Justification

Imagine the awful inconvenience of being declared dead by the United States Government. Consider this true story:

Susan and Darby Nye of Arlington, Virginia, have been married for 30 years and were looking forward to many more in retirement when Susan started receiving condolences from various federal agencies regarding the death of her husband. But there was one big problem: Darby was alive and well.

It started when Darby’s purchase at a pharmacy was declined. He called to find out why. “Well, they said the Social Security Administration has informed us that you are dead,” he said.

When someone dies, they’re supposed to be put on the Death Master File. The Social Security Administration uses the death data to terminate benefit payments and report deaths to other agencies. But one typo can mistakenly declare someone dead, digging a grave that buries them along with their finances.

Darby’s plight as a categorized deceased person is not singular: it is estimated that every year, some 12,200 U.S. citizens are declared dead by the Social Security Administration due to "keystroke errors." Those affected become like the walking dead, unable to secure a job, make financial transactions, file taxes, or visit the doctor, and for months on end, must endure the nightmare of convincing a large bureaucracy that they haven't yet bit the dust.

Possible Preaching Angle:
Being declared legally dead is a terrible inconvenience for people in our society. But being declared legally dead to sin is a tremendous blessing for believers that promises incredible freedom and hope.

French atheist Guillaume Bignon grew up in a loving family in France. He did well in school and landed a job as a computer scientist in finance. He also excelled in sports, growing to be six feet four inches, and played volleyball in a national league, traveling the country every weekend for the games. All in all, he was happy with his life. The chances of ever hearing the gospel—let alone believing it—were incredibly slim.

While vacationing in the Caribbean he met an attractive young woman. She mentioned that she believed in God and believed that sex belonged in marriage. This was a problem to him, so his new goal in life was to disabuse his girlfriend of her beliefs which were standing in the way of sex. He started thinking: “What good reason was there to think God exists? But, if I was going to refute Christianity, I first needed to know what it claimed. So, I picked up a Bible.” He also prayed, “If there is a God, then here I am. Why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me? I’m open.”

A week or two after his unbelieving prayer, one of his shoulders started to fail, without any evident injury. The doctor couldn’t see anything wrong, but he was told that he needed to rest his shoulder and to stop playing volleyball for a couple of weeks.

Against my will, I was now off the courts. With my Sundays available, I decided I would go to a church to see what Christians do when they get together. I drove to an evangelical congregation in Paris, visiting it as I would a zoo: to see exotic animals that I had read about in books but had never seen in real life.

After the service he hurried to the exit door to avoid all contact with people and the pastor. But as he reached the door a chilling blast went up from his stomach to his throat. He heard himself saying: “This is ridiculous. I have to figure this out.” So, he closed the door, and went straight to the pastor. Bignon said, “So, you believe in God?” “Yes,” the pastor said, smiling. “So how does that work out?” I asked. “We can talk about it,” he said.

After most of the people left, they went to his office and spoke for hours. Bignon bombarded the pastor with questions, who patiently and intelligently explained his worldview. Bignon writes, “My unbelieving prayers shifted to, ‘God, if you are real, you need to make it clear so I can jump in and not make a fool of myself.’”

But instead of a light from heaven, God reactivated his conscience. He remembered a particularly sinister misdeed and God brought it back to his mind in full force. Bignon writes:

I was struck with an intense guilt, and disgusted at the thought of what I had done and the lies I had covered it with. All of a sudden, the quarter dropped. That is why Jesus had to die: Me. He took upon himself the penalty that I deserved, so that in God’s justice, my sins would be forgiven—by grace as a gift, rather than by my righteous deeds or religious rituals. He died so that I may live. I placed my trust in Jesus, and asked him to forgive me. This, in short, is how God takes a French atheist and makes a Christian theologian out of him.

Editor’s Note: Guillaume Bignon went on to obtain a master’s in New Testament studies. In the process, he met a wonderful woman, got married, had two children, and attained a PhD in philosophical theology.

What does it mean when the Bible says that we have been pardoned by God? Here are two classic definitions from American legal history:

First, in 1833, Chief Justice John Marshall, in a landmark decision, described a pardon as “an act of grace … which exempts the individual on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed.”

Second, in 1866, the Supreme Court gave another famous definition of a pardon: “a pardon releases the punishment and blots out of existence the guilt, so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense … A pardon removes the penalties and disabilities and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity.”

Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig offers this as a marvelous description of a divine pardon. “‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation ….’ The pardoned sinners’ guilt is expiated, so that he is legally innocent before God.”

