I love George MacDonald, but it seems to me that what he preached was salvation by works or character. For those who are weary, beset by repeated sin, obsessions, etc., his is a* gospel of despair*. Whereas Paul seemed to teach a radical grace, MacDonald seems to teach that one must be good enough in effect to experience salvation.
Thoughts?
Existentially, so long as we continue to sin, we have not been saved from sin. Eschatologically, Christ is risen. In Him, the whole cosmos been saved already.
We are all characters in an epic book, and God is the author. He has revealed to us the closing words in the last chapter: “And they all lived happily ever after”. But for us, Chapter 1 has barely begun, and the sky is growing darker. Ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows lie ahead of us. We know we are safe, but we are not yet safe.
The difference is I feel crushed, not so much by my sin, but by my fear of what God will do to me because of my sin. Alas for me, the burden is not light.
Having said that, I really liked your post.
I sometimes feel like Eustace Scrubb (while still in dragon form) anticipating Aslan’s claws. Ah well. It may not be as bad as we fear. Or it may be worse! A bit like child birth, I imagine. Or chemotherapy. Or face-to-face battle. But take heart. Come what may, God is good and ultimately we are safe in his strong, faithful and loving hands.
But how do you find healing, joy and meaning now?
thanks for the gracious replies, btw.
Christ did not come to save me. He came to save us. Healing, comfort and restoration is found together with others, by participating in loving, faithful community.
I find joy in the goodness of God, and see his beauty reflected from a thousand facets. The faithful love of my wife, my most excellent sons, their beautiful wives and children, my true friends, even the gentle, trusting eyes of my dog. Music often transports me to some other place. And I catch the scent of heaven in writers like Lewis, Tolkien, and our very own MacDonald.
All these good things are elements born of community. Since God in essence is loving community, it is hardly surprising that we will find life only in communion with him and with each other.
Amen brother 
Hi Andre
What evidence do you have that MacDonald preached salvation by works or character, or that his is a gospel of despair?
Certainly MacDonald taught that faithful obedience to the commandments of Christ was the only way to find true peace and *assurance * of salvation. And he recognised that even this obedience was very hard - hence he never preached that we had to be successful in it, only that we must do the best we can.
But in all my reading of his work, I have never found anything that even suggested that we can actually *save * ourselves that way.
You do the great man a disservice, I fear.
All the best
Johnny
Hi
Read his sermon “The Hardness of the Way”. Or anywhere he insists one must cease sinning or at least make the effort to. It sounds like Lordship Salvation, where one is told one must totally surrender in obedience before God will forgive. Well, maybe for extroverted types that is feasible, but for some of us its a recipe for despair. How the hell can one even begin to untangle the habits and attitudes inside one’s self?
Paul said that sin is overcome by “walking in the spirit” in contrast to “walking in the flesh”. Yet it seems like GM is saying one needs to, at least initially, prove one’s self by one’s own self-will and flesh-power. GM says “stop sinning” and you will know God’s power; Paul says know God’s power and grace and you will stop sinning. At least that’s how it appears to me when I read Paul.
Hi Andre
I’ve read (and just re-read 
) The Hardness of the Way. I’ve also read all of MacDonald’s other Unspoken Sermons, and various other of his works. Neither it nor they sounds like Lordship Salvation to me, although I admit I don’t know much about that particular theological school of thought.
You say MacDonald says we “must cease sinning, or at least make the effort to”. Indeed he does. But this isn’t some whacky personal theory of his. It is simply and demonstrably the gospel of Jesus Christ. Oh yeah, and of Paul too. And, I repeat, nowhere does MacDonald say anything *remotely * like your assertion that we must first prove ourselves by our obedience *before * we can be saved. Certainly not in The Hardness of the Way, for a start.
Yes Paul taught ‘free grace’, but he also taught the necessity of obedience and righteous living - not as a *precursor *to salvation, but as a necessary product of it - just like, surprise, surprise, George MacDonald:
Romans 6:11-13 (NIV) - “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.”
You assert that MacDonald preached salvation by works, and worse, that he preached a *gospel of despair *- which is, as far as I am concerned, the purest bullshit, and offensive bullshit at that. I dread to think what an enquiring would-be believer in the glorious gospel of Universal Reconciliation might conclude had they visited this site and read your original post and believed such a thing were actually true.
