Justification by Faith and Justice

"Justification by faith alone and working for justice in this broken world have EVERYTHING to do with one another. Faith working itself out in love is what matters most."

Tim Keller

Do Not Presume

"Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, 

'we have Abraham as our Father,' for I tell you, 

God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham."

Matthew 3:9

In this passage, John the Baptist is speaking to the Pharisees and Sadducees as they came to him to be baptized. John's message to the religious leaders was clear (like it was clear to the other people he preached to in Matthew 3:1-2). They needed to repent. In this case, it meant repenting from their presuming upon God. What exactly was their presumption ?

According to the passage, the Pharisees and Scribes assumed their position with God based on their religious heritage. They presumed that they were children of God because they were from the same bloodline as Abraham. They were good with God because of their tradition.

I love the gospel because it speaks to each of us in our self-inflated efforts to gain God's acceptance. It bids us to repent; to literally turn from trusting ourselves, to trusting in Christ. To those who think they are good with God because they are moral people, the message of repentance is that we could never be good enough to earn God's acceptance. In fact, the only one who did that was Jesus. Therefore, we must turn from our own moral record and trust Christ's moral record on our behalf. To those who try to be their own god, the message is repent. Turn from trusting yourself as god and turn to the one true and living God. To those who think they are good with God because they come from a rich religious tradition, God's message is repent. Your religious heritage cannot save you; only I can. So, stop trusting in yourself and turn to trust in me. Don't assume you are a true child of Abraham and thus a child of God because of your families religious tradition.

This makes me ask, in what ways do I presume upon God? In what ways do I think my self-efforts earn my acceptance with God. To me, I can imagine this passage saying something like, "Do not presume to yourself that you are a child of God just because you go to seminary, or because you are an active member at a church, or because you are in ministry."None of those are bad things. However, when we trust in these 'things' to give us acceptance before God, they are wrong. The gospel is that we are only accepted by God by grace through faith. It is Christ's finish work that gains our acceptance. There is nothing we could ever do to earn it. To attempt to do so, is to minimize Jesus Christ as our Savior. This is what this passage demands we repent of. Join me in doing so. 

Faith Will Become Sight

From the Epilogue of Jonathan Dodson's, "Gospel-Centered Discipleship." This was too good not to post.

"One day the fight will be over. Faith will become sight. Our image will be perfectly aligned with Christ's image. Our affection for Christ will be so strong that it will be chief among ten thousand. All competitors for his attention will bow before him, and we will recover a childish, yet mature delight that will never cease to thrill our souls. Every act will be a natural act of obedience sparked by joy. The warnings will fade and the promises will be fulfilled. Threats will no longer be necessary and rewards will abound. The Spirit will have full sway in our gladdened hearts as we live forever in Spirit-led worship. We will no longer lean toward performance or license. The gospel will be central forever. Our conversions will be complete, our community characterized by love, and our mission colored in worship. We will no longer know our sin, fight our sin, or struggle to trust our Savior. Until then, may God grant us his sovereign grace to fight the good fight of faith, for our joy, and for his eternal glory."

The Inseparable Companion of Faith

"Repentance is the inseparable companion of faith. All the time that we walk by faith and not by sight, the tear of repentance glistens in the eye of faith. It is not a true repentance that does not come from faith in Jesus. It is not a true faith in Jesus that is not colored with repentance. Faith and repentance, like Siamese twins, are vitally joined together. We repent in proportion to our belief in the forgiving love of Christ. We rejoice in the fullness of Jesus' absolution in proportion to our repentance of sin and our hatred of evil. You will never value pardon unless you feel repentance. You will never taste the deepest portion of repentance until you know that you are pardoned. It may seem like a strange thing, and so it is. The bitterness of repentance and the sweetness of pardon blend in the flavor of every gracious life and make up an incomparable happiness."

- All of Grace, C.H. Spurgeon

The Object of Our Faith

"See, then, that the weakness of your faith will not destroy you. A trembling hand may receive a golden gift. The Lord's salvation can come to us even though we have faith only as a grain of a mustard seed. The power lies in the grace of God and not in our faith. Great messages can be sent along slender wires. The peace-giving witness of the Holy Spirit can reach the heart by means of a threadlike faith that seems almost unable to sustain its own weight. Think more of Him to whom you look than of the look itself. You must look away even from your own looking and see nothing but Jesus and the grace of God revealed in Him."

