God steps towards you!

Dear Friends,

This Sunday’s Epistle reading is all about hope, which is that ‘peace that passes human understanding.’ St. Paul writes, “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). He means that you and I have been made right with God not by our own merit or through our own efforts but by the person and work of Jesus Christ. This is the good news of the Gospel. 

What is especially remarkable about this announcement is unpacked in Paul’s clarifying statements. God’s love and acceptance is extended not to ‘good people getting better,’ nor to the allegedly ‘neutral,’ but rather to the plainly bad, and even the more subtly complicit: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (5:6) .

Most of us do not like to think of ourselves as complicit in wrongdoing, but for Paul the reality that God revealed his love for us while we were still undeserving is how we can be assured that God will love us no matter what. God does not wait for us to take the first step toward him or even to get to a ‘neutral’ position: “God proves his love for us in this, while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (5:8).

And just as this good news begins to sink in and wash over us, Paul expounds “grace upon grace.” He writes, “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” (5:10). Here Paul takes the justification of the ungodly to its logical conclusion. If God has already made right what has gone wrong, much more surely will he ensure salvation to those who have already been made right. If he’s already done the hard part, how much more likely is he to complete the job by doing the easy part?!

This is why we have hope. We are no longer worried about measuring up to an unaccommodating moral standard. We are loved and accepted by God no matter what. 

Internalizing this reality is liberating. We are unconditionally loved, so we are free to take inventory of ourselves and our deeds and not get defensive. God will never let us go, and we are released from our obsession with personal performance. “There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” so we can live, and principally serve our neighbor, without fear of judgment (8:1).

Grace and Peace,

Ben