Thousands of cars are damaged or destroyed by floods every year, but don’t assume all those vehicles end up in a junkyard. Some are repaired and resold in other parts of the country without the buyer being aware of the car’s waterlogged history. In fact, Carfax says 378,000 flooded cars were back on the roads in 2021. In addition, 2022s Florida’s Hurricane Ian, and the atmospheric “bomb cyclones” that brought flooding to California, Nevada, Texas, and other states will certainly add many more damaged cars to the used-car market.

The key takeaway is that you need to be vigilant when buying a used car, even if you don’t live near a traditional storm area. That’s because flood-damaged cars are often transported well beyond their original region after major storms to locations where consumers may be less aware of the warning signs to look for.

Water can wreak havoc on automobiles: rusty floorboards, water-logged electronics that controls so much of the car, including safety systems, and airbag controllers. It may take months or years, but corrosion can find its way to the car’s vital electronics and the long-term effects of water damage can haunt buyers for the life of the car.

But as Consumer Reports found years ago in an investigation of rebuilt wrecks, some flood-damaged vehicles reappear with a clean title. Be especially wary of any used car being offered with a “lost” title or with only a bill of sale.

Kenneth Potiker, owner of Riteway Auto Dismantlers, knows what advice he’d give to people considering the purchase of such a vehicle. “I would tell them not to buy a car like that — that would be the best advice. If it floods inside a car, water damage is one of the worst types of damage.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Redemption; Renewal; Restoration; Second Chance - Storms can suddenly strike and damage our possessions beyond repair. This puts buyers on the alert asking, “Has this been so damaged that it is now worthless?” The same question can be asked in the spiritual realm when a person has been damaged by the sudden storms of sin. “What happens to storm-damaged people? Are they of any value?” But by God’s grace there can be redemption, forgiveness, and restoration.

Every day, several large trucks full of discarded goods arrive at a warehouse in the eastern suburbs of Hamburg, Germany, before being sorted through and categorized by a team of workers.

But this is not a normal waste processing facility. Stilbruch (German for “stylish inconsistency”) is run by the city’s sanitation department. Instead of destroying or disposing of these throwaways, the municipal team checks and, if necessary, repairs them, before putting them on sale to the public. It touts itself as “for everyone who prefers used to new—used is the new sexy.”

Stilbruch is the “IKEA of used goods.” Some 400,000 objects are processed through two giant cavernous warehouses every year; everything from well-worn teddy bears to refurbished laptops and kitchen counters. Stilbruch contracts technicians and craftsmen who ensure that all used furniture is given a thorough beautification, and all electronics can be sold with a 1-year warranty.

Launched in 2001, Stilbruch has gone from having one full-time employee to 70, and from being a non-profit orientation to bringing in $330,000 to $550,000 per year in profit. Roman Hottgenroth, operations manager said, “These things are useful. They really aren’t rubbish. We are trying to stop throwaway culture and wastefulness. There’s so much value in what we treat like trash.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In God’s ecosystem, the people the world considers broken and useless are reclaimed and restored by God. The filthy is made clean (Isa. 1:18), and the worn out becomes new (2 Cor. 5:17).

Jen Wilkin writes:

When my parents entered their latter years, they took up a new hobby: keeping chickens. At the height of their enthusiasm, they tended 21 chickens in a hen house—20 chickens, that is, and one noisy rooster. Roosters crow and crow. They crow every morning, and they crow all morning. They crow to announce another day, but they continue crowing as long as it is called “today.”

Roosters make a notable appearance in the Bible. All four Gospels record Peter’s famous three-time betrayal of Jesus punctuated by the crowing of a rooster, just as Jesus had prophesied. All three synoptic Gospels say Peter “wept bitterly” at the sound.

Our senses are powerful memory holders. Smells … tastes … sounds, too, attach themselves to memories. I imagine what kind of memory the rooster’s crow evoked for Peter. Every dawn after that first terrible morning of betrayal, the proclamation of his bitter guilt would have rung afresh in his ears. Carried in the crowing would have been the memory of his colossal failure. Whatever his relationship had been with Jesus, whatever his calling, it appears to be finished.

“I’m going out to fish,” he announces to his companions (John 21:3). They fish all night and catch nothing. But just as day is breaking, a sound ripples across the water. A voice. The announcement of a miracle: Try the other side of the boat. Recognition dawns. As the others haul in fish as fast as they can, Peter hurls himself into the sea and thrashes toward shore. There sits Jesus, serving up a fresh breakfast menu: Restoration. Forgiveness. It is finished.

