Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Romans 3:24
An old man lived in a shabby shack on a very small lot outside the city. He watched as the city grew and developments spread around him, and hoped that he might be able to sell his little place for a good price. One day, an agent for a land developer came along and asked him how much he would sell his property for. The old man named what seemed to him to be a very high price, and was delighted when the agent agreed. ‘Here is a thousand dollars to hold the deal, and I will be back with the developer in two weeks to sign the deed,’ said the agent. After he left, the old man looked about his place and thought, ‘If he is going to pay me all that money, I had better fix this place up a bit’. So he bought some paint and freshened up the shack’s appearance, and he repaired some of the broken windows that he could not afford to fix before. He had just finished the work when the agent reappeared, along with the developer, to conclude the sale. Proudly, the old man showed the developer what he had done to improve the old shack. Smiling, the developer told him, ‘Oh, but I didn’t buy this place for what is on it now, but for what I am going to put on it’. And that is why God has justified us.
There was nothing God could do with the shabby old shack that was us in our unconverted days. He did not save us for what we were. Just as the developer bought the old man’s land so he could place his own creation on it, so God purchased us so He could create in us what He desired. His justification gives Him the authority to do that.
What does justification mean? When we first began to work with computers at my place of employment, we started working with a small word processing application. And we ran into a term that I had used many times before, but never in this way. The word was ‘justified’. When we wrote our news stories in the application, we were prompted as to how we wanted the material justified. That meant, which margin on the page did we want the material lined up with. We almost always needed it to be justified to the left margin. If we justified it to the right, it made the material difficult to read on the air. God also needs to justify us. He needs to line us up with His standards and His purposes. As far as our deliverance from hell and assurance of heaven are concerned, God’s justification is perfect and permanent. But as far as our daily lives are concerned, God’s justification is a work in progress. Some of the lines in the little story that is our life tend to drift away from God’s desire and expectation. So God works with us, teaching us in His Word and shaping us with His discipline, so that we line up our lives as we should.
God has freely justified us forever. How do our lives line up with what He has done for us? -Jim MacIntosh