Good Friday meditations

Even with my specific efforts to be intentional about major Christian events (like Christmas and Easter), I find that it's so easy for time to get away from me. In the midst of planning and cleaning and schooling and normal life, it's like I look up and think "Whoa! It's Holy Week! And I'm totally unprepared!"

We plan to do our Resurrection Tree that was so meaningful last year, and there are a few other thoughts swimming around in my head...thoughts on how to make the reality of the Resurrection come alive in my children's hearts.

But, praise be to God! He's not just about the resurrection coming alive in my children's hearts - God wants to continually make it come alive in my own heart too!

This week, I've been reading Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die. [And for the record, it's only my second Piper book to complete, but it appears my tolerance for good theology is growing! I plan to start a 200-pager soon...]

There are so many points in the book that cause me to love and adore Christ more, but I'll include this one little paragraph that keeps sticking in my mind. This comes from Reason 10: Jesus Came to Die to Provide the Basis for our Justification:

Being justified before God and being forgiven by God are not identical. To be justified in a courtroom is not the same as being forgiven. Being forgiven implies that I am guilty and my crime is not counted. Being justified implies that I have been tried and found innocent. My claim is just. I am vindicated. The judge says, "Not guilty."

Justifying is a legal act. It means declaring someone to be just. It is a verdict. The verdict of justification does not make a person just. It declares a person just. It is based on someone actually being just.

WHAT?! I have been tried, and found...innocent?

I know I'm not innocent. I know all those sinful tendencies I have - to be prideful and defiant, to speak unkindly to my children, to act as though my time is my own, to subtly try to earn my righteousness through my "goodness".

So, really? God searches my heart, looks at the evidence, and finds me innocent?

Simply because I have responded in faith by putting my trust in Christ, God finds me innocent?

I find it hard to believe - mostly because it's easy for me to look at the evidence and come to a completely different verdict.

God declaring me just brings home the enormity - and the beauty and the value - of Christ's death and resurrection in a way that I've never quite experienced before.

We are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Romans 3:24