What is Your Only Comfort in Life and in Death?

How would you answer that question?  Check out this video at: http://youtu.be/BJ2-Bw0Rd54

The Battle Against Sin

Christianity is not a list of pre-packaged rules.  D.A. Carson explains that sometimes, Christian pastors get this wrong.  Perhaps we try to discern signs of decay in the culture, and if we are not careful we will begin to say, “Don’t do that.  Do this instead!”  This type of thinking gives the impression that we can fix things by imposing a fresh set of rules—so you can show how righteous, good, and disciplined you are if you adopt all of these rules in your life.

The fundamental Christian motivation is not adherence to more rules.  Rather, Ephesians 4:32 says, “forgive each other as God in Christ has forgiven you.”  God’s Spirit transforms us by bringing us back to the cross so that all of our morality is first and foremost a function of gratitude to God for what Christ has already done.  If you begin to see just how much you were forgiven by what Christ did on the cross, how on earth can you possibly nurture bitterness toward others?  Because we have received so much love from God through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus, how can we not also go forth and freely and impartially love others (Ephesians 5:1-2)?  The gospel justifies us and the gospel sanctifies us. 

And yet we are painfully aware of our continual battle with sin, for we are simultaneously justified yet sinful.  John Newton talked about this reality.  Newton, who lived from 1725 to 1807, was once a slave trader who estimated he transported twenty-thousand slaves across the Atlantic.  He said that in his nightmares he could still hear them scream.  At some point in his life he became a Christian and then a pastor.  Near the end of his earthly pilgrimage, Newton said:

“I am not what I ought to be—ah, how imperfect and deficient!  I am not what I wish to be—I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good!  I am not what I hope to be—soon, soon, shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection.  Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”

If you are interested in talking more about “the battle against sin,” you are invited to come and join us for our next Bible study, which takes place tonight (Wednesday, August 24) from 6:30 to 8 PM.  We meet at 9257 Amsden Way in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. 

The God Who Declares the Guilty Just

D.A. Carson writes: At a certain level, the title above almost seems perverse.  The following is how we would prefer that things work:

Members of the jury, I am not asking for mercy or pardon.  I want justice.  I am demanding full acquittal.  Yes, I committed the murder of which I am accused.  But I am not guilty.  Members of the jury, you must consider all my good deeds—not merely as mitigating circumstances but as reason for exonerating me.  The goodness of my other deeds outweighs the crime I committed.  My good deeds require a “not guilty” verdict.  If justice is to be done, you must find me innocent.

We grin as we read the paragraph above because the argument is so ridiculous.  Yet suddenly we see that an approach to God that depends finally on our balancing of good deeds and bad deeds must be no less ridiculous.  For this is the lamest of all forms of self-justification—yet this is the case we want to make before God.  This argument is not a plea for leniency; rather, it is a bold assertion of innocence.  It assumes that guilt is cancelled by good deeds.  God must acquit us and declare us “not guilty” because we have done enough compensating good things.  This is self-justification.  And it is no more believable before the bar of God’s justice than it would be in a contemporary court.

So how should we think that God looks at things, this God who is himself spectacularly holy and who does not see our good deeds as things that are weighed in a balance against bad deeds but sees even this futile effort at self-justification as one more example of our moral defiance against him?  What is the Bible’s solution?  God does not pretend that good deeds make up for bad deeds.  Rather, he has found a way to declare the guilty just—and retain his integrity while doing it.  Instead of self-justification, he finds a way to justify us.

Do you want to know where God’s justice is most powerfully demonstrated?  On the cross.  Do you want to know where God’s love is most powerfully demonstrated?  On the cross.  There Jesus, the God-man, bore hell itself, and God did this both to be just and to be the one who declares just those who have faith in him.  God views the Christian through the lens of Jesus, who absorbed the white-hot wrath of God that we deserve.  Your sin is now viewed as his, and he has paid for it.  And his righteousness, which he earned by perfectly obeying God's law, is now viewed as yours (2 Corinthians 5:21).  God looks at you and declares you to be just, not because you are just (you are guilty, as Romans 1:18-3:20 says) but because he has set forth his Son to be the propitiation (wrath-appeasing sacrifice) for your sins (Romans 3:21-31).

If you are interested in talking more about “the cross of Jesus,” you are invited to come and join us for our next Bible study, which takes place tomorrow night (Wednesday, August 10) from 6:30 to 8 PM.  We meet at 9257 Amsden Way in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.