I wonder, as the two conversed, could Peter hear in the surrounding countryside the sound of roosters? I can’t say. But … I suspect that every morning thereafter, Peter affixed a new memory to that clarion call. The sound of homecoming. Fear not. Glad tidings. Each day, the sound that had announced new-morning guilt now spoke a better word. All hail the rooster, that fine-feathered herald of forgiveness, that megaphone of new-morning mercies.

Possible Preaching Angle:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). What memory of past guilt announces itself to you at every turn? Friend, hear the annunciation of your emancipation: Morning has broken, and with it, fresh mercy.

In times past, when items of mass-produced apparel experienced production defects, those pieces would usually be sent to a landfill or overseas. But now, they’re sent to Jeff Denby and Nicole Bassett.

Denby and Bassett are the founders of The Renewal Workshop, a factory that specializes in repairing irregular or defective clothing. Client apparel firms send their defective pieces to the Renewal Workshop where they are restored to like-new, then resold on what they call “recommerce” websites affiliated with their original manufacturer brands.

Bassett said, “It is unique for brands to allow someone else to fix their products. We invested a lot into developing repair standards so that brands could feel confident in the quality of the work we do so that they can stand behind their products being sold as renewed.”

The idea for the Renewal Workshop came out of a desire to reduce all the waste generated from the low-margin fast fashion industry. Their first factory was upgraded to a factory from a warehouse back in 2016. Since then, the company has since opened a second factory in Amsterdam.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Though we may have scars from mistakes or sins, they do not disqualify us from God's redemptive plan of salvation and restoration.

The rock star, Sting, in his autobiography Broken Music, tells how he bought his first bass guitar. In a local music shop, in the middle of all the shiny new guitars, he saw an old Fender bass.

I have had my eye on a second-hand Fender in the back of Barratt’s music store. ... It is a careworn relic of the sixties, the paintwork ruined and the varnish flaked and piebald. Among all the shiny others on the wall there is something orphaned, something life-scarred about this instrument that appeals to me. I have absolutely no desire for a new bass. I want something with a history, where every scratch and dent in the varnish has a tale to tell. What were their dreams and aspirations (of those who owned it)? Why was it sold, and what were the circumstances? … I am convinced that I can pick up the trail where it was left. ... I will dream up a new and glorious future that the past has only hinted at.

He bought that bass guitar.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God wants to take you with your failures and imperfection to play the music of His Kingdom to the world. Like that old bass, you may have given up on the vision you once had. Like Sting, Jesus wants to take you in his hands and pick up that music where you left off.

Michelangelo, the great Renaissance artist, is known for his statue of David and the incredible Sistine Chapel. But what many don’t know is that Michelangelo lived as the Reformation was sweeping through Europe and was influenced himself by Reformation ideas about justification by grace through faith.

Michelangelo was plagued throughout his life to live up to his own and others’ high demands for his artwork. But as he approached his death, a spiritual rebirth began to occur. One of his final works, intended to be his gravestone, was a statue of himself, in the guise of Nicodemus—the one who was “born again” (John 4)—holding the dead body of Jesus. You can see the statue at the Duomo Museum in Florence, Italy, where a poem by Michelangelo is printed on the opposite wall. In the poem, Michelangelo describes coming to the end of his life and seeing that his artwork was actually harmful to his soul because it became “my idol and my King.”

At the end of the day, his only hope was not in being a great artist or receiving acclaim from others, but rather, the “divine Love, who to embrace us, opened his arms upon the cross.”

Click here for a poem and photo of The Deposition statue.

In his book, Rick Mattson writes:

I’m not the one making the exclusive claim about salvation—Jesus is. He is the one who said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). I’m simply trusting his authority to know these things. It’s like going to my excellent family physician, Dr. Lehman. If he tells me my cholesterol is too high and that I need to cut down on sweets and fatty foods, I believe him. He’s an expert on the matter. Sure, there are plenty of other voices I could listen to about my health, including celebrities, infomercials and tabloid articles. To the extent that these voices disagree with Dr. Lehman, they’re most likely wrong. My physician has made the “exclusive” claim that his patient, me, has a certain malady that requires a certain treatment. I’m just the amateur who believes him.

