A reflective poem

Justified I Stand 

Once again my heart confound, 

Didst Christ wear that blood-soaked crown, 

And upon his righteous life laid down, 

Was it I that was there found

To wear his righteous gown? 

Surely it is not I, 

By the law a wretch condemned to die! 

Yet with faith the gift of which I cry, 

“Not by works shall I try

to appease the God of earth and sky.” 

Within thy word is revealed

Once again that balm that healed, 

Upon my heart the layers peeled

Till once again my heart hath feeled, 

The justifying grace before concealed. 

Yes, guilty I before the Judge did stand, 

But God’s wrath for me on Christ did land, 

And from his Father the nail that pierced his hand

Has brought redemption through this Son of Man; 

Here now by faith in him, justified I stand. 

We’re a people who look back

In Psalm 52, David expresses his hope in God’s unending love: “The steadfast love of God endures all the day” (v. 1). When threatened by violent enemies, his confidence for his future welfare is not placed in his own hands, and it is not left in the hands of others—no, David’s confidence is in the fact that God will always work for His good, to satisfy him in God. 

Perhaps more surprisingly, however, is the fact that David’s hope for future blessing from God is ultimately rooted in the past. David is sure about the future because God has secured it in the past. So he writes:

“I will thank you forever because you have done it” (v. 9). 

This is the pattern for a Christian’s hope today. I have hope (unbreakable confidence) that God will work for my joy and satisfaction in God when I wake up on mornings like today because of the finished work of Jesus. Salvation has been accomplished at the cross. Jesus didn’t pay for the possibility of my joy with His own blood—no, He purchased my eternal satisfaction in God once for all by His life and death.

I’m savoring and trying to marinate my heart in this truth, expressed by John Stott in The Cross of Christ as he quotes James Denney: 

“The work of reconciliation [of making peace between God and man], in the sense of the New Testament, is a work which is finished, and which we must conceive to be finished, before the gospel is preached… Reconciliation… is not something which is being done; it is something which is done. No doubt there is a work of Christ which is in process, but it has as its basis a finished work of Christ” (p. 196).

Stirring it is to stop and ponder that everything God is doing in me, today, and in my life, is happening because I have been reconciled to God at the Cross. Christ meant what He said when He cried, “It is finished!” 

Hark the voice of love and mercy, 

Sounds aloud from Calvary! 

See, it rends the rocks asunder, 

Shakes the earth and veils the sky!

“It is finished, it is finished,” 

Hear the dying Savior cry. 

“It is finished,” O what pleasure,

Do these charming words afford. 

Heavenly blessings, without measure, 

Flow to us from Christ the Lord.

 

The Greatest News in the World

For those who consider themselves as nothing, renouncing every form of selfishness and pride, who mourn for their sin, who consider others of more importance, and for those who feel the hunger pains of yearning to be made into the image of the holy God and unlike the character of our indwelling sin (Matt. 5:3-6), this is the best news in the world. It is, as Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes, the heart of the gospel:

“To hunger and thirst really means to be desperate, to be starving, to feel life is ebbing out, to realize my urgent need of help… Let us look briefly at what is promised to those who are like that… ‘They shall be filled’, they shall be given what they desire. The whole gospel is there. That is where the gospel of grace comes in; it is entirely the gift of God. You will never fill yourself with righteousness, you will never find blessedness apart from Him. To obtain this, ‘all the fitness He requireth, is to see your need of Him’, nothing more” (Sermon on the Mount, p. 68).

ML-J goes on about the reality of justification in the life of one such believer:

“If you believe on that cross He was dying for you and for your sin, you have been forgiven; you have no need to ask for forgiveness, you have been forgiven… the righteousness of Christ is imputed to you. God looks at you in the righteousness of Christ and He no longer sees the sin. He sees you as a sinner whom He has forgiven… The Christian, therefore, should always be a man who knows that his sins are forgiven. He should not be seeking it, he should know that he has it, that he is justified in Christ freely by the grace of God, that he stands righteous at this moment in the presence of the Father” (Sermon on the Mount, p. 69). 

This blessed truth—that we are justified in Christ apart from anything we do—is the freedom of the Christian to pursue holiness, knowing that it is freely given to him. He pursues it not as a wage, but as a gift. 

“The Christian is one who at one and the same time is hungering and thirsting, and yet he is filled. And the more he is filled the more he hungers and thirsts. That is the blessedness of this Christian life” (Ibid, p. 70).