Here, in his Unspoken Sermon The Truth in Jesus, George says (my emphasis):
You say you love MacDonald, but you cannot, or choose not to, see the absolute, the *fundamental *truth of his whole theology! So why do you love him?
Further, in your original post you say that George preached “salvation by works or character”. And then you say a sentence or two later that he taught that one must be “good enough in effect to *experience * salvation” (my emphasis). You don’t need me to point out, I’m sure, that the two concepts are a million miles apart.
All the best
Johnny
Johnny, you gotta calm down bro… I think Andre is just struggling with MacDonald’s teaching, and he needs some help… not to be yelled at and challenged… there’s no need to throw down the gauntlet, bro 
I can actually relate to where Andre is coming from… I haven’t read a whole lot of MacDonald, but I’ve read enough to get some feel for his style and approach… he was a great man, from what I can gather, and it’s no wonder why C.S. Lewis and others were influenced by him… but he is just as challenging as he is encouraging…
Lewis said of him: ‘I dare not say that he was never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems closer or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence, his Christlike union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside of the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.’
I think what’s bothering Andre is the severity and the terror side of MacDonald’s teaching, which is in fact, like Lewis pointed out, in the Spirit of Christ…
I feel the same way, it bothers me, but not because I think MacDonald’s wrong to focus on the need for obedience, I believe he’s right to do that, because that’s what Christ did, but it bothers me because it is so challenging…
I felt the same way when I read the Sermon on the Mount or the book of James, etc…
Jesus said ‘it is hard to follow me’ and ‘pick up your cross and follow me’ and ‘you must lose your life to save it’… and on and on from there… there were a lot of challenging things that Jesus said… He talked just as much of the need for our obedience, for us to do what’s right (not so we could earn God’s love, which as most of us here would agree is unconditional, but because that’s what we’re called to) as He did about the Father’s love for us and grace towards us…
Tenderness and severity, terror and comfort, grace and truth…
It’s the tougher side of MacDonald’s teaching, and his Master’s teaching, that is hard to take, especially for those who are more sensitive and easily discouraged, like myself and Andre…
Andre, I think I know how you feel. When another person, or even when Jesus Himself, calls you to repent, to do things differently, to change your ways, it can be a downer when you feel like you just can’t…
Or maybe all you’re saying is that you need to know that God makes the first move, instead of you having to, because you feel like that’s impossible, and you feel that MacDonald teaches that you need to make the first move, and therefore you’re uncomfortable with him…
Well, I don’t think that MacDonald teaches that you need to make the first move, though it may seem that way because of his tone sometimes…
I gather that he teaches that God always makes the first move, and is always there to assist us in learning and growing… but then, on the other hand, we must learn and grow, because that is what we are called to do…
And I think Jesus teaches the same.
The tenderness, the comfort, the grace, is that God always goes first, loves us already without our needing to earn that love, is always with us wherever we go, is committed to us, and refuses to give up on us…
But the severity, the terror, the truth, is that we need to make moves in response to God, in order to learn and grow, and we need to learn how to trust in His love, and learn to obey in that trust, knowing that His ways are always best… and that’s not easy… in fact, it’s hard, and sometimes very hard.
