Justification

Last week we looked at something called “The Performance Trap” in which we saw how the following simple lie can get a grip on our lives and rob us of the joy and freedom we can have in Christ. This is the lie:

I must meet certain standards to feel good about myself.

We saw how this leads to the fear of failure in our lives, and then discussed what this fear can do to us. We looked at just three possible outcomes, perfectionism, addictions and loss of identity. Today we are going to talk about how God deals with this big lie. His answer is something theologians call “Justification”.

Justification

This is a major theological principle, it can be made as complex as one wants to make it, and we are going to go into a little detail about it in a moment. First though I want to give you a way of remembering what it is basically about.

Justification means that God has made things “just as if I had never sinned”.

Now we are going to construct an understanding of what “justification” is from the Scriptures and following that we will look at how it applies to us in the context of the “Performance Trap”.

I’ll start with a definition of “justification”:

Justification is a divine act of grace whereby an infinitely Holy God judicially declares a believing sinner to be righteous and acceptable before Him.

Let us start from the beginning. When mankind was created, they were perfect, and then sin entered the world through the action of disobedience of Adam and Eve. They became sinners, as did all of those who followed. What is sin? (Open discussion) Let’s see how the Bible defines sin, turn to 1 Jn 3:4:

Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. NASU

Sin is therefore the act of disobedience to God by breaking of His law. Just so that we know some basic truths about sin, let’s look at a couple of passages in Romans, Rom 3:23 and 6:23(a):

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. NASU

For the wages of sin is death. NASU

So here is the situation. Adam and Eve have messed up, they have sinned and as a result we have all sinned, and we are going to die physically and spiritually as a result of it. The enemy is rejoicing, as he believes he has foiled God’s design and intention to have eternal fellowship with mankind who were created to freely love Him. But God has a plan!

Mankind has fallen and now cannot live with God in what we call “right standing” and the Bible calls righteousness. No matter how we come to Him, we will always fall short of the standard of perfect Holiness required to live with Him. In Isaiah 64:6 God says our righteous deeds, meaning righteous in our eyes, are like “filthy rags” to Him, and I picture that as being like something we wear that covers up our uncleanness. The Bible tells us in several places what God is going to do about our unrighteousness, let’s look at one of them, Rev 19:11:

And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war. NASU

All unrighteousness, which is a result of our sin, will be judged. In fact God will wage war against all that is unrighteous. We all know the outcome of this future war, all that is unrighteous and unholy will be judged and thrown into the eternally burning fire, all that is holy and righteous will be saved. The question is, how does God deal with mankind so as to turn them from being unrighteous to righteous? How does He save us all from the fire, because He knows that we cannot do it for ourselves?

He decides to do it for us, how does John 3:16 put it?

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. NASU

God Himself comes here and shows us His righteousness, God the Father allows His son to be murdered by us, all of mankind, and to receive judgment as a man. How does this murder of Jesus get mankind from being unrighteous to righteous and remove the consequences of sin from our lives? First we must be sure that this is actually what happens, let us look a 1 Jn 1:5-10:

This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. NASU

In this passage the Apostle John tells us that the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. That is all sin, meaning past, present and future. It also tells us that these sins are forgiven, resulting in us owing God nothing, and further says that we are cleansed from all unrighteousness, also meaning past, present and future. But notice that there is a condition! This is all conditional on and hinges around us “walking in the light”. Walking in the light is Bible talk for being saved. So how do we get saved? The complete answer is found by combining Rom 10:9 and Eph 2:8-9:

If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; NASU

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. NASU

When a person confesses Jesus as Lord, the outward action, and believes in their heart that He is risen from the dead, an inward action, they are saved. The Ephesians passage then tells us that at that moment an act of grace, based on the faith shown in our outward and inward actions, occurs. Hence the phrase “saved by grace through faith”.

This is also the moment of Justification. Let us see what the Scripture tells us here, look at Rom 5:1-2:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God. NASU

It says we are justified, by an act of God’s grace through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now let us see what we said the definition of justification is:

Justification is a divine act of grace whereby an infinitely Holy God judicially declares a believing sinner to be righteous and acceptable before Him.

God performs this act of grace by imputing Jesus righteousness to us. Jesus, as the man, is right with God, and since we have accepted Him, He will stand in our place. When God looks toward our unrighteousness, all He sees is the perfect righteousness of Jesus, and he judges us as acceptable.

Before we move on to application of this to our study we must state a couple of things.

· Our actual sins are not taken away by this action, nor are their earthly consequences. The full effect of justification happens at the first judgment.
· Our actual unrighteousness is not removed either, we don’t become actually fully right with God until we pass from this life. Until that time we are said to be positionally right with God.

This is a good time for a break in my teaching to open the floor for questions.

Now we come to the practical side of justification. How do we apply this wonderful spiritual stuff to our lives today? We’ll first look at the big lie that has been called the performance trap; can you remember what it is?

I must meet certain standards to feel good about myself

The truth is that we can never meet the standard of complete and perfect obedience to God’s laws, which is the standard that is necessary to meet for entrance into eternal life. This is the big lie that sucks so many of our fellow Americans into sure eternal death. We often hear it expressed this way, “I’m a good person, and that is why I’ll go to Heaven”.

The truth is that once we are saved by grace through faith, “certain standards” or performance is irrelevant in the context of getting into heaven because of justification. Once we absorb this as a core belief of our Christianity we can become freed from linking performance to feeling good about ourselves. Some of us, however, carry around some barriers to absorbing this as a core belief, the book lists four.

· Addiction to the approval of others. We’ll be looking at this in detail next week.
· Sense of hopelessness. Becoming and living as a passive victim, I sometimes think this is an addiction too.
· Desire to live by some formula. This is a person who has to have rules about everything to feel okay in life.
· Controlling nature. Being a control freak is a major barrier to overcoming the “performance trap” lie.

I’m only going to talk about the barrier of being a control freak this morning. The book says this, and I have to admit this made me smile as I read it!

Most of us have a priority system that goes something like this, air, water, food, control.

I think the author was talking about me. Our control freak nature is pictured here, not as a character defect (which it is!), but as a vital thing that we need to sustain our life. When a person’s need to control gets that strong they are controlled by it. This person finds it so hard to let go of control that they will not let Christ into their lives. In fact I see this in unsaved people, people who even when they have heard the gospel and understand it will not accept Christ because they will have to hand over control. This is a person that feels secure in their own abilities, but it is a false security, and all of them will have to deal with it at some point. Jesus talks about this in this parable which is found in Lk 12:16-21:

And He told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man was very productive. And he began reasoning to himself, saying, 'What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry."' But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?' So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God. NASU

This parable is normally used in the context of identifying greed and hoarding as foolishness, but I want us to understand that it is a good example of a control freak at work. This person actually said, and I’m going to paraphrase here, “Soul, you are in so much control of your life that no one and nothing can bring you down, go have a good time, and do your own thing”. Here the control freak has so absorbed the lie about feeling good through meeting certain standards that he shuts out God.

I used this parable so demonstrate that being a controlling person is such a character flaw that it can even keep a person out of heaven. In our lives, being a control freak is a barrier to spiritual growth. It gets in the way of healthy relationships with those around us and with God. In the context of our lesson, our internal need to control may stop us from enjoying the upside of the justification that Jesus has provided for us. This upside is the belief that we don’t have to succumb to being driven by performance in order to feel okay.

That is where I am going to finish today. Chapter four has a section at the end of it on why we ought to be obedient to God. We didn’t have time today to cover it, but it is worth reading and rereading.

Next week we are going to cover the “Approval Addict”, which is chapter 5 in the book.