I write that hurting.

There’s a vacancy. A void. An open-ness so wrong and painful.

As I write, Thrice’s album Major/Minor fills my ears. It’s the album that’s brought me here tonight. I’ve recently been traveling, and in more ways than one. Maybe wandering is a better word. The past six days I’ve driven from New Jersey to California across plains and over mountains, through snow and sun, in singing and in silence. And after driving three thousand miles I’m still not far from where I started.

I am the other prodigal, more crafty than his brother. For all my traveling, I am home in the worst way. I hope you understand. See, I wander without moving: the better son, the older brother. I’ve learned to leave without getting lost. I’ve found the grave and how to flirt with her, how to land a kiss and not die. But she’s had her wages.

Death is my mistress. And she’s wearing off on me.

I remember rare moments when my heart’s deepest dissatisfaction was met, however fragile its meeting, somewhere between the lines of that beautiful book, like some secret breathed beneath the page, hiding behind the words. I recall its haunting. I can feel my risen pulse on those nights the lines would rob my eyes of sleep and send waves of tears in exchange.

But I am someone else tonight. I am somewhere else. Bring me home, just the way you did at first, the way you’ve done before and again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QFD-PhJRsk  //  ”Words In The Water” by Thrice, Major/Minor.

I am praying this song, and am once more reminded of home, of you, of life. I’ve wandered, cheated, and died. Speak light into my darkness. Breathe life into this dust. I am dry and disappointed, lonely and derailed. I feel wounded and deceived by you, tricked into a hope you don’t mean to fill. I am afraid to stay with you, and only more to leave for good. But your quietness with me is so unsettling. You’ve become so hard to find, and I’ve become too weary to look. I’m hurt by you and your erratic, no-show tendencies. I hate your games. But I know you. You are horrible and beautiful. You wake the dead and heal the dying. I am both.

I am floored, over and again, by the voices of those who can hardly push past tears the deep, unsettling compassion they feel for a city they call their own, for people they live into and toward and for and among. They pour their lives out as a small huddle of broken people in order to see what beautiful thing Jesus might make of them. These are radically inclusive, embracing, accepting communities head over heels with Jesus and the world he so deeply loves, sincere about reshaping their lives around the missio Dei and not the other way around. Here, now, his kingdom is breaking in. Here, now, his life is fleshed by his people. Here, now, broken people are being healed in love.

It was refreshing to see someone weep over their city.

[ SOMA Communities // Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/22754743 ]

I’m not talking about the kind of heady, overly-blissful delusions many young dating couples find themselves lost in. I’m talking about marriages 25 years deep, rich with all the scars of a war veteran. I mean marriages just barely hitting the 3-year mark, thick with all the tension and difficulty of finances, insecurities, and in-laws. My sister and her husband are one such couple.

Hearing my sister talk about her husband, one might be tempted to think she’s being insincere or maybe even darkly sarcastic. But her authenticity is palpable, and hers are no empty words. She says “I love you” as one who’s been wounded and healed. And given the chance, she would talk about him – his good, bad, and ugly – with more love than you thought possible.

I love hearing people who love people.

People who love people talk about them. And it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re romantic.

Like the old man whose granddaughter, he would swear, has gifted the world in grace merely by her presence here. Or the little boy who knows that his dad, of all dads, can hit a baseball clear into outer space. Or the admiring daughter whose single mom, strong and selfless, works 80-hour weeks just to make the bills this month. Give any of them an opportunity to talk about the people that matter most to them, and it’s likely to inspire a bit of healthy jealousy in us. They love these people.

I find it hard to know that many Christians don’t like to talk about Jesus much. In some situations, if they manage to avoid talking about him and I was not so successful, I am made to feel sorry for bringing him up. Often, I’m on the other end, more than a little embarrassed to mention him. This week alone, I felt my own embarrassment of him. Twice. And it’s only Tuesday.