- All of Grace by Charles H. Spurgeon

To Attain Unto God

For the summer, I am taking a couple classes on  Church history. Studying history, for some, may seem more like cruel punishment than an enjoyable opportunity; a buffet of boredom rather than an exciting adventure. However, it has been such a joy to be able to dive into the story of Christianity and to study the faith of those who have come before us. It has been like opening up a small door into a vast storehouse, stretching beyond where the eye can see and mind can comprehend. And in this storehouse are the riches of God's faithfulness, seen in the generations of Christians whom He has faithfully worked in. His glory is seen through these countless testimonies of His grace.

Over the next couple days, I will post a few accounts of early Church father's that really encouraged me. The first is from Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch. Around the year 107, Ignatius was condemned to death by the imperial authorities. He was ceased in Antioch, then was brought from Antioch to Rome, so that his death might be a spectacle to many. It was on this journey that Ignatius wrote seven letters. It was also during this time that Ignatius was somehow made aware that Christians in Rome were planning to free him from the imperial authorities, thus freeing him from death. Contrary to how most of us would react, Ignatius was not in favor of this idea. He was ready to die as a witness to the gospel. His main concern was Christ, not himself. In one of his letters he wrote.

"I fear your kindness, which may harm me. You may be able to 

achieve what you plan. But if you pay no heed to my request it will

be very difficult for me to attain unto God.....so that I may not only be called a Christian, 

but also behave as such....My love is crucified...I no longer savor corruptible

food....but wish to taste the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ...

and his blood I wish to drink, which is an immortal drink....

When I suffer, I shall be free in Jesus Christ, and with him shall rise again in freedom....

I am God's wheat, to be ground by the teeth of beasts, so that I may be offered as pure bread of Christ."

Everything Is Ours

Luke 11:37-41

"While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him, so he went in and reclined at table. The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. And the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you."

....

A perfect summary of the gospel. Give up yourself. Realize what you are worshiping on a daily basis to justify you, to make you clean. The false saviors of my life. Accolades. Success in medical school. Thinking I've got it all together. Being perceived a certain way. Give them up. More specifically, give IT up. It's not only what you're giving up, but more importantly what you are getting. Give your heart up, and let your every affection rest in and identify with Jesus as the fulfillment of them. It is only by faith in Lord Jesus that everything is clean for us. His Might is our boast. His perfect record is our grade. His humility is our disposition. His promise is our confidence. His life is our salvation.

What Abortion?

A great article written by Tullian Tchividjian. I needed this.

HT: Tullian Tchividjian

What Abortion?

Back in June I preached a series of six sermons entitled Pictures of Grace. Of all the sermons series’ I’ve preached, I probably enjoyed this one the most. I took our church through the Gospels and looked at various events in the life and ministry of Jesus where the shocking, counter-intuitive nature of amazing grace is on display. Each week we looked intently at how Jesus wrecked people afresh with his grace, turning everything that makes sense in our conditional world upside-down and setting sinners free.

Well, I went back to the first of those six sermons yesterday as I was doing some research and was struck again at how crazy God’s grace really is.

I began that series by by preaching from Luke 7:36-50. This is the famous account of the sinful woman (most likely a prostitute) barging into a party of religious leaders and washing the feet of Jesus with her tears of repentance. I pointed out that two rescues are happening in this passage: the obvious rescue of the immoral person but also the rescue of the moral person.

Normally when we think of people in need of God’s rescuing grace, we think of the unrighteous and the immoral. But what’s fascinating to me is that throughout the Bible, it’s the immoral person that gets the Gospel before the moral person; it’s the prostitute who gets grace; it’s the Pharisee who doesn’t. What we see in this story is that God’s grace wrecks and then rescues, not only the promiscuous but the pious. The Pharisee in this story can’t understand what Jesus is doing by allowing this woman to touch him because he assumes that God is for the clean and competent. But Jesus here shows him that God is for the unclean and incompetent and that when measured against God’s perfect holiness we’re all unclean and incompetent. Jesus shows him that the gospel isn’t for winners, but losers: it’s for the weak and messed up person, not the strong and mighty person. It’s not for the well-behaved, but the dead.

