Justified Through Faith?

After a week's break with Pastor Dale guest speaking about God's wonderful work through missionaries in Indonesia, REEF continued on their study 'Justification'.

So what is the word 'Justification' and what does it really mean to be justified?

In this context, 'our own mistakes being paid for' or in other words - we are made righteous with God. It means we are free from our guilt and pain because of this single awesome undeserving (Grace) gift(Jesus) from God, all from his undying love for us. Want to know how to accept this life changing gift(Faith) that will put us right with God(Justified) with the promise of eternal life(Salvation)? Read on..

Continuing on from our first topic - 'Justification through Grace', which explored the awesome undeserving gift that the world have been blessed for over 2008 years (and still going!) and who we now know as, Jesus. Yes, Jesus was a gift from God. He might not have been perfectly wrapped with gold ribbons and blessed with money, good looks, worldly fame but rather what mattered most - who he is and what he did for us.

'Justified...Through Faith' further examined our 'gift' from God and how we can fully utilise it. In the bible the term faith is simply used to mean trust, rely or depend. You can use all these words interchangably. So to have faith in something is to depend upon it, to trust in it or rely on it. For example, you display faith when you sit in a chair. When you sit, you place your trust in it and depend upon it to hold you. It is not your faith that holds you up it is the chair. And here is the most impotant thing about faith - it is not that you have faith, it is what you put your faith in that counts.

When Christian faith is understood in these terms then we see that it not so much our faith that is important but what we place our faith in. Christianity is all about placing faith or trust is Jesus Christ and his death for our salvation. To trust in anything other than Jesus will mean that our faith is wrongly placed and we will not be saved. As Jesus said - “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one shall come to the father but through me” (John 14:6). That is hard for people to hear, but it is the truth.

But it is not just faith though, it is faith in action. Real Christian faith is seen in the way in which we live. If I said I had faith that a chair would hold me but were not prepared to sit in it, what does that say about how real my faith is? It is easy to say I have faith, but the quality of that faith will be seen in the way I live, the way in which I follow Jesus and seek to obey him. It is that sort of faith that saves and is the only “requirement” to claim that you are Christian.

I hope that this short summary has allowed you (if you haven't already) joined the dots between the two studies on 'Justification'. That through God's grace - Jesus and through faith in him we are justified.

And how do we know we will receive this so called - 'salvation'? Because of God's promise -

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." - (John 3:16)