The Saving Life of Christ

There is something which makes Christianity more than a religion, more than an ethic, and more than the idle dream of the sentimental idealist.  It is this something which makes it relevant to each one of us right now as a contemporary experience.  It is the fact that Christ Himself is the very life content of the Christian faith.  It is He who makes it ‘tick.’  ‘Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it’ (1 Thess 5:24).  The One who calls you is the One who does that to which He calls you.  ‘For it is God which worketh in you, both to will and to do of His good pleasure’ (Phil 2:13).  He is himself the very dynamic of all his demands.

Christ did not die simply that you might be saved from a bad conscience, or even to remove the stain of past failure, but to ‘clear the decks’ for divine action.

So begins the rather obscure, dated book called The Saving Life of Christ, by Major Ian Thomas.  I’ve come back to this book several times over the past 20 years, especially in trying to grasp the gospel of grace.