Pulling into the parking lot of Blockbuster, I was listening to The Almost’s “Dirty And Left Out” – specifically the part where Aaron Gillespie sings out, “Jesus, Jesus / There’s something about your name / Master, Savior / Jesus!” As I pulled in, I noticed someone I went to high school with but hadn’t seen in some time, suddenly felt self-conscious, and turned the music off. On another occasion, I sat in a Starbucks and was turning through the pages of the newest issue of RELEVANT Magazine. One page contained an ad for a new book that read in large text, “Jesus was weird.” I was careful not to linger on the page longer than I had to; someone might see.

I can’t help but think of Peter, whose self-proclaimed love for Jesus dissolved into shame around a fire. And as much as I’d like to make excuses for Peter (mostly because I’d be making excuses for myself), I wonder at Peter’s love for Jesus. Peter’s shame and Peter’s love were not unrelated. At least Jesus didn’t seem to think so. Pulling Peter aside in John 21, Jesus asks him three times, careful to parallel Peter’s denial: “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?”

“Peter was grieved, because he asked him a third time.” (21:17)

From moment to moment I confess I am more like Peter than Jesus and mostly just assume my love for him. But in my most honest moments, I find him asking me the same: “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” And I grieve.

I marvel at why, because I know myself.

You’ve made yourself so low, so much like me, and You were offered no mercy at our hands though for mercy on us You came. Even daily, I make efforts to set You on Your cross and bury You beneath the busyness, beneath the meetings and music and more.

You, who wove us together in Your love as we developed within our mothers, You who write our story in Your love as we flash a finger toward you in indignation, You who could not be more inexplicably faithful: I am appalled at Your life, because I am appalled at mine. You stand in such painfully sharp contrast to me, and yet with such remarkable solidarity. I am grateful, if only sometimes, if only with irregular authenticity, that Your entering into our story to redeem it is not merely past but here, present, now, and that Your persistence overwhelms my best resistance.

And so I confess my aggressive subversion, my covert coup for Your throne, and my readiness to abandon Your mission when it does not fit my agenda, when it challenges my hierarchy of values, when it asks too much. I confess I more often put flesh to Peter’s denial, to Judas’ betrayal, to the Pharisees’ self-righteousness than I put flesh on Your life in mine. And so I pray for Your continued patience, persistence, and power, that Your conquering me would serve to be witness to Your reign and advancing kingdom. Help me to put on Your flesh with more  risk, creativity, and love, that You would be known and I would be forgotten. Make Your marks of death and resurrection on my life, and redeem Your world by Your life through mine.

God, I just want you to know. . . I see what you’re doing to me. You are terribly faithful in your reshaping, remaking work in me and around me and through me and for me and, oftentimes, despite my shortsighted and deep-seated resistance. I want you to know I notice, and sometimes I’m grateful. Be your best, inexorably gracious self toward me.

In hopes that I’m not alone, I confess that it is not infrequently that I’ve seriously questioned why I became a follower of Jesus, or that I did at all. I’ve wandered through very dark nights of doubt, uncertain that my motives were actually pure when I “accepted Christ” for the first time. Or the next time. Or the next time. (That’s so revealing about us: we, who proclaim with pride that if we place our faith in Christ we are saved once and for all, are nervously “accepting Christ” again and again and again.) And this seems to be the common experience of so many Christians. If we’re honest, we know and admit, with nausea, that it is because in dark rooms of our psyche we’ve sought to suppress the haunting questions: how true was my faith, really? am I actually believing in Jesus for selfless reasons, or am I deceptively self-seeking? how can I know that my trusting and believing and hoping really worked, was really enough, was really true and pure and right?

If you’re anything like me, you know that anxiety-ridden place, and it scares you to think how tattered and riddled with holes your faith may truly be. Let me cut to the chase: your faith, and mine, is unstable, uncertain, and unreliable, and I would not stake the weight of eternity on the integrity of my schizophrenic faith. It is sandy at its foundations and it is selfish in its motives.  Sure, a mustard seed will move a mountain. But let me ask you: how much of your eternity are you willing to stake on that seed of yours?

