not simply your ticket to the big show of self preservation.

2)       Dear Christian, please make it your every effort to yield your members to righteousness today. Surrender your will and your rights in order to embrace the grace of relying on Another’s efforts on your behalf. We demonstrate daily our dependence on God alone and His righteousness for us by doing the good works prepared beforehand by Him. We are pleasing to Him because Christ is pleasing to Him and by faith we are found in Christ.

Working hard to please God is exhausting and useless in that it cannot accomplish its goals.

Working hard because God is pleased with you in Christ is energizing and useful in that it fully accomplishes God’s goals.