God's Way of Holiness: Finding True Holiness Through True Peace - by Horatius Bonar

"These are weighty words of the apostle, 'we are his workmanship. Of him, and through him, and to him, are all things pertaining to us. Chosen, called, quickened, washed, sanctified and justified by God himself, we are, in no sense, our own deliverers. The quarry out of which the marble comes is his; the marble itself is his; the digging and hewing and polishing are his; he is the sculptor and we the statue." (pg. 10)

"How the Holy Spirit operates in producing the newness of which we have spoken, we know not; yet we know that he does not destroy or reverse man's faculties; he renovates them all, so that they fulfil the true ends for which they were given." (pg. 14)

"As the vessels of the sanctuary were at once separated to God and his service, the moment the blood touched them, so are we. This did not imply that these vessels required no daily ablution afterwards; so neither does our consecration intimate that we need no daily sanctifying, no inward process for getting rid of sin. The initiatory consecration through the blood is one thing, and the continual sanctifying by the power of the Holy Ghost is another." (pg. 17)

"The gospel does not command us to do anything in order to obtain life, but it bids us live by that which another has done; and the knowledge of its life-giving truth is not labour but rest - rest of soul - rest which is the root of all true labour; for in receiving Christ we do not work in order to rest, but we rest in order to work. In believing, we cease to work for pardon, in order that we may work from it; and what incentive to work or source of joy in working, can be greater than an ascertained and realised forgiveness." (pg. 30)

"The sinner's legal position must be set to right before his moral position can be touched. Condition is one thing, character is another. The sinner's standing before God, either in favour or disfavour, either under grace or under wrath, must first be dealt with ere his inner renewal can be carried on." (pg. 39)

"All through the ages has this struggle gone on, between the love and the dread of sin, the delight in lust and the sense of degradation because of it; men clasping the poisoned robe, yet wishing to tear it off; their life steeped in the evil, yet their words so often lavished upon the good." (pg. 53)

"Under law and its curse, a man works for self and Satan; 'under grace' he works for God. It is forgiveness that sets a man a-working for God." (pg. 57)

"The cross on which we are crucified with Christ, and the cross which we carry, are different things, yet they both point in one direction, and lead us along one way. They both protest against sin, and summon to holiness. They both 'condemn the world,' and demand separation from it." (pg. 69)

"It may seem a possible thing just now, by avoiding all extremes and all thoroughness, either in religion or in worldliness, to conjoin both of these, but in the day of the separation of the real from the unreal, it will be discovered to have been a poor attempt to accomplish an impossibility; a failure; a failure for eternity, a failure as complete as it is disastrous and remediless." (pg. 70)

"We want not merely a high and full theology, but we want that theology acted out in life, embodied nobly in daily doings, without anything of what the world calls 'cant' or 'simper'. The higher the theology, the higher and the manlier should be the life resulting from it." (pg. 110)

"Christ's truth sanctifies as well as liberates; his wisdom purifies as well as quickens; let us beware of accepting the liberty without the holiness, the wisdom without the purity, the peace without the zeal and love." (pg. 132)

Horatius Bonar, God's Way of Holiness: Finding True Holiness Through True Peace (Ross-shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 1999)