Freedom from Conscience

Here are a few quotes from Chapter 8 of Schaeffer's True Spirituality:

"Thus from the time of the Fall onwards, everything rests upon the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, not upon ourselves, no in ourselves. Hence if there is any real victory in my life, it must not be thought of as my victory or my perfection. Such a notion foes not fit the scriptural picture of man or God's dealing with is since man has sinned. It is not my victory, it is always Christ's victory; it is never my work or holiness, it is always Christ's work and holiness. When I begin to think and grow in the idea of my victory, there is really no true victory. To the extent that I am thinking about my sanctification, there is no real sanctification. I must see it always as Jesus Christ's."

"If I count on Christ's victory for my entrance to heaven, will I deny him the glory he would gain in victories won, in me and through me, in my present life? If I look to Jesus Christ and his victory on the cross for my entrance into a future heaven, dare I deny to him what that victory should produce in the battles of the present life--the battles before men and angels and the supernatural world? What an awful thought."

"And the emphasis is on the specific sin. It will not do just to say, "I sinned." This is nothing. There must be a willingness to call my specific sin sin. I must take my place in the Garden of Gethsemane with Christ. There Christ is speaking as a true man, and he speaks the absolute reverse of Adam and Eve in the Garden of the Fall, when he says, "Not my will, the thine be done." I, too, must say with meaningfulness, "not my will, but thine be done," at the point of that specific sin; not just a general statement, "I want you will," but "I want your will in reference to this thing that I acknowledge to be sin" [...] Thus we say, "Not my will, but thine be done." And as I say this in reference to the specific sin, I am once again the creature before God; I am in the place for which I was made."

"And in the question of restoration: the blood of Christ has meaning for me in my present life when I have fallen and my peace is gone. Restoration must be first upon the understanding of what Christ has done for us in this area, and then beginning to practice this moment by moment. It is not a mechanical process; the meaning of the work of Christ in our present life is to be consciously acted upon. But the base is the finished work of Christ in history [...] When my heart cries, "You have done it again," I am to believe God again as to the value of the finished work of Jesus Christ. There must be death, we have seen, before there can be resurrection."

I could pretty much type out this entire chapter because it was so good. This book is bringing so much freedom to so many different areas of my life that I hadn't realized were being held captive.