Getting older, as elderly folks often say with a smile, is not for sissies. So too the Christian life: it’s no joke. It’s no small thing to carry a cross in pursuit of the celestial city. To get there, we need to keep glorious biblical truth ever before our eyes. Toward that end, following on this post on functional works-righteousness, here are nine hope-giving truths about the Christian life as you put on the armor of God and venture into this wild world (Eph. 6:10-20).
First, we have been loved before the foundation of the earth. God did not recently start loving you as a believer. If you are a Christian, you were elected in Christ before all time by the loving decree of God the Father (Eph. 1:3-14). You did not write your name in the Lamb’s book of life; God himself wrote your name there in ink that no one can scratch away, in lettering that will never fade with time. This is what Revelation 13:8 teaches us: the names of every believer were “written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.”
This means that you did not cause God to love you, and you will not cause God to keep loving you. As Sinclair Ferguson has captured, God has always loved you, loves you now, and always will love you. Jeremiah 31:3b unfolds this wonderful truth: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.” God doesn’t love us because we’re lovely or because we loved him. Hear 1 John 4:19 afresh: “We love because he first loved us.” It’s plain as day, Christian. God loves you, always has loved you, and always will love you.
Second, there is now no fear in our relationship with God. This isn’t me talking; this is 1 John 4:18 ministering powerful truth to us. “There is no fear in love,” John writes, “but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” The only “fear” the believer has regarding God is reverential adoration driven by the awesome majesty and cosmos-shaking love of God (2 Cor. 7:15 as one example). There is not 0.0000000000000000001% fear of the wrath of God for the Christian. Not even a tiny remaining sliver. It’s all gone.
The “fear” that the Christian has toward God is—again—reverential adoration. This is not fear that trembles under threat of searing, lashing punishment. This is fear that manifests in adoring and obedient pursuit of God, all of it powered by the grace of God. Though God is wholly other, God has drawn near to us to fulfill the purpose of his electing grace. By the Father’s loving initiative, we have been decisively rescued from the kingdom of darkness through the realized work of Christ and the gift of justifying faith.
So Colossians 1:13–14 tells us in no uncertain terms: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” We’re not hoping for this transfer; this transfer has been accomplished. It’s done. It’s over. There’s not so much as a solitary toenail of ours that remains in the “domain of darkness” (13); like Joseph, we’ve been transferred out of the dungeon of wrathful despair, and we’re never going back.
Third, we no longer bear the burden of our sins. As a Christian, all your burden HAS BEEN BORNE ON THE TREE. You are not carrying it; it's not on your shoulders. It's on the infinitely strong shoulders of the warrior-savior, Christ Jesus. He has done the work; he has borne the burden. See this incredible verse and what it assures you of: "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed" (1 Peter 2:24).
Christian, in terms of your salvific burden—your sin especially—the simple truth is this: you don't bear it. It’s gone. The scapegoat took that sin far into the wilderness, and you couldn’t find that stinking, festering body of sin if you tried. God has dealt with it decisively, perfectly, and eternally through the death of his Son (Hebrews 11:14). You don’t walk through life with a 100-pound weight on your shoulders; your call is instead to live in the joyful rest that has been won by the finished work of Christ (Matthew 11:25-30). That rest will come to perfect fruition in the age to come, but it is yours now, in the present, and no one can take it from you.
Fourth, we have complete peace with God. It’s not partial peace; it’s total peace as Paul says: "...since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:1). When we sin, we do distance ourselves from God’s goodness, and we can surely enter into a disordered state of our own making. But in salvific and positional terms, the biblical fact stands: our peace is secured and unlosable.
This peace is not dependent on you and your effort; this peace is, like justifying faith itself, the gift of God. It's not that you made peace with God, and you keep peace with God; it's that God made peace with you and God will keep peace with you. You're not at war with God, believer; you're at peace with God, and he will never go to war against you. We’re always in God’s hands, and those hands will never strike us or batter us.
Fifth, the believer in Christ is not condemned, will not be condemned, and cannot be condemned. Write this verse on every wall in your house or apartment if you must: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Repeat it to yourself by the hour if you have slipped into thinking that you as a believer can be condemned and possibly will be condemned. I repeat myself: Satan cannot condemn you, you cannot condemn you, and God will not condemn you.
Do we watch ourselves carefully and closely? Definitely we do (1 Tim. 4:16). But our status as uncondemned, innocent, and righteous is not a minor truth that we should only occasionally think and talk about. We should celebrate this fact every day we live. We should wake up in the morning with praise to God on our lips due to this otherworldly reality.
At the practical level, this frees us to stop living in fear and misery (this very day!), and to start living in joy and gratitude (this very day!). It’s not that it’s highly unlikely that you will suffer condemnation; it’s that, as I have said, you cannot suffer condemnation, because the Father cannot re-crucify his Son, and he cannot re-justify you by re-giving you saving faith. He already gave you all that. The work is finished.
Sixth, we’re not under law but under grace. The ministry given to the church in the New Covenant era is not the ministry of law. The law came through Moses; the law concretizes the moral perfection of God, and is good. We learn a great deal from it. But having noted this, the law cannot and does not save. This is why the New Covenant is a BETTER COVENANT (Hebrews 7:22); the ministry given to the church in the New Covenant era is the ministry of grace. Grace has come through Christ. These glorious truths are taught in passages like John 1, 2 Corinthians 3, and Hebrews 7.
