Dear Friends,
Do you, like me, hate to be cheated? If so, you will not want to miss today’s devotional so you can escape the wiles of a great cheat! God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Isaiah 64:6 (ESV)

  We have all become like one who is unclean,
  and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
  We all fade like a leaf,
  and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

“Self-righteousness is a great cheat. The man who gets most comfort out of it simply gets that comfort because he is ignorant; if he knew himself, and knew God’s law, and knew the demands of inflexible justice, he would fling upon the nearest dunghill that self-righteousness of his, which looks like fair white linen, but which really is, in God’s sight, nothing but filthy rags. O sinner, ye cannot find your way to heaven by your own works, for the only way to heaven by works is perfectly to keep the law of God, and you have broken that law already. You must present this matchless vase, flawless and entire, at the gates of glory if you would be saved by works, but you have already shattered it in a thousand pieces; how can you hope to mend it? That is impossible; the hope of salvation by a perfect life is over…” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit LII, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1906), p. 111-112]