That’s the way things are… we can’t remain as we are. We’re gonna have to change sooner or later. All of our sins and issues, all of our weaknesses and flaws, are gonna have to be dealt with at some point… because God is holy and righteous, and means for us to be the same, no matter the cost… though He remembers that we are dust, and understands how hard it is for us, and will be with us every step of the way as we stumble and struggle and learn and grow, however slowly…
I know how hard it is to change… for example, just last night I gave into temptation and looked at pornography online until the early morning… I’ve been wrestling with an addiction to it off and on ever since I was a boy, and sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to beat it… and there are other things I struggle with as well… anger, pride, apathy, fear and doubt… and sometimes I feel like I have so far to go…
But when I woke up today I was reminded in my spirit of God’s continuing love for me and commitment to me, and regardless of how little I may feel I deserve it, or how many times I fail or how many times I fall…
I do believe that God’s grace is radical… I believe it’s radical enough to the point where He won’t give up on anyone, even though there are times when we look around or look at our own lives, and it feels like He will give up, on others or on us… but faith says the opposite, trust says the opposite…
But even believing in God’s plan of universal reconciliation, in the salvation of all by grace, and finding great hope in that, we’re still left with the challenge to learn to live as true disciples of Christ, to learn how to walk with God, to learn how to trust and how to obey, not because we must save ourselves, for God is the only one who can save us, but because that is the path we must take, that is what we are called to…
Jesus said that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father but by Him…
I think one of the things he meant by that is that in order to come closer to the Father, to be more in tune with Him, to be truly intimate with Him, then we must learn to walk that Way, and know that Truth, and live that Life…
And it’s a process, often awkward and haphazard to be sure, but there is always hope, because even when we are faithless, He remains faithful…
Grace is not a license to sin, but I do believe it is a license to keep trying, to keep getting back up, to not give up…
I know how you feel… I have had my times when I’ve been afraid of God, afraid of what He’d do to me or the people I care about… afraid of punishment, afraid of rejection, afraid of hell… there were even times I felt I would lose my mind, because the very foundation of everything that I believed and everything that could give my life purpose or meaning was in question… like my fiancee says ‘if we can’t trust God, then who can we trust?’
I’m not so afraid now as I once was, but I still struggle with trusting in God’s love, with trusting His heart…
I think that’s something all of us do at some point or another… trust is not an easy thing…
And when we have a hard time believing, believing in God’s love, His goodness, His mercy, that He will what’s right for us and by us, that He really cares and understands and can bring us to where we were made to be, or even believing in God’s very existence, all we can do is say ‘help me with my unbelief.’
All we can do is just keep praying and not give up…
There’s something about Jesus, about God, that draws us, that we can’t quite shake, and even when He seems severe, or terrifying, or when we don’t know how to handle or process the truth that He is showing us, we still can’t help but keep coming back, and we know that He’s our only hope…
Sometimes it’s fear and desperation that drives us towards God… but other times it’s longing and hope… may you, and may all of us, be able to come closer to Christ and through Him to the Father, by the power of the Spirit working within us, and may we find whatever strength and courage we need to keep going and not give up, and may we all be able to learn and grow, in our ability to trust and to obey, and may we be able to live as true disciples, students of the Teacher of Teachers, more and more, children of the One who loved us first, loving Him back, and loving one another, and loving those around us, as best we can on our feet of clay, until we find home, which is in His embrace…
Blessings to you bro, and may God give you peace and rest
Matt
Agreed with Matt. There are many portions of MacD which can be quoted where he emphasizes that God leads us to depend upon and ask His help to do these things.
Andrew says he’s in pain; let’s give him something comforting from MacD to work with, rather than using foul language at him.
A Condensation of “Salvation from Sin”
Which is Chapter 1 of The Hope of the Gospel
by George MacDonald
The wrong, the evil that is in a man; he must be set free from it. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature, the wrongness in him, the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
He will want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, unless he is delivered from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that leads to liberty. There can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.
The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while those sins remained. That would be to throw the medicine out the window while the man still lies sick! That would be to come directly against the very laws of existence! Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have (consistently with their low condition) constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. This idea (this miserable fancy rather) has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered.
He came to work along with our punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins.
Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned; not for the worst of them does he need to fear remaining unforgiven. The sin in which he dwells, the sin of which he will not come out. That sin is the sole ruin of a man. His present live sins, those sins pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, but to which he clings instead, the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it — these are the sins for which he is even now condemned.
It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, from which we need to be delivered. If a man will not strive against this badness, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being (no essential part of it, thank God!) from which He came to deliver us — not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore.
As this possibility departs, and we confess to those we have wronged, the power over us of our evil deeds will depart also, and so shall we be saved from them. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction ---- these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, that is, the deeds we do, because they not only produce these loathsome characteristics, but they make us just as loathsome. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins. These sins, the essential opposites of faith and love, these sins that dwell in us and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but at the same time begin to die. We are then on the Lord’s side, and He begins to deliver us from them.
From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to deliver us; not only, or even primarily, from the punishment of any of them. When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed also. He came to make us good, and therein blessed children.
Evil is not human; it is the defect and opposite of human; but the suffering that follows it is human, belonging of necessity to the human that has sinned. While evil is the cause of sin, suffering is FOR the sinner, that he may be delivered from his sin.
