Grace (as Bill Beatty Understands It): Justifying Grace

Justifying Grace: Redeeming Grace - The SON

Here's the dictionary definition for Justify:

jus·ti·fy (jst-f)
v. jus·ti·fied, jus·ti·fy·ing, jus·ti·fies

v. tr.

1. To demonstrate or prove to be just, right, or valid: justified each budgetary expense as necessary; anger that is justified by the circumstances.
2. To declare free of blame; absolve.
3. To free (a human) of the guilt and penalty attached to grievous sin. Used of God.
4. Law.

• To demonstrate sufficient legal reason for (an action taken).
• To prove to be qualified as a bondsman.

5. Printing. To adjust the spacing within (lines in a document, for example), so that the lines end evenly at a straight margin.

v. intr. Printing
To be adjusted in spacing so as to end evenly at the margin.

[Middle English justifien, from Old French justifier, from Late Latin istificre, from Latin, to act justly toward : istus, just; see just1 + -ficre, -fy.]

Synonyms: justify, warrant

These verbs mean to be a proper or sufficient reason for: an outburst justified by extreme provocation; drastic measures not warranted by the circumstances.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth EditionCopyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved

So, what is Justifying Grace?

Many of us justify all the time - we justify our actions, our thoughts, our inactions, our irrationalities, our prejudices. We try to make something wrong, right. The police officer asks, "Is there a reason you were going twenty miles an hour over the speed limit?" What do we say? Late for a meeting, my wife is sick, the dog just had puppies. Is there a reason? Yep, I wasn't paying enough attention to how fast I was going and I have a lead foot...

We are used to justifying our wrong actions - we lie, so that someone won't get hurt, we gossip about somebody, and call it "sharing" or "prayer chain" or whatever, we speak vile things about someone and then smile and tell them what a nice person they are (because they really DO have some good qualities and, um, he's my brother's boss...and...). Whatever. We're pretty good at justifying our wrong actions.

I remember a Safe Sanctuaries training session that I went to and we watched a video about boundaries. A pastor (it was a dramatization based on facts) was talking about how God had put him together with this woman that he was having an affair with and how God really had pushed his wife away from him and how this new woman understood him and she had such strong faith and she was so encouraging... Or something like that, anyway. Justifying his own sin...actually, using the Lord's name in vain (God wants me to commit adultery? Um....)

dcTalk sang:

I keep trying to find a life

On my own, apart from You

I am the king of excuses

I've got one for every selfish thing I do

What's going on inside of me?

I despise my own behaviour

This only serves to confirm my suspicions

That I'm still a man in need of a Saviour

CHORUS: I wanna be in the Light

As You are in the Light

I wanna shine like the stars in the heavens

Oh, Lord be my Light and be my salvation

Cause all I want is to be in the Light

All I want is to be in the Light

The disease of self runs through my blood

It's a cancer fatal to my soul

Every attempt on my behalf has failed

To bring this sickness under control

Tell me, what's going on inside of me?

I despise my own behaviour

This only serves to confirm my suspicions

That I'm still a man in need of a Saviour

CHORUS

Honesty becomes me [There's nothing left to lose]

The secrets that did run me [In Your presence are defused]

Pride has no position [And riches have no worth]

The fame that once did cover me [Has been sentenced to this Earth]

Has been sentenced to this Earth

Tell me, what's going on inside of me?

I despise my own behaviour

This only serves to confirm my suspicions

That I'm still a man in need of a Saviour

CHORUS
[There's no other place that I want to be]

[No other place that I can see]

[A place to be that's just right]

[Someday I'm gonna be in the Light]

[You are in the Light]

[That's where I need to be]

[That's right where I need to be]

"I'm the king of excuses/I've got one for every selfish thing I do."

"This only serves to confirm my suspicions/That I'm still a man in need of a Saviour."

So, we know the negative side of Justification. We're actually pretty good at it, too. We can justify just about anything. I've been able to convince myself that it really was a good idea to go into debt to buy that recording equipment. You know, we'll record songs, God will be glorified, etc. I am the king of excuses...

So, I think maybe justification has gotten a bum rap. But that doesn't make it any less a powerful word, a transforming concept. Let's redeem Justification.

Here's what The Book of Discipline has to say (in part):

We believe God reaches out to the repentant believer in justifying grace with accepting and pardoning love. Wesleyan theology stresses that a decisive change in the human heart can and does occur under the prompting of grace and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

In justification we are, through faith, forgiven our sin and restored to God’s favor. This righting of relationships by God through Christ calls forth our faith and trust as we experience regeneration, by which we are made new creatures in Christ....