Editor's Note: This simple illustration can show that proclaiming the exclusive claims of Christ need not be arrogant. Preachers can easily adapt this illustration with details from their own lives. Here’s my adaptation of the illustration (with a twist of humor):

I went to a sleep specialist doctor because apparently, I snore a lot. I told everyone, including the sleep specialist doctor, “Fine, do your study, but I am NOT wearing one of those CPAP machines.” I was convinced the doctor was getting kickbacks from the CPAP machine company. So I spent the night with electrodes stuck on my head and the doctor gave me his diagnosis: you have sleep apnea and you need to wear a CPAP. Now I trusted his expertise even less. I called a doctor friend to investigate this quack with his kickback scam. My friend said, “Your doctor is the real deal. Wear the CPAP machine. You’ll have more time on earth to enjoy your grandchildren.” So, every night I put that silly mask on my face. Why? Because after kicking and screaming, I have come to trust and to surrender to my doctor—his authority, his expertise. Why do followers of Jesus obey him in all things? Because they have surrendered to his authority and expertise.

Possible Preaching Angles: Rick Mattson writes, "This analogy can work with any authority figure you can think of: pilot, air traffic controller, professor, lawyer, scientist, astronaut, boat captain and so on. I prefer the doctor image because it’s so universally revered. I suppose a skeptic could push back on the analogy by pointing out that sometimes doctors are wrong and one should get a second opinion. That’s fine. The point is that somewhere in the process I, the amateur, trust in some authority who makes an exclusive truth claim about my condition.”

In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek discusses the importance of motivation in a very interesting section titled “It’s What You Can’t See That Matters.”

Detergent advertisers once promoted their product with statements like “Gets your whites whiter and your brights brighter.” That’s what the market research revealed customers wanted. But was it really? Sinek explains:

The data was true, but the truth of what people wanted was different. The makers of laundry detergent asked consumers WHAT they wanted from detergent, and consumers said whiter whites and brighter brights…. So brands attempted to differentiate HOW they got your whites whiter and brights brighter by trying to convince consumers that one additive was more effective than another. No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean.

Later a group of anthropologists discovered that this approach wasn’t really driving buying decisions. They observed that when people took their laundry out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white and bright it was. The first thing people did was to smell it. Sinek concludes, “This was an amazing discovery. Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean.”

Possible Preaching Angle: This same attitude extends out of the laundry room deep into the recesses of our hearts. We are much more interested in the illusion of clean than the reality of clean.

When Pricess Lalla Salma gave birth to a daughter named Lalla Khadija, her husband King Mohammed VI of Morocco was delighted. In fact, he wanted to celebrate. But instead of giving out cigars, he pardoned 8,836 prisoners and reduced the sentences of 24,218 others. The Justice Ministry said the pardons were a humanitarian gesture.

When God’s one and only Son was born in Bethlehem, the whole purpose was to provide pardons for condemned people. God had promised he would do so in Isaiah 55:7, “Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.”

The New York Times published an article explaining large numbers like a million, billion, and trillion. The article was titled “Just how long is a trillion seconds?” In a letter to the editor, Dorothy C. Morrell from Seattle explains a trillion in terms of time.

I asked myself, why not think of it in terms of seconds? A trillion seconds would have to be years, probably many years. I made a wild guess. As it turned out, I wasn't close. I found that 1,000 seconds ago was equal to almost 17 minutes. It would take almost 12 days for a million seconds to elapse and 31.7 years for a billion seconds. Therefore, a trillion seconds would amount to no less than 31,709.8 years. A trillion seconds ago, there was no written history. The pyramids had not yet been built. It would be 10,000 years before the cave paintings in France were begun.

Was I alone in not knowing how long ago a trillion seconds was? I asked some of my neighbors what they would say if they were told they could have $1 trillion in one-dollar bills, so long as they agreed to initial each bill. Their answers were very similar. ‘No!’ they said. When I asked why, they said, almost without exception, '’Because it would take me the rest of my life!’”

Preaching Angles: 1) Forgiveness; Justification; Redemption - This illustration is good for explaining just how much we have been forgiven by Christ Jesus as in the story of the ten thousand talents (Matt. 18:21-35). 2) Debt; Finances; Money - It can also use it to explain any type of large number, like the national debt. 3) Eternity; Heaven; Time – Our short time in trials on earth will fade compared to the eternal rewards that are to come.

Three-year-old Zainab Mughal, who lives in Florida, requires frequent blood transfusions for cancer treatment. There are over 300 different blood types, and 90 per cent of the population is fairly easy to match to one of those types. The challenge for the doctors treating Zainab is that her very rare blood type only occurs within Indian, Pakistani, or Iranian communities. So far, only five donors around the world have been tracked down.