A man may recognize the evil in him only as pain. He may know little and care nothing about his sins. Yet the Lord is sorry for his pain. He cries aloud, “Come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He opens His arms to all weary enough to come to Him in the hope of rest.
I certainly do not disregard understanding. The New Testament is full of urgings to understand. Our whole life must be a growth in understanding. But I cry out about the misunderstanding that comes of man’s endeavour to understand while not obeying. Upon obedience our energy must be spent; understanding will follow. The Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he still holds to his sins.
If a man wants to be delivered from the evil in him, he must himself begin to cast it out, himself begin to disobey it, and work righteousness, and the man should look for and expect the help of his Father in this endeavour. Alone he could labour to all eternity and not succeed. He who has not made himself, cannot set himself right without Him who made him. But his maker is in him, and is his strength.
The sum of the matter is this: —The Son has come from the Father to set the children free from their sins. The children must hear and obey Him, that He may send forth judgment unto victory.
This is good stuff bro, challenging yes but also encouraging. Thanks for sharing
Hopefully this encourages Andre as well, and helps him to better understand MacD’s teaching
Matt
By the way, welcome Andre Maybe you could introduce yourself in the Introductions section?
PS Try to forgive Johnny for being a bit brash… he gets a little worked up sometimes, but he’s a good guy once you get to know him. 
Andre,
Welcome! You have prompted some profound discussion. Here’s my 2 cents.
You say that MacDonald thinks that we need to “make the effort” not to sin, and that “obedience” is necessary. Yes, I think that he, as I, perceives that Paul also thought that this was consistent with his Gospel of grace. The warnings that Paul gives to believers make no sense to me if our fundamental continued commitments don’t matter.
For me, one genuis of universalism is that it can reconcile two Biblical ideas in tension: the Bible’s insistence upon some level of righteous response on our part (which alone would leave us fearful), with the assurance that God is the one who is committed to graciously securing that victorious outcome. That means that in the big picture we are in God’s hands as safe as can be. Yet in the short term, the choices that we make can still really matter. The balance provided is that a sober reverence before God remains, but there is no place for dreadful fear of the One who is committed to our good.
Grace be with you,
Bob
Its okay, I think the “foe” button is like an ignore button?
Good quote, Paidion! I’ll be citing more from that sermon below, with a little overlap.
That’s true; but MacD also talks a lot about how God is always acting in ways to lead us to the point of renouncing our sins. That’s the process of salvation, and God initiates and maintains it. He doesn’t wait for you to become morally perfect before acting to save you (or me or any of us) from sin. Nor does He wait for you to cooperate with Him perfectly, before leading you in various ways to cooperate with Him even a little. A father is rightly pleased when his child takes even the most tottering is step, but no good father would be perfectly satisfied with anything less than the full healthy stride of his child.
However, MacD does stress that salvation is not primarily from the consequences of our sins, but from our sins. MacD would say (and I could quote him on this from the Unspoken Sermons or Hope of the Gospel) that you haven’t really hit the bottom yet that God is aiming and leading you toward:
Whenever I feel this way, I remind myself that what I ought to be fearing more than what God will do to me because of my sin, are my sins! I ought to be more worried about and bothered by them than even by hell itself!
MacD did have some tough things to say about that, but theologically they’re true:
"]To save a man from his sins, is to say to him, in sense perfect and eternal, ‘Rise up and walk. Be at liberty in thy essential being. Be free as the son of God is free.’ To do this for us, Jesus was born, and remains born to all the ages.
Note that MacD affirms that we do not have to earn Jesus doing this for us, or even to earn His approval before He will do this for us.
God doesn’t inflict this from on high; He joins us in our suffering, even if the suffering is that of our punishment for insisting on holding to our sins. But He’ll keep at us until He leads us to renounce our sins utterly. If that means He has to lead us into more suffering because we haven’t yet learned to be most distressed by our sins, God will keep at it.
Like Johnny, I am not familiar with Lordship Salvation; but for MacDonald (and I agree with him), it is not a question of us doing anything at all before God will forgive.
However, logically we cannot accept God’s forgiveness so long as we are holding onto our sin.
