A Living Sacrifice

Here is a great quote from chapter two of The Bookends of the Christian Life. It goes along very well with what we considered this last Sunday morning from the book of Romans.

For many of us, our initial encounter with the gospel when we first trusted Christ occurred many years ago and is now a distant memory. Furthermore, the book of Romans may now be overly familiar to us; it just doesn’t generate the same excitement it surely generated among the Roman believers when it was first read in their churches. The Christian life may now be more of a duty than a joyous response to the gospel. Consequently we may not experience the motivating power of the gospel.

That’s why we need to intentionally bathe our minds and hearts in the gospel every day. Remember, we need the gospel not only as a door into an initial saving relationship with Christ, but also as the first bookend to keep our daily lives from becoming a performance treadmill. As we rely on Christ’s righteousness in this manner, far from leading to a license to sin, it actually motivates us to deal with the sin we see in our lives by presenting our bodies as living sacrifices to God.

Two Thoughts on Justification from Bookends

Not too long ago I got my hands on a good little book titled “The Bookends of the Christian Life (You can find it here or here or in my office). I thought I’d share a few thoughts from the book that have been a challenge and encouragement to me. Here are two quotes from the first chapter that are worth thinking about.

There’s an old play on the word justified: “just-as-if-I’d never sinned.” But here’s another way of saying it: “just-as-if-I’d always obeyed.” Both are true. The first refers to the transfer of our moral debt to Christ so we’re left with a “clean” ledger, just as if we’d never sinned. The second tells us our ledger is now filled with the perfect righteousness of Christ, so it’s just as if we’d always obeyed. That’s why we can come confidently into the very presence of God. ~pg. 26

When talking about Galatians 2:20 (I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.) the authors say this:

For Paul, justification was not only a past event; it was also a daily, present reality. So every day of his life, by faith in Christ, Paul realized he stood righteous in the sight of God–he was counted righteous and accepted by God as righteous–because of the perfectly obedient life and death Christ provided for him. He stood solely on the rock-solid righteousness of Christ alone. ~p. 29