How can we experience the righteousness of Christ as it was meant to apply to our daily lives? In Galatians 2:15–21, Paul provided much insight on this, beginning with this sentence:

We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we . . . have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. (Galatians 2:16)

In this single sentence Paul uses the word justified three times. The repetition emphasizes that we’re justified not by our personal obedience to the law but by faith in Christ.

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 day 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.

Before battery-powered watches were invented, wristwatches had to be wound every day. A watch’s stem was used not only to adjust the hands but also to wind up the mainspring. The gradual unwinding of the mainspring throughout the day drove the mechanism of the watch to keep time. The gospel of justification by faith in Christ is the mainspring of the Christian life. And like the mainspring in old watches, it must be wound every day. Because we have a natural tendency to look within ourselves for the basis of God’s approval or disapproval, we must make a conscious daily effort to look outside ourselves to the righteousness of Christ, then to stand in the present reality of our justification. Only then will we experience the stability that the first bookend is meant to provide.

But if it’s true God’s acceptance of me and his blessing on my life is based entirely on the righteousness of Christ, what difference does it make how I live? Why should I make any effort? Why should I put myself through the pain of dealing with sin and seeking to grow in Christlike character if it doesn’t affect my standing with God? We’ll answer these questions in the next chapter.

The Bookends of the Christian Life

Copyright © 2009 by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington
Published by Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers
1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

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