I was reminded once again that Jesus came not to effect a moral reformation but a mortal resurrection (moral reformations can, and have, taken place throughout history without Jesus. But only Jesus can raise the dead, over and over and over again). As Gerhard Forde put it, “Christianity is not the move from vice to virtue, but rather the move from virtue to grace.”

Wrecking every religious category he had, Jesus tells the Pharisee that he has a lot to learn from the prostitute, not the other way around.

The prostitute on the other hand walks into a party of religious people and falls at the feet of Jesus without any care as to what others are thinking and saying. She’s at the end of herself. More than wanting to avoid an uncomfortable situation, she wanted to be clean-she needed to be forgiven. She was acutely aware of her guilt and shame. She knew she needed help. She understood at a profound level that God’s grace doesn’t demand that you get clean before you come to Jesus. Rather, our only hope for getting clean is to come to Jesus. Only in the Gospel does love precede loveliness. Everywhere else loveliness precedes love.

I closed the sermon by recalling a story that Rod Rosenbladt told me when we were together at the Gospel Coalition conference in Chicago. It’s a story about a middle-aged woman who needed help from her pastor.

She went to her pastor and said, “Pastor, you know that I had an abortion a number of years ago?”  “Yes,” the Pastor replied.  “Well, I need to talk to you about the man I’ve since met.”  “Alright,” replied the Pastor.

“Well, we met a while back, and started dating and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. Then things got more serious between us and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. A while later we got engaged and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. Then we got married and I thought, I really need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn’t. So I needed to talk to someone, Pastor, and you’re it.”

The Pastor replied, “You know, we have a service for this. Let’s go through that together.” So they did – a service of confession and absolution.

When they were finished, she said to him, “Now I think I have the courage to tell my new husband about my abortion.  Thanks, Pastor.”

And the Pastor replied to her, “What abortion?”

What the Pharisee, the prostitute, and everyone in between, need to remember every day is that Christ offers forgiveness full and free from both our self-righteous goodness and our unrighteous badness. This is the hardest thing for us to believe as Christians. We think it’s a mark of spiritual maturity to hang onto our guilt and shame. We’ve sickly concluded that the worse we feel, the better we actually are. The declaration of Psalm 103:12 is the most difficult for us to grasp and embrace: “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” To be convinced in our hearts, said Martin Luther, “that we have forgiveness of sins and peace with God by grace alone is the hardest thing.” Or, as Corrie ten Boom once said, “God takes our sins—the past, present, and future—and dumps them in the sea and puts up a sign that says ‘No Fishing allowed.’” This seems too good to be true…it can’t be that simple, that easy, that real!

It is true! No strings attached. No but’s. No conditions. No need for balance. If you are a Christian, you are right now under the completely sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ. Your pardon is full and final. In Christ, you’re forgiven. You’re clean. It is finished.

What abortion?

Uncomfortable Grace

These words have spoken in a significant way to me over the past several weeks.

"So, if you are God's child, resist the temptation to doubt his goodness in the middle of your stress. It's time to stop thinking that our difficulty is a sign of his unfaithfulness and inattention. If you are God's child and you still recognize the battle of sin within, then those difficulties are sure signs of rescuing redemptive love. God isn't withholding his grace from you. No, you're experiencing uncomfortable grace, grace that's willing to break bones in order for your heart to be true. This grace is unwilling to give up. This grace will not turn its back. This grace will not accept the status quo. This grace will not compromise or grow cynical. God hasn't forgotten you. He loves you with real love, and he's giving you real grace. And he'll continue to do so until you're finally free of your propensity to wander away. Now that's real love."

-Paul Tripp, Whiter than Snow

Observation # 4: Justification is Rooted in Our Union With Christ

We are only able to receive the benefits of Christ through our present union with Him. Because we are united to Him, we are seen as if we achieved His righteousness. The imputation of Christ's righteous to us finds its roots in our union to him. The Bible comes back to this teaching time and time again. Here are just a few verses that talk about our justification being 'in him', which is the equivilent to being united in Christ.

"It is because of him (God) that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God- that is our righteousness, holiness and redemption." 1 Corinthians 1:30

"God made him (Christ) who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might became the righteousness of God." 2 Corinthians 5:21

"...that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ-the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith." Philippians 3:8-9

These 3 verses specifically refer to our righteousness before God, that is, our justification, as being rooted in our present union with Christ. It is 'in him' that we have attained a righteousness. We receive this righteousness because we are in him. 