To put a point on it, you're not under Moses, Christian--that era is over. It's done. It's concluded. It's passed by. It lies in the grave alongside the bones of Moses. The transition from Moses has already occurred, and no one can turn the clock back. In this era, we Christians are under Christ. This is not just marginally better; this is way better! Here is why it is so, so much better: because all the promises of the Old Covenant are realized in the person and work of the Son of God whose blood is the blood of the New Covenant. Every promise is “yes” and “amen” in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20). Not a lot of them; every one of them. All roads in Scripture run to and through Calvary.
This in turn signals for you and me that our whole life is lived in the overflow and outpouring of divine grace and divine mercy, and this never ends and never stops. We’re in the era of realized promises, of gospel advancement, of kingdom conquering, of the poured-out Holy Spirit. Stop living as if you’re under law, believer, when you’re under grace. By all means: stop!
Seventh, the foundation for godly living is not abject terror of God and God's law. All God's teaching and moral truth is good and good for us, definitely. Further, as we noted earlier, we never lose our sense of the majesty and transcendence and awesomeness of God. God never becomes a buddy to us akin to any other person we like. No way! In this way we always "fear" God, but this is the fear of reverent adoration, not the fear of wrathful abandonment. That cannot happen and will not happen for the Christian.
Again, the foundation for godly living is the mercy and grace purchased for us by Christ in his death and resurrection that now rushes out from heaven and is applied to us by the Spirit such that we are exhilaratingly conformed to Christ's own image (2 Cor. 3:18). Sanctification, then, is not a matter of quaking in God's presence; sanctification is a matter first and foremost of recognizing all that the Father has done to bless us and help us and change us.
The predominant language of sanctification, then, is not the following:
You’re a worthless piece of garbage, and you’ve gotta get it together!
You fail and fail and fail and fail—your whole Christian life is an exercise in failure.
Why can’t you just get it together and stop being such an ungrateful idiot?
You might want to think you’re uncondemned, but you’re living right over the precipice of disaster.
Sin is awful—so just stop sinning, you stupid wretch.
This is the language of hellish condemnation. I know that’s strong, but it’s true. This is not how grace-driven preachers, teachers, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, college students, children, and everyone in between talks. The following is the language of grace-driven sanctification, and we should all learn to speak it:
I am a great sinner, but Christ is a much greater Savior.
I do stumble daily, but through the Spirit, I’m becoming more and more like Christ.
I don’t deserve a shred of grace, but God is doing a good work in me, and I’m so encouraged and thankful that he is.
Though God should by rights have cast me out, he never has and he never will.
By his own will and wisdom, God loves me with an everlasting love.
My performance is never what it should be, but God is changing me and helping me.
Every day I get things wrong, but God’s forgiveness is deeper than the ocean.
When I read about biblical people who commit real sin against God, I don’t look down on them; I see myself, but even more than that, I see a God who is incredibly patient and persevering with his people.
Here’s hoping, by much prayer, we can all learn to speak the language of grace-driven sanctification.
Eighth, as a Christian your standing with God does not rise or fall. Believer, your quiet time, service to the church, and care for loved ones does not increase your justification, just as your sin and stumbling does not decrease your justification. All this is good and right and should happen in your life. Further, if you’re flagging or fading or drifting (as we all will and do, even in small ways), we need to repent and confess and come back to God.
But your status with God is not dependent on you. It’s likely that at times you will slip into the defeatist mindset of basing the nature of your Christian walk on your own conduct. You might even think, as I have alluded to, that your behavior makes God love you (or not love you). As I have said elsewhere, such performance of "acts of penance" owes to systems of man-centered salvation like the false Catholic gospel, not the true biblical gospel.
Your conduct matters, and all of us must claim God's daily power so that we do not grieve the Holy Spirit (Eph. 4:30). We want to pursue God with zeal and alacrity (2 Tim. 1:6)! We want to crucify the flesh, and we should and must seek this (Gal. 5:24). But in all this, we will not un-justify ourselves by sin, nor can we re-justify ourselves with good works. Instead, all our godly thoughts, desires, actions, and prayers ascend to heaven as a fragrant offering and sacrifice of love to God (Eph. 5:2). None of this appeases a God who is raging against the Christian; all of this pleases, blesses, and even delights the God who has loved us with an everlasting love (Jer. 31:3). All of the power for such mortification of sin comes from God, further; none of it comes from us.
Ninth, all this means that the Christian life is a life of joy. We hear Romans 15:13 on this count: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” Paul doesn’t want Christians to abound in misery and fear and burden-bearing; he wants the church to be filled with “all joy and peace in believing.” When this is occurring, the church is experiencing the “power of the Holy Spirit” and will “abound in hope.”
To repeat, the Christian life is not a life of terror, abject fear, failure, misery, burden-bearing, and the ministry of the law. The Christian life is the ministry of grace, and that means that it is full to overflowing with the peace, kindness, forgiveness, joy, hope, blessing, mercy, tenderness, compassion, and transformation of God.
This has powerful practical effect. It entails that we should mark carefully what version of the Christian life we live. I urge you: don't live a shadow version, cloaked and steeped in gloom and failure; don't live a works-righteousness-driven Christian life; don't live as if you're under Moses in the Old Covenant; don't live as if your eternal fate hangs in the balance and your sins are unpardoned and you're in a state of wrath (Eph. 2:3). You're not! By God-given faith, you're under the better covenant, the New Covenant, the one where the promises are realized in Christ, the captives are free, the lepers are healed, the dead are raised, the wrath of God is satisfied in Christ, and the light of the new heavens and new earth is dawning.
This is the life of true joy--by grace, through much prayer, live it!