How much? Are you really that confident in your own faith?

Stop. Think about that.

The sooner we embrace the failure of our personal faith, we may begin to turn and see that the gospel is wholly and truly beautiful, that it is good news, that it is freedom for the slave: Jesus has believed for you.

Let this sink in.

You’ve let go of the idea that you can somehow accomplish or earn your salvation by works. But understanding that faith is not merely something you have but something  you do–believe, trust, hope–have you been released from the notion that salvation is not upon your faith, but his?

Jesus has done it all. 

Jesus has done it all.

Jesus has done it all.

This is the gospel. Breathe. Jesus has done it all.

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. . . Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him.

The real believer is Christ and we live by and out of the human faith of Christ. . . Our faith is the knowledge, given to us in the Spirit, that he has accomplished our salvation in his person and work and that we are saved purely by his unconditional grace.

To repent and believe in Jesus Christ and commit myself to him on that basis means that I do not need to look over my shoulder all the time to see whether I have really given myself personally to him, whether I really believe and trust him, whether my faith is at all adequate, for in faith it is not upon my faith, my believing or my personal commitment that I rely, but solely upon what Jesus Christ has done for me, in my place and on my behalf, and what he is and always will be as he stands in for me before the face of the Father. That means that I am completely liberated from all ulterior motives in believing or following Jesus Christ, for on the ground of his vicarious human response for me, I am free for spontaneous joyful response and worship and service as I could not otherwise be.

- T. F. Torrance (in Incarnation and Mediation)

You are a child, small and unnoticed, who wakes every morning to the bustling sounds, chuckles, and shrieks of other orphaned children. It’s the only kind of waking world you’ve ever known. Every morning, the lingering smell of ammonia from the night cleaning crew. Every morning, a nurse wiping up accidents in the hall outside your door. Every morning, alone in a room crowded with other children. You have no parents, no mist of memory, no whisper of a past, no foggy recollections. Only a small, strange mark on your chest. There was no paperwork, just a name tag tucked into a whimpering bundle on the back stoop of an orphanage waiting to be found, to be heard, to be loved. You are a child, small and unnoticed. And today is no different.

You open your sleepy, crust-sealed eyes, waking from a dream–a hope–of some better life “out there.” You hop down from your bunked cot, and stepping toward the door pull your bare foot up from the floor; you stepped on something. Rubbing your still-sleepy eyes, you discover an envelope: very small, hardly noticeable. You crouch down to pick it up, glancing over your shoulders to see if anyone else has made note of this envelope slipped so mysteriously under your door. Today is different.

You turn it over in your hands. The edges are clearly worn, the bottom right corner slightly water-stained, and there in the center is your name, handwritten. You would have torn open the envelope just then, but you can’t read–your name is the only written word you can recognize–and in your curious, cautious excitement, bring the envelope to a orphanage worker you’ve befriended. You sit down on a bench and explain. As he opens the envelope, inside is a paper, creased and folded over many times. Slowly, he unfolds the sheet, his eyes widening as he reads ahead before relaying the contents to you.

After listening to the contents relayed, he hands back to you the paper, as stunned as you are. There, on the unfolded sheet, is your picture. Next to it, the photograph of a famous billionaire. And as you stare in bewilderment, you try to make sense of what you can.

“Years ago, you were kidnapped in the middle of the night, along with the rest of his family, and held for ransom. He has sent out search parties for each one of you, and has not stopped looking day or night since your kidnapping. He’s on his way to where you are, and has asked that you look and ask and search fervently for any of your other brothers and sisters who may also be here. They have the same mark you do–that is your proof.”

You are not an orphan. You never have been.

