HIS STEPS TO YOU AND US
In Christ separated Adam/us is undone and you/and we have been made one with God in Christ.
REPENTANCE
The cross and its atonement is prior to your life. You are forgiven before you repent. Repentance is coming to the cross in abandonment of all forms of self-worthiness to accept the union with God and worthiness that is already yours in Christ. Christ is your worthiness. Baptism illustrated this change of being from death to life in Christ.
YOU ARE EARNED BY CHRIST
We cannot earn Christ. We do not need to. He has earned us with His body and blood. Don’t submit to a pernicious kind of self-salvation in which you earn acceptance with Christ. You don’t. You are already accepted. Live in this union and you will come to like God and not fear God in a morbid sense. You will come to like yourself because you will absorb the reality that God likes you and loves you for yourself as demonstrated by His cross for you. Now He lives for you and to be you as the real you that you are in God.
REAL LOVE
Unconditional love is not always enjoyed in the human sphere. But is ours in fullness in Christ. Feet of clay we may have, but our inheritance is what theologians call the vicarious humanity of Christ. Jesus is the ‘stand in’ for us which means that He is us. If you are an older person like me, you may have regrets about your life and even shudder at some of the things you did or neglected to do. Agree with Christ that He is your life; that His grace is more than sufficient for you and that you are accepted, loved and liked in Him by God and by heaven. Jesus is joy and comfort.
VERIFIED LOVE
God’s love is real. “In refusing to spare his dear Son but in delivering him up in atoning sacrifice for us all, God the Father reveals that he loves us with the very Love which he bears to himself, and that with Jesus Christ he freely gives us all things. If God is for us in this way what can come between us? And in giving us his one Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son and sheds abroad in our hearts the very Love which God himself is, God reveals that there is nothing that can ever separate us from him in his Love.” (1)
UNCERTAINTY UNDONE
In living from Christ in the manner that He is our life, we take on the truth about God and ab0ut ourselves that undoes the lies of Satan. These are the lies that have been absorbed to be practised in self-effort religion and spread about by latter-day money-changers. Careers have been made by offering ‘their way’ as a substitute for the One Living Way that is Christ our life.
Drive the money-changers out of your life by agreeing with the sovereignty of Jesus and His life as yours.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 162). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.