God is already and always offering His forgiveness to us, along with salvation from our sins, both of which He is already and always acting toward before we ever take a single step in agreement with Him.
But God isn’t going to be satisfied with anything less than our willing cooperation with Him in renouncing our sins and being righteous instead.
He’ll cure, sooner or later, whatever only needs curing, and He won’t hold that against us.
He’ll excuse, and does excuse, everything for which we really do have good excuses.
MacDonald very daringly (but in good Biblical form) goes far beyond even that, to the very limit!
We (including you) need not worry about God punishing us for what we have done, although neither should we resent when what we have done leads to unpleasant consequences for us. But God already forgives us of those.
Neither should we really be worried about God punishing us for the sin we insist on still continuing to do. God already forgives us for that, too.
What we should really be worried about, is the sin that we insist on still continuing to do! If we are worried about what God will do to us for choosing to keep on doing that sin, we have our priorities badly misdirected. It is because God forgives us that He punishes when we cling to our hay, wood and stubble; we may be burned but we shall be saved as by fire. God has no wrath in Himself; He goes out to war against us when we insist on persisting in going out to war against Him with brambles and thorns. But what He burns up are our brambles and thorns!–we’re burnt, too, so far as we cling to them, but that is no fault of God’s, and He will not let us be finally destroyed thereby. When we stop clinging to our brambles and thorns, and cling to God instead as our refuge (as the prophet Isaiah reports in the midst of much talk of God throwing down and slaying enemies up to and including Satan himself), we make Him our friend. But He was already our friend: that’s why He had no wrath in Him but only went out to war against us to destroy our tools for making war against Him.
MacD elsewhere affirms, very strongly, that God does not only promise relief to those who sorrow for their sins, but for those who sorrow about anything–and so one thing God does for those who are not primarily worried about their sins yet, is bring them to genuine sorrow about something! From that, God can and does lead us to sorrow for the sins we have so far refused to stop persisting in, too. It is not all God’s action–we have our responsibilities, too–but God initiates and keeps it going until He gets it done with us.
We don’t have to be good enough to convince God to save us from our sins. That would be ridiculous, and MacDonald never once falls into the fault of teaching that. But God is dedicated to leading us to be good, righteous, sinless; and He isn’t waiting for us to get our act together before starting and going the farthest distance necessary for that goal Himself.
Anyway, I agree with Johnny (and with MacD where he cited him), that we should get up and go do the first thing God brings to our mind that involves fulfilling fair-togetherness with some other person. God doesn’t wait for you to do that before He forgives you; He leads you (and by ‘you’ I also mean ‘all of us’) in various ways to do that as part of His forgiveness of us, so that we can accept and fulfill His forgiveness of us.
But when we aren’t primarily interested yet in being saved from our sins, then God is likely to turn up the heat, too, in various ways! Maybe we’ll be interested in being saved from that!–but God will make sure we come to understand there is no salvation from that without salvation from our sins.
That’s what He’s after; that’s what He’s working toward; and that’s what He’s going to achieve, regardless of how long we’re obstinate about it.
And we don’t have to earn any of that merciful graciousness, nor any of God’s other merciful graces either!
But it helps a lot if we learn to understand that God’s wrath is itself a merciful grace to us, too, which we also don’t have to earn before it’s a merciful grace to us. (MacD has quite a bit to say about that as well.)
Like Johnny (and MacDonald) said, we can always make a beginning of it. God won’t be satisfied until He sees the end and completion of it, but we don’t earn His attention or much moreso His grace by our making a beginning (much less an end) of it.
And as MacD’s greatest student Lewis followed up with: God knows the real excuses, and we needn’t despair about Him reckoning those in our favor, as our fairest judge. God judges according to the inward man, and sees that what may look like practical failure to anyone else (even to the man) was against the problems and difficulties really a heroic victory. Never mind, keep at it, praying for guidance in little things even if you can’t seem to tackle the big things yet. God isn’t going to give up on you, or me, or anyone else, even if we occasionally give up out of frustration (or out of selfish desire): the stronger ox pulls the yoke onward anyway, even if (or though) it kills Him!
But neither is He going to be satisfied with us, even for our own sake, until we’re yoked in cooperation with Him.
Meanwhile, from “The Hardness of the Way”:
MacD does not preach here that the sinner must first do righteousness and then God will save him.