“For the creation waits in eager expectation
for the children of God to be revealed.”
- Romans 8:19

JUSTIFICATION

First, it is important to understand that justification cannot be rightly understood whatsoever independent of union with Christ. Indeed, this is the only context within which it makes any sense at all without subjecting itself to the accusation of legal fiction. Speaking of justification, McKnight writes:

God’s making people right is itself part of a larger network of God’s redemptive work and it is reductionistic not to connect justification to union with Christ. The ground for justification, as Reformed scholar D. A. Carson argues, is being “in Christ.” Thus, incorporation is the foundation for justification… it all comes down to one thing—being incorporated into Christ, which showers the one so incorporated with all the blessings expected in God’s covenant.[1]

There is no understanding justification as separate from our union with the justified one, Jesus Christ, who is more than a merely legal “fix-it” for a merely legal problem. Indeed, because the problem is more than legal,[2] our solution, who is Jesus himself, is of course therefore more than legal. So what is justification? McKnight succinctly summarizes: “In particular, justification…is both corporate and individual; it is relational as well as judicial; it flows from the ‘in Christ’ theme, giving a less-than-totally-legal context; and therefore, finally, it is not just a declaration but also an actual ‘right-making’ in the here and now.”[3]

What we must restate and affirm is that the term justification is an aspect of law-court metaphor employed for the purpose of understanding what God has done in the person and work of Christ for us through union by grace, and any singular metaphor expected to encompass the whole of the saving, atoning person and work of Christ will fall miserably short of doing so.[4] However, justification is not merely law-court metaphor. In reducing justification to believers’ courtroom declaration of righteousness by God, we isolate a concept from its context. This context extends the meaning of justification beyond the courtroom of God. McKnight references Michael Bird to clarify:

Justification is forensic (it refers to status not moral state), eschatological (the verdict of judgment day is declared in the present), covenantal (Jews and Gentiles belong in one fellowship table), and is effective (sanctification cannot be subsumed under justification but neither can they be completely separated).[5]

This means that while there is a forensic, judicial aspect to justification, it is not limited to this setting. Justification, in light of its ancient Near-Eastern Jewish context, also refers to covenant, community, and our responsive participation.

Covenant | Jesus fulfills the Abrahamic Covenant in himself, who is the “blessing to all nations” and “seed” made known in Genesis 12 and fulfilled in his Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19).[6] He embodies both the promises and their fulfillment. Christ remains faithful to his covenant, offering himself as the one true blessing of Israel to all nations as her Messiah, as established by his death, resurrection, and presence in and through us by the Spirit. His righteousness is, at least in part, his faithfulness to his own covenant with Abraham. This is why we who are in union with him may be called “the righteousness of God” as those who make Christ available through us (jars of clay)[7] to all nations by the indwelling Spirit.

Community | The covenant Christ fulfills in himself is not to the benefit of isolated individuals, but to a community in covenant: the people of God. This people of God is “comprised of both Jews and Gentiles who believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. God originally promised a universal family (Gen. 12; cf. Gal. 1-14, 28), and the ‘justified’ family ‘in Christ’ is the fulfillment of that promise and the anticipation of its future perfection.”[8] This redemptive, justified community lives what it looks like to be in right relationship with God as those who bear the imago Dei, the image of God. They image together as missional community.[9]

Responsive Participation | We, as this redeemed community justified in Christ, participate in God’s present, active “right-making” of the world. Justification is not merely something past (our union with Jesus and his resurrection) or something future (the final, climactic “right-making” of all things). We participate in the redemption and restoration of relationship with God, with self, with others, with world to presently mirror that reality which is yet to come (future) and has happened (past) in Jesus Christ. Paul expresses exactly this in Romans 6:5-14:

If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him…Now if we died with Christ we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him…In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body…but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life…For sin shall not be your master…

The past and future bear upon our responsibility in the present. McKnight says it well: “Our premise is simple: if eternity is like x, then life on earth ought to be lived in tune with x.”[10] The covenant people of God—those justified in Christ Jesus’ resurrection and who are therefore promised justification at the future eschaton—have a responsibility to live redeemed, justified lives as redeemed, justified people.