Adjunct Professor David Irving is with the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, which found the match for Zainab. This process has been aided by an effective system that has been established for the international tracking of blood. The blood collected from the Australian donor has been sent to Florida, for use in Zainab's stem cell transplant operation.

Zainab still needs more blood for further treatments, so the search for donors will not stop at five. Professor Irving said, “We are certainly looking to diversify our blood donor pool so that we are ready for those patients like Zainab. Our red cell reference laboratory researchers are working hard to make sure that they get the best match for all of the patients who are in need of red blood cell transfusion.”

Possible Preaching Angle: Blood of Christ; Easter; Sin Nature; Substitution – Our terminal disease of sin also requires an extremely unique blood donor. In all of history, only the blood of the sinless Son of God is the perfect match. Nor is there is a need for repeated transfusions – one time is sufficient for all of our needs.

While waiting in a Nazi prison cell in 1943 a few weeks before Advent, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a friend, "A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent."

Shortly after penning those words, the Nazis executed Bonhoeffer. But he was right: the door of freedom for him and for us today is still opened from the outside by the coming and second coming of Jesus Christ.

Fleming Rutledge writes: Sin is a category without meaning except in reference to God. A Calvin and Hobbes comic strip illustrates this in an endearing way. Calvin, a little boy, is hurtling down a snowy slope on a sled with his friend Hobbes, a tiger, conducting a discussion about sin (the wildly improbable nature of this scene is part of its charm). Here is the dialogue:

Calvin: I'm getting nervous about Christmas.

Hobbes: You're worried you haven't been good?

Calvin: That's just the question. It's all relative. What's Santa's definition? How good do you have to be to qualify as good? I haven't killed anybody. That's good, right? I haven't committed any felonies. I didn't start any wars. … Wouldn't you say that's pretty good? Wouldn't you say I should get lots of presents?

Hobbes: But maybe good is more than the absence of bad.

Calvin: See, that's what worries me.

Timothy Keller writes: Christmas is about receiving presents, but consider how challenging it is to receive certain kinds of gifts. Some gifts by their very nature make you swallow your pride. Imagine opening a present on Christmas morning from a friend … and it's a dieting book. Then you take off another ribbon and wrapper and you find it is another book from another friend, Overcoming Selfishness. If you say to them "Thank you so much," you are in a sense admitting, "For indeed I am [overweight] and obnoxious."

In other words, some gifts are hard to receive, because to do so is to admit you have flaws and weaknesses and you need help. Perhaps on some occasion you had a friend who figured out you were in financial trouble and came to you and offered a large sum of money to get you out of your predicament. If that has ever happened to you, you probably found that to receive the gift meant swallowing your pride.

There has never been a gift offered that makes you swallow your pride to the depths that the gift of Jesus Christ requires us to do so. Christmas means that we are so lost, so unable to save ourselves, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God himself could save us. That means you are not somebody who can pull yourself together and live a moral and good life.

When playing the game of Monopoly, one of the best cards to have is the famous "Get Out of Jail Free" card—but when you're playing the game of "real life," the card doesn't work quite so well. At least, that's what a man in Minnesota found out recently.

He was pulled over when an officer saw he wasn't wearing a seatbelt (and also that the car he was driving "was registered to someone who was wanted on a warrant"). Turns out the driver himself was also wanted—and as he was being searched, "the man pulled out the infamous Monopoly card."

The card may have "provided a few laughs for law enforcement, [but] the man still landed himself in jail."

The county sheriff's office posted on social media about the incident, saying, "We appreciate the humor! … 'A' for effort!"

Potential Preaching Angles: Isn't it a relief that we don't have to try card tricks on God to try and receive mercy, that we receive more than an "'A' for effort" when we stumble and fall? As the writer of Hebrews declares, "Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (4:16).

Utility bills can cause unwelcome surprises from time to time, but "unwelcome" might be a less sufficient description for one man than "impossible." Kieran Healy of Raleigh, North Carolina received notification of his upcoming water bill recently, which at first appeared normal with a $189.92 charge. But then he saw the additional service charge, which tacked on an additional $99,999,999 to the bill. Apparently confident that he hadn't used that much water the previous month, Healy jokingly asked his water provider on X if he could make installment payments on the balance. The company issued a hurried apology, citing an error in the software of a third party company that helps send out payment reminders.

Potential Preaching Angles: The idea of a $100,000,000 debt might be difficult to grasp for many people due to its size. Yet, compared to the debt paid by Jesus Christ on our behalf, $100,000,000 simply seems inconsequential.