Bookends of the Christian Life...Continued from page 5

Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington

In this context, faith involves both a renunciation and a reliance. First, we must renounce any trust in our own performance as the basis of our acceptance before God. We trust in our own performance when we believe we’ve earned God’s acceptance by our good works. But we also trust in our own performance when we believe we’ve lost God’s acceptance by our bad works?by our sin. So we must renounce any consideration of either our bad works or our good works as the means of relating to God.

Second, we must place our reliance entirely on the perfect obedience and sin-bearing death of Christ as the sole basis of our standing before God?on our best days as well as our worst.

Just a few sentences later Paul wrote, “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” (Galatians 2:20). In the context of Galatians 2:15–21, it’s clear Paul is still talking about justification, yet he’s using the present tense. He writes of the life he lives now in the flesh. This raises an apparent problem. We know justification is a past event?the moment we genuinely trusted in Christ we were justified, declared righteous by God. That’s why Paul wrote, “We have been justified [past tense] by faith” (Romans 5:1). So if justification was a point-in-time past event for Paul, why in Galatians 2:20 does he speak in the present tense: “The life I now live [today] . . . I live by faith in the Son of God”?

The answer to this question is important. It tells us how to experience the application of the first bookend to our daily lives. For Paul, justification was not only a past event; it was also a daily, present reality. So every day of his life, by faith in Christ, Paul realized he stood righteous in the sight of God?he was counted righteous and accepted by God as righteous?because of the perfectly obedient life and death Christ provided for him. He stood solely on the rock-solid righteousness of Christ alone, which is our first bookend.

We must learn to live like the apostle Paul, looking every da

y outside ourselves to Christ and seeing ourselves standing before God clothed in his perfect righteousness. Every day we must re-acknowledge the fact that there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves either more acceptable to God or less acceptable. Regardless of how much we grow in our Christian lives, we’re accepted for Christ’s sake or not accepted at all. It’s this reliance on Christ alone, apart from any consideration of our good or bad deeds, that enables us to experience the daily reality of the first bookend, in which the believer finds peace and joy and comfort and gratitude.