Saturday I ended the “Refresh, Part 2: Justified By Grace” message by encouraging you to preach the gospel to yourself.  I will be posting all this week on how to preach the gospel to yourself.   Why is this necessary?  Jerry Bridges explains in The Gospel For Real Life:

“Unfortunately, many believers do not live as if justification is a permanent, abiding state.  They have divorced their hope of eternal life in heaven from their relationship with God today.” (p. 110)

He goes on to explain how this worked for the apostle Paul:

“For Paul, justification was not only a point-in-time event that occurred in the past, but it was a present reality in which he rejoiced every day.  Paul did what we should do.  He renounced any confidence in his own performance or, for that matter, any dismay over his lack of performance.  Instead, by faith he looked to Jesus Christ and His righteousness for his sense of being in right standing with God today and tomorrow, and throughout eternity.”  (p. 111)

In other words–and I’ll be saying this over and over all week–is that preaching the gospel to ourselves means working hard to remember that Christians are justified by grace: that this point-in-time, once-for-all event, which happened when we became Christians, has enduring effects into the present and the future.  And one of the effects is that God the Father looks at us as having the full righteousness of Christ.  This is great news.  More on that the rest of this week…

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