Justifying Grace is conversion, it's being born again, it's the moment of transformation. Justifying Grace is, in a way, a moment of perfection. We have confessed our sin, we have opened ourselves up to the redeeming and transforming power of God in the Holy Spirit by the blood of Jesus Christ.

And here we see the correct, the perfect meaning of Justification. It really IS making all our wrongs right. But not by excusing them or explaining them. Our wrong is TRANSFORMED to right by FORGIVING - and letting go.

Psalm 130:3:

If You, O Lord, should mark iniquities,

Lord, who could stand?

God has the right to condemn us. God has the right to judge us. God, who created us and who sustains us, has the right to do with us as He will. And if God chose to keep track of our sin, well, then who of us could be counted righteous?

BUT...

Psalm 130:4:

But there is forgiveness with You,

so that You might be revered.

Forgiveness. We so often think of a loving God as a strictly New Testament idea, but the Old Testament is run through with God's grace. Psalm 130 ends with:

It is He who will redeem Israel

from all its iniquities.

Wow - God Himself will redeem Israel. Sounds like just what Jesus did. So, of course, Psalm 130 must have been written after Jesus lived...heh - sorry, a little cynical today.

Anyway, grace is the running theme of the Bible - and Justifying Grace is that which the righteous in the Old Testament looked forward to, it is that which we look back to - that event in history which changed all of history. Jesus' death on the cross. When Jesus said, "It is finished," sin and death and hell were conquered. We were justified.

Romans 10:9-10:

because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.

One believes with the heart and is so justified... It is that change within us. That transformation that makes us something new...

In Justification we are, through faith, forgiven our sin and restored to God’s favor...

Jesus died to forgive us. He lived to show us what God’s love really looks like and to show us how we can and should live together as brothers and sisters – children of God. But He DIED so that we could be forgiven of our sins. Nobody else could do it and NOTHING else can do it. Only Jesus’ blood justifies us...

Romans 5:9-11:

Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.  But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

I remember one of my professors in seminary being uncomfortable with references to blood - "There's a Fountain Filled With Blood" is one of our hymns, for example. He wanted a kinder, gentler Christianity. But I'm afraid if you take the blood out of the story, you take the redemption out of the story.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!

My sin, not in part but the whole,

Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

When I was about 13 or so my dad was diagnosed with leukemia - Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). Since my dad's parents were dead, and he had no living siblings (my dad had only one sister who died when she was very young, I think around 3 or 4 years old), the best chance (and it was a slim one) for a bone marrow transplant match was my sister and me. I can still remember having the blood taken (it seemed like so much to me then) and then waiting for two or three weeks, I think, praying, hoping, wondering if we would be a match... No luck... So the go to the database - but it's not likely, and the national database wasn't very extensive (did it even exist in 1982?). I remember at 41, my dad was considered too old to be a likely success at a transplant, anyway (of course, when I first became a pastor I had a sixty-something parishoiner go through a bone marrow transplant and, 7 years later, she's still alive and doing well...).

My sister and I would have gladly given our blood to save my father. Blood bringing life, bringing healing, bringing wholeness. No, let's leave the blood in the story.

Although it's probably not a true story, what follows is an illustration of God's Justifying Grace:

Many years ago, when I worked as a volunteer at Stanford Hospital, I got to know a little girl named Liza who was suffering from a rare and serious disease. Her only chance of recovery appeared to be a blood transfusion from her five-year-old brother, who had miraculously survived the same disease and had developed the antibodies needed to combat the illness. The doctor explained the situation to her little brother, and asked the boy if he would be willing to give his blood to his sister. I saw him hesitate for only a moment before taking a deep breath and saying, "Yes, I'll do it if it will save Liza."

As the transfusion progressed, he lay in bed next to his sister and smiled, as we all did, seeing the color returning to her cheeks. Then his face grew pale and his smile faded. He looked up at the doctor and asked with a trembling voice, "Will I start to die right away?"

Being young, the boy had misunderstood the doctor; he thought he was going to have to give her all his blood.

Isn't that just what Jesus did? He gave ALL of our blood so that we might be saved.

Justifying grace takes the sin, washes it in the blood of Christ, and makes us new again. Whole again. Justified. Redeemed.