On the contrary, much of MacD’s whole initial point is that the rich young ruler, who had already been keeping the commandments, was dissatisfied with the result of merely keeping the commandments, and so wishing to be perfect (which in fact he was not already), had gone to the Master to learn what more he ought to do in order (as the Greek puts it) “enjoy the allotment of the inheritance”.
Many people are not in that position; it is not keeping the commands of God that is the problem for them, but the not keeping of the commands. Such a young man had discovered from apparently honest and legitimate experience, though, that even keeping the commandments was not enough!
That shatters the whole concept that we can earn God’s salvation by doing good works. And MacD is well aware of that.
The first great reward of keeping the commandments is loving righteousness. (Although we must also love righteousness to some degree first before we can even truly try to keep the commandments–mere formality or code-worship is not what MacD is talking against here, since that is so obvious as hypocrisy it hardly needs mentioning. Nor can that love come from anywhere else first but from inspiration in us by God from above! So it starts with God acting in us anyway.)
But the further reward is to discover that, even with all the energy we can put forth, we are but an unprofitable servant; to discover that the law can be kept only by such as need no law; coming to feel that we would rather pass out of being than live such a poor, miserable, selfish life as anything less than that; coming to discern that there is something that is not ours yet even with our honest discipline and successful labor; coming to see that we may honestly and (to some extent) even successfully keep the Law without yet trusting personally in God.
Perhaps we have even gone beyond trusting in our own efforts to be good (which is exactly what MacD is critiquing here, and then going on beyond to critique the core problem with this in other forms). We may trust in the merits of God as our Savior. We may trust in His finished work. We may trust in the sacrifice He has offered.
It is also true that the Persons cannot give us eternal life so long as we insist on sinning (and of course if we are sinning we are not keeping the spirit of the commandments even if we happen to be keeping to the letter of the Law). But then, insofar as we are willfully sinning, we cannot really be trusting (to that extent) personally in God, and especially not (to that extent) trusting God to save us from our sins!
Christ Himself, as MacD reports, emphasized that it is hard for anyone to enter into the kingdom of God–and even harder for a rich man! But never can it be done merely by keeping the commandments; thus MacD says, “The law-faithful Jew, the ceremonial Christian, shrinks from the self-annihilation, the life of grace and truth, the upper air of heavenly delight, the all-embracing love that fill the law full and sets it aside. They cannot accept a condition of being as in itself eternal life.”
MacDonald thus has direct sympathy for those who truly know how difficult it is to enter into the kingdom of heaven, “those who have tried–tried hard, and have not ceased to try. …] They only, I repeat, know how hard it is to enter into life, who are in conflict every day, are growing to have this conflict every hour *–nay, who have begun to see that no moment is life, without the Presence that maketh strong.”
Where then is MacD ever talking about proving one’s self by one’s own self-wlll and flesh power?! It is certainly not in this sermon! Rather he proclaims that “it is the ever fresh rousing and calling, asking and sending of the Spirit that worketh in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has attained, then is he in danger.”
MacDonald does go on afterward to talk at length about how we ought not to put our trust in things either; that would be even more ridiculous than to put our trust in our selves, and he has already talked about how ridiculous that is! He is making a how-much-moreso contrast, not advocating that we ought to trust in ourselves instead of that which is less than ourselves. MacD does not return much to the theme of trusting personally in God in this sermon, but he already covered that topic, and will return to it again. He had ended the previous sermon however (also on the incident with the rich young ruler), with the description of the young man’s straits: “While thus he stands [climbing the stair of eternal life], then, alone and helpless [for he is unable to go farther]: behold the form of the Son of Man! It is God Himself, come meet the climbing youth, to take him by the hand, and lead him up His own stair, the only stair by which ascent can be made!”
It cannot be done by the young man alone without God’s help; it cannot even be done by the stair which the young man was climbing. Neither however can it be done unless, trusting God, he removes his golden shoes to take the first step on God’s own stairway.
Instead the young man chooses to keep his precious shoes, and drag them about on the earth, rather than part with them for a world, God’s world, where they are useless.
(That’s also MacD’s point to the sermons. But he doesn’t teach that the man can get there by himself on his own stairway if only he will take off the shoes.)*