“Preach the gospel to yourself” is one of those phrases we have to be very careful with. It’s a phrase we hear often and it could be easy to think we know what it means and assume we’re doing it fully and rightly. What does it mean? Jerry Bridges again, from Discipline of Grace:

It means that you dwell upon the promise that God has removes your transgressions from you as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12), that He remembers your sin no more (Isaiah 43:25)… But it means you realize that all these wonderful promises of forgiveness are based upon the atoning death of Jesus Christ.

It is the death of Christ through which He satisfied the justice of God and averted from us the wrath of God that is the basis of all God’s promises of forgiveness. We must be careful that, in preaching the gospel to ourselves, we do not preach a gospel without a cross. We must be careful that we do not rely on the so-called unconditional love of God without realizing that His love can only flow to us as a result of Christ’s atoning death.

Remember: the gospel is about Jesus. Who He is and what He has done. So if we’re going to preach the gospel to ourselves, we have to make an effort to remember what He did on the cross, AND the continuing effect His death has for us today. The continuing effect is that we can draw near to God through Jesus and his death, with confidence. Remember the “double transfer”? Jesus has taken our sin and given us his perfect righteousness.

“Justification is like two sides of a coin. On the one side we are declared “not guilty” before God, and on the other we are positively declared to be righteous through Christ. That is, we are counted in God’s sight as having perfectly obeyed the law of God.” (p. 53)

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