Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
One of the most neglected passages in the Bible explains simply how righteousness by faith works. Yet it's profound.
The topic talks about when you and I will meet Jesus Christ face to face in final judgment, a very real moment of life, the most real ever (2 Cor. 5:10: "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ").
What will ensure our happiness, then? Not what we have done in achievement, but what we have permitted Him to motivate us to be and to do: "The love of Christ constrains us" (vs. 14). The opposite of restrain, that love impels us, pushes us outside of ourselves, makes us do things we never thought we could do. When you've been "constrained" by love to do something, any whiff of merit is denied.
This "constraint" is not mysterious emotion but sober, rational thinking: "because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then [that's equivalent to saying that] all died; and He died for all" (vss. 14, 15). In other words it's a 2 + 2 = 4 phenomenon: what happened on the cross means that when He died, actually you died. And the simple fact is that if He had not died then you would not have survived! "We judge thus," the most profound reality of all human life. You and I owe everything to Him.
From now on, living is simply recognizing the honest obligation that we are in debt eternally and infinitely. It's the most joyous debt you can imagine.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: November 13, 2007.
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