Observation # 3: Justification is Received by Faith Alone

There are two important elements to note in this statement. One, justification is something received, not earned. Second, the means by which it is received is through faith.

If justification is an act of God, whereby he declares us righteous based on the merit of Christ, then justification can only be received by faith. In fact, being a Christian consists of turning from self-justification and turning to justification through faith in Christ. The Apostle Paul states it beautifully in his letter to the church at Galatia,

"yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified." Galatians 2:16

Again, justification has to do with trusting in the work of another. At times this can be a very difficult concept to functionally accept. There are two reasons this is true....

First, as Martin Luther said, our default mode is religion. In other words, our sinful, human tendency is to attempt to justify ourselves through 'doing'. This is religion. If we do x,y,z....then God will justify us. If we perform enough religious rituals, then we are OK with God. If we are nice people then we are righteous. If I get good grades and perform well on the sports field then I'm good. If I try to be moral and be a good parent, then God must accept me. The list is endless, and in some way, shape or form, applies to us all. Our default mode is to try to earn or merit our rightness with God. However, the Gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that we can never do enough ______(fill in the blank) and we can never be good enough, so Jesus lived the perfect life and died for our shortcomings. Therefore, to be accepted by God, to be justified, we must look to Christ in faith, trusting only in Him.

The second reason justification by faith can be a hard reality to accept is that we are constantly falling into sin. Even as Christians, those redeemed from sin, being renewed in the likeness of Christ, we still struggle with sin. It can be hard to believe that we are justified when we keep messing up. It is hard to rest in the work of another and trust that His pardoning favor is sufficient. However, this is exactly what faith is. Fully casting ourselves upon, and trusting in the work of another. Growing as a Christian means to grow in ones faith in Christ's finished work. If our trust is in the fact that we are justified by faith in Christ, then our faith will be as solid as a rock. However, if we are trusting in ourselves, we will have no comfort, peace or rest. Martin Luther used to say that a Christian is able to simultaneously call himself both 'sinner' and 'saint'. Sinner because he still struggles with sin, and still cannot earn salvation. Saint because he is hid in Christ.

Observation # 2: Justification is a Declarative Act

Continuing the 10 observations on the doctrine of justification, we come to our second observation on this concept.

Observations #2: Justification is a declarative or judicial act of God.

It must be understood that justification is a declaration of ones right standing with God. Therefore, justification is not a process by which we become more or less justified. Rather, it occurs as an act. God declares us righteous. One moment we are under His wrath, the next moment, through faith in Jesus, we are forever seen as right. Throughout the entire Bible, the use of the word to justify (both in the hebrew OT and greek NT) has a legal tone to it. It is as we are before a judge, or were under condemnation for our acts. Justification is the announcement that a sinner who was under condemnation is now righteous. He is no longer under condemnation (Rom. 8:1). Justification is a one time, once for all. legal declaration that a guilty sinner is no longer under God's wrath, but is now declared as righteous.

Now, in the later observations we will discuss in more detail the grounds by which we are declared righteous, but for now, I will only say that we are declared as righteous before God not based on our own merit or goodness, but solely on the righteousness of Jesus. As we will see tomorrow, that is why justification must be by faith alone.

Calvin on Assurance

John Calvin writing on the assurance of salvation says,

"He alone is truly a believer who, convinced by a firm conviction that God is a kindly and well-disposed Father toward him, promises himself all things on the basis of his generosity; who, relying upon the promises of divine benevolence toward him, lays hold on an undoubted expectation of salvation.....No man is a believer, I say, except him who, leaning upon the assurance of his salvation, confidently triumphs over the devil and death."

Institutes, III.ii.16.

Good Discussion

Per Kevin DeYoung's blog on the TGC website and Tullian Tchividjian's blog on the TGC website. This are a couple of articles in a very insightful discussion by guys that are much smarter than I am, and guys who love Jesus. I love discussion and learning. Each of these articles has caused me to think about the two wonderful doctrines of justification and sanctification, and of God's incredible grace toward sinners!

Pleading the Work of Another

All thy lovingkindness is in thy Son,

I bring him to thee in the arms of faith,

I urge his saving name as the one who died for me.

