When God accepts a sinner, He is, in fact, only accepting Christ. He looks into the sinner’s eyes, and He sees His own dear Son’s image there, and He takes him in.<\/i> – Charles Spurgeon<\/p>\n\n\n
Who am I to argue with the late, great Charles Spurgeon, but I think this whole “imputed righteousness” idea is likely bull hockey.<\/p>\n\n\n
It’s another one of those ideas you hear floated in so many sermons – “When God looks at you, He doesn’t see your sins, He sees His Son’s righteousness” – but I have never really examined it in Scripture.<\/p>\n\n\n
I plan to investigate it, but at the moment I am guessing it’s just one of those things that sounds good, so pastors repeat it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
It’s got at least 3 things going for it:<\/p>\n\n\n
Still, I’m going to need to see the receipts from the Bible on this one.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Because here’s the problem: it seems to imply that this is all there is to salvation. Jesus did all the sacrificing and suffering and now He just covers you with His own righteousness.<\/p>\n\n\n
But if we get to enjoy all the benefits of righteousness imputed to us – without actually developing our own righteousness – that’s demotivating.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Sanctification isn’t just some legal fiction. It’s supposed to be our lived experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
In Colossians 1:22, Paul says that Christ “has now reconciled you in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before God”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Is Paul talking of some sort of imaginary righteousness that is won by Christ’s death?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Or did Christ die to make us truly righteous through and through?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When God accepts a sinner, He is, in fact, only accepting Christ. He looks into the sinner’s eyes, and He sees His own dear Son’s image there, and He takes him in. – Charles Spurgeon Who am I to argue with the late, great Charles Spurgeon, but I think this whole “imputed righteousness” idea is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,4,7,2,3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colossians","category-holy","category-imputed","category-paul","category-righteousness","category-sanctification","category-spurgeon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1907"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1908,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions\/1908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}