The podcast continues. In this chapter, Pastor Bonar addresses the topic: Not Faith, But Christ
Personally, I find this chapter very encouraging. Bonar ensures that we know and understand that faith is not a graded performance that wins God’s favor. Instead, in faith we look to Christ. It is His righteousness, His life, His death which save us. We look to Him, and in that look, whether feeble or frail, we rest ourselves in His work on our behalf.
The bringer of the sacrifice into the tabernacle was to lay his hand upon the head of the sheep or the bullock, otherwise the offering would not have been accepted for him. But the laying on of his hand was not the same as the victim on which it was laid. The serpent-bitten Israelite was to look at the uplifted serpent of brass in order to be healed. But his looking was not the brazen serpent. We may say it was his looking that healed him, just as the Lord said, “Thy faith hath saved thee”; but this is figurative language. It was not his act of looking that healed him, but the object to which he looked. So faith is not our righteousness: it merely knits us to the righteous One, and makes us partakers of His righteousness. By a natural figure of speech, faith is often magnified into something great; whereas it is really nothing but our consenting to be saved by another: its supposed magnitude is derived from the greatness of the object which it grasps, the excellence of the righteousness which it accepts. Its preciousness is not its own, but the preciousness of Him to whom it links us.
Horatius Bonar, The Everlasting Righteousness
You can listen to the episode here, or at any of the podcast directories linked at the bottom of the page.