Yesterday Steve Camp at The Cross Church (@thecrosschurch) put out this tweet:
Christian, your justification lies in His work, not your performance. Until you grasp that, the roller coaster never ends.
You can’t say it much better than that. That’s Romans 3:21-31. Justification is the heart of the Gospel. That is the issue that drove Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
So why are we stuck on this roller coaster of self-improvement that tells us we aren’t good enough? Satan’s lie that says we have to try harder to please God.
We can thank Charles Finney and his legacy for much of what we see in the Church today. Michael Horton wrote about The Legacy of Charles Finney in Modern Reformation magazine. He wrote:
Finney believed that God demanded absolute perfection, but instead of that leading him to seek his perfect righteousness in Christ, he concluded that
…full present obedience is a condition of justification. But again, to the question, can man be justified while sin remains in him? Surely he cannot, either upon legal or gospel principles, unless the law be repealed…But can he be pardoned and accepted, and justified, in the gospel sense, while sin, any degree of sin, remains in him? Certainly not (p. 57).
Let’s get off the roller coaster. Join us Saturday night as we look deeper into the issue of Law and Gospel.
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