Kedo Peseyie
I look back at the early years of my Christian life and realise that I actually lived in uncertainties and with fear of being rejected by God. I considered my Christian life as a performance before God. The amount of grace and forgiveness I’d receive depended on how well I performed before the Lord, or so I thought. The emphasis was on Romans 3:23 - Sin. But now I wonder how I missed the next important verse: v-24 - justification by grace. I did know something about the doctrine of justification by grace, but to a sinner like me it sounded too good to be true. I never believed it, until now.
So what is justification? “Justification is the judicial act of God pardoning sinners, accepting them as JUST, and so putting PERMANENTLY RIGHT their previously estranged relationship with himself.”-J.I. Packer. Justification is not an act done by us, nor is it something that happens inside of us. But it is an act done by God outside of us: it is something that happens inside the heart of God. It means “to declare righteous”, “to acquit”, the opposite of “condemn.” God declares us righteous and in his heart He resolves to love righteous people. So at this point, our feelings—whether we fell happy, sad, sinful, clean, etc-do not matter. Take the example of a convict in jail. One day the jail warden comes and tells him, “today I forgive all the crimes you have committed and declare you righteous and you are now free. Go and commit no more crime.” The convict is now forgiven and freed with no strings attached.
This is what God did with us. It’s God’s decision, not ours. Our sinfulness does not hinder justification. Our righteousness (which is like filthy rags before God) does not help justification. But it is God’s grace alone. We are declared righteous because of what Jesus Christ did for us on the Cross. And a righteous person does not continue to sin. Even is he does, he knows grace is always available.
Justification is not strictly a one-time-event as some say. It is an act of God that happens every time a person genuinely repents and seeks Gods forgiveness.
It is important that we seek to understand the concept of “righteousness”, or “righteous” within the framework of the doctrine of Justification by faith. I believe that “righteousness” is a natural by-product of a salvation that comes purely by faith through grace. Nobody deserved salvation with all the evil we have fallen in. But Christ died for us and declared us righteous on the basis of His blood which was shed for us.
But today there are those among us who claim they we can please God enough by what we are and what we do that God should be obligated to grant us salvation. They claim to be tough guys who can work their own way to heaven. They undermine the finished work Jesus Christ on the cross and elevate the dignity of the human being to a status that was never meant to be. Such an attempt to praise the achievements and dignity of the human being by undermining the very source of this dignity can surely bring about lot of hurt and confusion. Such kind of a shallow humanism that emphasises on effort, traditionalism and legalism can lead to unwanted results, some of which we are already seeing in some of our churches. Today the modern society is trying to elevate the status and dignity of the human being but they have no idea how to do it because they have lost the truth that man is created in God’s own image and was bought by God’s own blood.
I have come across a lot of people who have been hurt in some way or the other by a church that refuses to believe that sinners can feel welcome in the church too. One of the reasons why many youths and students in Kohima don’t attend any church is because they don’t feel welcome there. Many feel they don’t have proper clothes to make themselves acceptable there. They don’t feel “CLEAN ENOUGH” to come to church. Many of us church people may not want to admit this truth. But it is there and it is true. We may choose to look the other way today. But if tomorrow we turn back to look again we may find our pews empty, no one left to listen to our concept of “righteousness.”
Where did they get the idea that one has to be “clean enough” to come to a church? Or that one should wear formal clothes to be acceptable in a church? Who made them feel unwelcome? It’s church people—you and I, with all our traditionalism. Who else!! Forgive me, but the way I see it, some churches are just surviving to prove that they are surviving as an institution. If the church is an institution, it is an institution of Grace.
There are some writers in our society who cannot come to terms with the doctrine of justification: salvation by grace through faith. I do not know whether it is because they do not understand it, or because they do understand and think it is too good to be true, and therefore seek to disprove it. Perhaps, they have believed in humanism and the sufficiency of human efforts for so long that they cannot understand something that work its way down from top to bottom. But that is what Christianity is about: the only religion where God came down looking for lost humanity.
So how does this doctrine apply to my Christian life?
Though many Christians know this fact, they live their Christian lives regretting over past sins. Whenever something about their past comes up, they turn to the defensive and become apologetic. God wants us to forget the past and move on with our lives. He wants us to develop a “divine forgetfulness” in dealing with the past unpleasant things that can hinder our spiritual progress. We can now respond to the past with confidence and declare: “Though my past was ugly, it does not bother now. God has forgiven me and declared me righteous. He does not hold my sins against me anymore, in fact He has forgotten my sins and wants me to move on to greater heights”. We don’t have to feel condemned because of sin (Romans 8:1). God sees us and treats us as righteous people. Assurance of forgiveness and assurance of salvation is not based on external human acts, but is based on “something that happens inside the heart of God”.
Now I realise that Justification is vitally important for growth in Christian life. I no longer worry about how well I perform before the Lord. But now there is a deep and solid assurance and joy in knowing that God has declared me righteous and accepted me as His child even before a single good word crossed my lips or my hands performed a kind deed. To me this is the best news in my entire Christian life so far. It is the basis for my assurance in God.