When we seize the person of Jesus, we seize the justified one, whether we realize it or not. N. T. Wright says it well: “one is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith, but by believing in Jesus.”[11] Our present justification, according to Wright, “is based on God’s past accomplishment in the Messiah, and anticipates the future verdict.”[12] There is a present-tense aspect of justification, and its force is in the past justification (evidenced by the resurrection)[13] of Jesus and its momentum propels us toward the hope of our future justification.[14] So our present justification is the past justification of Jesus and future justification of the full people of God made manifest in us, who are united to him.[15]

///// ESCHATOLOGICAL

Eschatological union is the culmination of the union between believers and Christ made wholly perfect at the end of time. It is the full realization of our past and present union with Christ, the final cancellation of dissonance for harmonization of our experience with objective reality. This takes place at the eschaton, the Final Day, the climax of history, the end of the world.

It is through our real and actual union with the faithful, righteous Christ in his incarnation purely by God’s unconditional grace that future justification is also ours.[1] If there is no actual union of Christ to our fallen humanity, there is no future final salvation for us. We have not been crucified. And so we will not be raised.[2]  If we have not been raised in him, we have not been justified and will not be justified by the Father.[3] John Calvin, in his work Institutes of the Christian Religion, writes:

First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. Therefore, to share in what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and dwell within us …for, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him.[4]

The wrath of God has been satisfied, death has been conquered, and life has been given for any and all who participate in him. Unless we are truly and actually present in him in his incarnation—his earthly human life, death, and resurrection—the justification he receives from the Father has nothing to do with us, has not been spoken of us in actuality, and the justice of God against our personal wrath-invoking sin has not been satisfied. The justified One remains outside of us and we outside of him. This means that at the end of time, if we have not been brought into union with Christ, we are found separate from his saving person and will perish.

Christ has been justified. We are justified. We will be justified. So what is justification?

//// CONSCIOUS

Here the past, present, and future collide. We are saved in the past and we are being saved in the present in light of the future promise of salvation. Past salvation is objective. Present salvation is subjective. Future salvation consummates the two. We will focus here on the relationship between our past (our salvation in Christ) and its bearing upon our present. We’ll discuss the relationship to the future in eschatological union.

Conscious union is the contact made between our consciousness and the objective reality of who we have been made to be in Christ. It is that aspect of union with Christ within which our consciousness, through the sole conduit of faith, comes to seize the saving person and work of Jesus. Prior to faith, our experience is in dissonance with the reality of our salvation in Christ. The objective reality is that Jesus has saved us in himself. But we are deluded and live in darkness, unaware we have been made sons of the Light.[1] Through faith we wake to reality, the good news: we have been united to Christ, and so are saved in him.[2] God is bent on saving us from our present delusion, healing our unbelief by giving us faith in Christ that we might gain the joy of participating in the resurrection work of Christ upon our lives.

An objection may rise: if we’ve already been objectively saved, doesn’t it follow that our present lives don’t actually matter and that we can go on living in sin and unbelief? Paul responds to precisely this objection in Romans 6:

By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.[3]

Here, Paul clearly explains how the past ought to bear upon our present. Our union with the resurrected One means we are able to, and must, live in his new life just as we died in his death. We are actual sharers in his death and burial by virtue of our union with him; therefore, we ought to participate in forming our lives to the shape of his death and resurrection. Christ’s present work in and through our lives by the Spirit is for the purpose of making our lives in every way more like his. This has enormous implications on how we understand faith.

Just as works are evidence of faith, faith is the evidence of our union. Our human faith is indicative, not effective. Our faith experience is not our human faith alone,[4] but the perfect faith of Jesus worked in us and through us.[5] Previously hidden from us, “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”[6] By grace we have already been saved in Jesus, and faith plays a role in “saving” us from our unbelief. Our salvation has been objectively accomplished; we are just waking up to the fact, and are commanded to live out of that reality.

