How God Sees us

If you awoke in the middle of the night to discover that your house were burning down, and every second remaining in the inferno put your own life at risk, what would you grab – not counting people or pets – on your way out?

It’s a dinner-party question because the answers make for good conversation. Your answer may also offer a glimpse into your personality and core values.

Anyway, what would you say? Do you gather your most costly items: Jewelry, a laptop, antiques, bonds or cash from the safe? Do you grab what is most sentimental to you? Pictures of the children, grandma’s quilt, your journals, a letter written from your father before he passed? Or do you focus on the most practical items? Passport, phone, backup hard drive, wallet, backing the car out of the garage?

For a great digital collection of others’ answers, go to http://theburninghouse.com. It’s a community photo blog created by photographer Foster Huntington around this pressing question. People lay out and snap an image of everything they would bring from their burning home, then post it with a quick text description that others can comment on.

Items that people say they’d run out of the house with include phones, iPods, journals, old print pictures, childhood keepsakes and favorite clothing items. One 27-year-old from Iran said he’d grab his wedding ring, a lighter and cigarettes (the power of nicotine). Husband and wife 20-somethings from Australia would each clutch one side of a vintage record player cabinet, stacked with a mandolin. They’d also grab a quilt, a rare Louis Armstrong record and the husband’s favorite Italian leather shoes.

Other surprising items include a box of multigrain cereal, a mounted deer hoof, an ABBA record (really? ABBA?), a feather collection and a bottle of Hendrick’s gin “to drink while watching the house burn.”  Personally, I prefer Tanqueray, but to each his own, I suppose.

In short, the burning house question provides an opportunity to give a response that reveals our deeply held values and personality quirks. And today’s Epistle asks a similar diagnostic question of us, but on the spiritual level. The question: If your life were coming to an end and not your house, what would you carry with you into eternity?

The apostle Paul’s answer is: “Not a blessed thing – except the righteousness of Jesus Christ.”

Painted with the broadest of brushes, Paul has argued that all people, Jew and Gentile alike, are separated from God (see Romans 3:23). But now he also suggests that the grace and mercy of God has been extended to all, Jew and Gentile alike, including the very righteousness of Christ to all who believe. This change of heart and mind comes to us through sola fide, faith alone. It secures a judgment that we’re not guilty, an acquittal, as it were.

And this astonishing verdict is the result of nothing humans have done, but is the gift of God, freely given. Paul is also refuting theoretical objections from Jewish opposition who might claim their ancestry or adherence to the law as worthy of notice, or as qualifying at the very least for special consideration.

For instance, Abraham had a great resume that could certainly earn him favor with God:

• Obediently agreed to transplant his family geographically.
• Hoped in God to fulfill the promise regarding his offspring (v. 18).
• Was stunningly faithful when asked by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac.
• Buried his wife in Canaan before seeing the fulfillment of all God’s promises.
• Became the father of many nations.

But here’s the key to today’s Epistle – despite these great works, “his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness’” (v. 22). And likewise for all of us after Abraham, our right standing with God “will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (v. 24).

So if our life were coming to an end and not our house, what should we bring in our arms to present to God?

• Not all the good things we’ve done
• Not religious laws
• Not the Christian legacy of our family
• Not denominational affiliation
• Not correct doctrine
• Not a lifetime of prayer and love of the Scriptures
• Simply faith in Jesus Christ.

The implication of right standing through faith in Christ alone is that we can’t do anything that will make God love us any more. Neither can we do anything that will cause God to love us any less.

Brennan Manning once said, “The most difficult part of mature faith is allowing yourself in your brokenness to be the object of the vast delight of the risen Jesus.” Since we are justified by Christ, we must do the hard work of believing God loves us, allowing ourselves to feel loved by him, and then living as the beloved.

In The Search for Significance, author Robert McGee suggests that for many Christians, there is a subtle and unexamined equation to our faith: Spiritual Self-Worth = Performance + Others’ Opinions. To feel good about our relationship with God, we need to pray more, sin less, love hard people, serve in hard ministries. The performance list goes on and on. McGee’s answer to this broken equation? The doctrine of justification by faith alone.

He asks provocative questions to those trapped in a Christian version of works righteousness: “When God considers you, does God deceive himself in some way or does God know who you truly are? If you think of yourself differently than God thinks of you, who is mistaken, you or God?”

Justification replaces our performance with Christ’s performance, and gets us to view ourselves as God views us.

Author Neil Anderson poses an interesting experiment. Ask a Christian who they are in relation to their faith, and they’ll probably answer with denominational or doctrinal tags, or they’ll speak about their gifts or roles in church service. But is this who they are? What we do with our faith does not determine who we are. Who we are determines what we do, and what we think, and what we feel.

Paul argues elsewhere that Christians are new creations; an entirely new set of realities describes us as justified by Christ. We’re sons and daughters of God. Christ is not ashamed to call us “brothers and sisters.” We are the workmanship of God. We are saints, even while we are still sinners. That which God says is true of us, is true of us. It doesn’t matter if we believe those truths. It doesn’t matter how we feel about them. It doesn’t matter how our past experiences condition our trust in them.

As we look at Paul’s premise of justification by faith, there’s one glorious message that leaps off the pages; “That which God requires, God provides.”

If we want to emerge from the often-burning wreckage of false beliefs, we only need to carry one thing along with us. It is that which God already provides us through faith in Jesus Christ – our unqualified approval as we stand and walk with God, for now and all eternity.

In the words of the old gospel hymn, Rock of Ages: “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.”