The past few days my thinking has been focused on all that Jesus is to me. Because of Jesus, I have a new family and the ultimate friend. Today I’m reflecting on the beautiful gift of justification that is available because of Jesus. Justification is the act of paying the debt of sin that you and I owe.
In Romans 3:23, it is spelled out clearly that we are all guilty of sin. Since Adam and Eve sinned in the garden all mankind has been cursed with the sin nature. God is a holy God and cannot be in the presence of sin. We have all fallen short or missed the mark required to be in His presence. The only remedy for us to be accepted by God was for our sin debt to be paid.
Rom 3:23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.
How do you pay a debt when you have no way of meeting the requirement? The answer is we can’t. Someone must pay it for us. We are spiritually bankrupt! Isaiah 64:6 teaches us that our righteousness is like filthy rags, worthless in their state of filth. However, if you wash those rags with something powerful enough to remove the stains, they become useable again. That is what Jesus did for us! He the perfect one stepped out of Heaven and gave His righteousness to all who would believe, repent, and place their faith in Him. He cleaned us up and made us presentable to the Father.
Isaiah 64:6a “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.
When God looks at those who have received Jesus as the payment for their sins, He does not see their sin, but He sees the righteous blood of His Son covering them. When we accept what Jesus did for us, we have peace with God. We become justified! When I teach kids about justification, I break it down to its simplistic definition. Because of Jesus, God sees me just-as-if-I-had never sinned.
Romans 5:1 “Therefore being justified by faith; we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”
We are free from the penalty of sin, and we are free from the power of sin. It no longer has the power to control us. We obtained our justification as a free gift. We could do nothing to merit our justification and we had nothing by which we could buy it.
Romans 3:24 “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:”
The greatest gift we could ever receive was provided by Jesus. All because of His desire to please the Father, all because of His love for us, and all because of the holiness of God, Jesus makes it possible for us to be justified.
This gift can never be fully appreciated or understood until we enter into eternal life in Heaven. We can dream about it, meditate on it, and study what the Bible says about it, but we can’t truly grasp perfection because everything we’ve ever known has been affected by sin. Hallelujah, for our justification provided by Jesus!