There are three problems with believing it is merely by our faith, even given as a “gift from God,”[7] that we are actually saved: 1) explaining how faith teleports 2000 years of time in order to alter the historically fixed and finished event of the cross by tacking our sin onto it ex post facto, 2) explaining how faith—something we not only have, but do—cannot be classified as a work we must perform for salvation, and 3) explaining how, unlike anything else we have or do, faith remains invincible to our sinful corruption.

The first problem is hardly worth arguing against. Faith as the abstracted, disembodied, history-altering, sin-and-righteousness-time-machine teleportation vehicle we find (though not stated as blatantly) prevalent throughout Christian thought today is found nowhere in Scripture.

Second, if we are determined to cling to the idea that it is our human faith which is saving, even affirming it as given as a gift from God, we cannot dodge asking and explaining the very same questions Rob Bell raises in his book, Love Wins:

If the message of Jesus is that God is offering the free gift of eternal life through him—a gift we cannot earn by our own efforts, works or good deeds—and all we have to do is accept and confess and believe, aren’t those verbs? And aren’t verbs actions? Accepting, confessing, believing—those are things we do. Does that mean, then, that going to heaven is dependent on something I do? How is any of that grace? …Isn’t that what Christians have always claimed set their religion apart—that it wasn’t, in the end, a religion at all—that you don’t have to do anything, because God has already done it through Jesus?[8]

James argues that faith and works are symbiotic, distinct, and inseparable.[9] We always do that which we most truly believe. Christ’s reversal of our sin is not merely by what he did (righteousness), but also in Whom he believed and trusted (faith). Just as our own righteousness is insufficient to save us, our own faith is insufficient to save us. Even the righteousness of Jesus would be insufficient to save us were it not in seamless harmony with his faith in the Father. Indeed, his life and work is the outplay of his faith and trust in the One who sent him. If works are indeed an extension of our believing God to be who he is and we to be what we are, then daily, our works of sin expose our unstable, schizophrenic faith.[10] We are utterly incapable of generating the faith required of us.

Third, if it were somehow our faith and not Jesus’ through us, what exactly keeps our sin from corrupting our faith like it corrupts even our most righteous works?[11] Our faith must be as fallen, broken, fractured, and corrupted as we are.[12] It is insufficient in every way. A simple experiment would prove this: we may ask any Christian to describe the God in whom they believe and he will invariably be, in some way and measure, different than the God in whom we believe. And so to one degree or another, we all serve God falsely since our conception of him is inaccurate (I do not mean incomplete, though it is that, too). The faith which saves us is only Christ’s own, given to us in union with him.[13] Only those in Christ will experience his faith and believe: “Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.”[14] So what is the function of our faith if it is not “saving”?

Our present conscious faith functions as an indicator that we are united to the faithful One. Only the flawless faith of Christ[15] worked through us, in union with us, and manifested in our lives as our own, is acceptable to the Father. Union with Christ is not a result of our faith. As previously established, predestinational union and incarnational union predate our faith experience. Our faith is a result of a pre-existing union with the Faithful One, whose perfect faith is made manifest in us as an identifying indicator that we are in Christ who is faithful. Torrance writes about the relationship between Christ, his faith, and our faith in The Mediation of Christ:

He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so he acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in him, who has already believed in God through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Christ you are already accepted by him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus your Lord and Savior.[16]

All that is Christ’s—his faith[17] and his righteousness, and therefore his justification (the result of his faith and righteousness before the Father)—is made incarnate in us through union with him by the Spirit, now 2000 years after his life.[18] Our union with Christ—or perhaps better stated, his union with us through the indwelling Spirit[19]—is the means by which we find the chasm between our doubting, unfaithful, unrighteous selves and the faithful, righteous Christ bridged seamlessly and securely. He makes us “one flesh” with him,[20] by which his faithfulness and righteousness might be counted as ours not as legal fiction but as true and actual reality, and through whichwe approach the One who abides in the light unapproachable. Before the Father, in Christ, we are justified by his faith and righteousness.