I plead his blood to pay my debts of wrong.

Accept his worthiness for my unworthiness

his sinlessness for my transgressions,

his purity for my uncleanness,

his sincerity for my guile,

his truth for my deceits,

his meekness for my pride,

his constancy for my backslidings,

his love for my enmity,

his fullness for my emptiness,

his faithfulness for my treachery,

his obedience for my lawlessness,

his glory for my shame,

his devotedness for my waywardness,

his holy life for my unchaste ways, 

his righteousness for my dead works,

his death for my life

Valley of Vision

200 Proof Grace

Per my friend Dane Ortlund's blog Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology:

Episcopal priest and author Robert Farrar Capon:

The Reformation was a time when people went blind-staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, 200-proof grace--of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture that would convince anyone that God saves us single-handed.

The Word of the Gospel, after all those centuries . . . suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home free even before they started. How foolish, then, they said, how reprehensibly misleading, they said, to take the ministers of that Word of free, unqualified acceptance and slap enforced celibacy on them--to make their lives bear a sticker that said they had gone an extra mile and paid an extra toll. It was simply to hide the light of grace under a bushel of pseudo-law. . . . And for the Reformers, that was a crime. Grace was to be drunk neat: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super-spirituality could be allowed to enter that case.

--Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace (Eerdmans 1997), 109-10

I want to be drinking that 200 proof Gospel Grace

Illustration: The Saving Object of our faith

The following text is found in The Reason for God by Timothy Keller...

"The faith that changes the life and connects to God is best conveyed by the word "trust." Imagine you are on a high cliff and lose your footing and begin to fall. Just beside you as you fall is a branch sticking out of the very edge of the cliff. It is your only hope and it is more than strong enough to support your weight. How can it save you? If your mind is filled with intellectual certainty that the branch can support you, but you don't actually reach out and grab it, you are lost. If your mind is instead filled with doubts and uncertainty that the branch can hold you, but you reach out and grab it anyway, you will be saved. Why? It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. This means you don't have to wait for all doubts and fears to go away to take hold of Christ. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you have to banish all misgivings in order to meet God. That would turn your faith into one more way to be your own Savior. Working on the quality and purity of your commitment would become a way to merit salvation and put God in your debt. It is not the depth and purity of your heart but the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf that saves us."

...

This illustration is gold. Christ is the actor. He is doing the action, the saving itself. I confess how much I treat my faith as a spiritual resume I add to every day. I realize this in how much I think about my faith throughout the day, and not the author of my faith, Jesus. Keller's words resonate so powerfully to me because of how much I think about what I should do, rather than what Christ has done. My desire to want to essentially save myself is only evidence of my unbelief that my Savior will actually save me. May we rest in the security we have in Christ alone, who is certain to save those whom he has called. May we fix our eyes on Jesus, who has given us faith as a gift, and promises to carry us in it for all eternity.

The Object of our faith: Jesus

I often think if I want to know God better, I best pray harder, read scripture longer and do more work. I put the burden on myself to make it happen. However, I believe seeking to grow as a Christian is not the same as supplementing Christ with religiosity. That is a totally different gospel.

The gospel is...

"for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.

(Romans 3:23-27)

....

John Calvin writes about Rom. 4:5 in his Commentary on The Epistle to the Romans...

"Some haves stumbled at this sentence - "his faith is counted for righteousness," and have misapplied it, as though faith were in itself the cause of righteousness, and hence a meritorious act, and not the way and means of attaining righteousness...hence, what is believed, or the object of faith, is what is counted for righteousness."

....

As we seek to grow in our faith, may we not look inwardly to ourselves, but outwardly to Jesus, and what he has done for us all by grace. May we refocus our vision from trying to improve our faith, to the object of our faith itself, Jesus Christ. By humbly clinging to Christ in faith and embracing His saving work on the cross, we are freed from the need to functionally save ourselves by doing more. In other words, may we continue to trust we are completely loved, accepted and justified before God in Christ Jesus already. For now, we are freed to obey, not in order to improve, but in a spirit of thankfulness, because we are united with Christ. In essence, may we allow our finished justification to fuel our daily sanctification.

The verdict is already in...may we grow in this truth as we look to Christ for everything.