In other words, if you could have saved yourself, there was no need for God to be on a cross. But God was on a cross, wasn’t He? Why? To save you, because you could not save yourself. And so we do well not to believe, live, or proceed as if God were not on a cross. Christians do not live under law and we do not live in sin. Christ has fulfilled the former and absolved the latter. We now love because He first loved us, serve because He served us, keep the Commandments, not because they are a guide to heaven, but rather because they are an expression of what pleases Him who has granted us heaven as a free gift, though not a cheap gift, costing Jesus His very life. It is, as Paul says, “no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” so that “the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Christ does not make us sinners by dying and rising for us, making plain our inability to keep the law perfectly, which is how it must be kept if it is to give life. No, we were already and have been sinners from conception. The law had plenty of which to accuse us and for which to condemn us even had Christ not exposed the depths of our fallen race’s and our own personal sin through His passion. What Christ has done, then, is stopped its mouth and pardoned us, justified us, declared us not guilty, all for His sake. He has become one with us, dwelling in us, working through us, renewing our will and bringing forth fruits of repentance in our actions. It’s all Christ or no Christ. There is no in-between, and comfort is found only in the Christ who is all in all, Alpha and Omega, advocate and judge, all for us. And so, may Christ and His Word dwell in your richly so that all things in your lives abound in Him, for Him, and through Him, to His glory, and sanctified in His name.
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