CHAPTER seven
CHAPTER seven
All in Christ
Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, and Redemption
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Among all the texts of Scripture that I preached across thirty-five years of ministry, one passage stands above the others not in terms of fame — the new birth sermons were more famous — but in terms of theological completeness. It is a single verse from Paul's first letter to the Corinthian church, and it contains, compressed into its thirty-one words, the entire architecture of the Gospel. It is the text that I returned to again and again when I wanted to show a congregation not merely that they needed Christ but precisely what they had in Him when they received Him by faith. I am speaking of
(1 Corinthians 1:30 KJV) "But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption."
Of him are ye in Christ Jesus. Everything begins there. Not of yourselves — that is the very point the Apostle has been laboring toward in the preceding verses, where he has reminded the Corinthians that not many of them were wise by the world's standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. God has chosen the foolish things to confound the wise. God has chosen the weak things to confound the mighty. God has chosen the base things, the despised things, the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are — so that no flesh should glory in His presence. And then, having stripped away every human basis for boasting, Paul presents the only legitimate foundation for glory: Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.
I preached this text many times, in many places, to many different kinds of audiences. I preached it to crowds of coal miners in the Bristol fields and to drawing rooms full of London aristocrats. I preached it in American cities still vibrating with the energy of the first Great Awakening and in small country churches where the revival had only been a rumor. Every time I opened this text, I found in it something fresh — some angle of the light by which it illuminated the vast riches of what it means to belong to Jesus Christ. Let me walk you through it now, as I walked congregations through it across thirty-five years.
Before I do, I want to note the particular poignancy of this text for the church to which it was addressed. The Corinthians were a troubled church. They were divided by personality cults — some following Paul, some Apollos, some Cephas. They were morally compromised. They were theologically confused about a dozen important matters. They were, in short, a mess. And into this mess, Paul writes with the full authority of the apostolic calling: but of him are ye in Christ Jesus. Despite the mess. Despite the failure. Despite the factions and the confusion and the moral disorder. In Christ Jesus. That is where they are. That is what they are. And it changes everything. (Romans 8:1 KJV): "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus." No condemnation. Not reduced condemnation. Not provisional condemnation pending further review. None. The person who is in Christ Jesus — genuinely, through repentance and faith — stands before God with no condemning charge against them. Not because they are perfect, but because He is. Not because their record is clean, but because His is, and His has been credited to their account.
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Christ as Wisdom: Knowing What Actually Matters
The first thing that Paul says Christ is made to us is wisdom. This is not the wisdom of the philosophers, though philosophical wisdom has its uses and its dignities. This is not the wisdom of worldly prudence, the wisdom that tells a man how to advance his career and manage his reputation and navigate the social currents of his time. This is the wisdom that the Greeks called Sophia and the Hebrews called chokmah — the wisdom of knowing reality as it actually is, not as we prefer to imagine it.
Let me be specific about what that means, because vagueness about wisdom is itself a form of foolishness. The wisdom that Christ is made to us consists, first and most essentially, in knowing ourselves. I took this from an ancient Greek philosopher — Know thyself was accounted the height of wisdom in that culture — and I mean to press it with all its weight. Before a soul comes to Christ, it does not know itself. It knows things about itself, certainly. It knows its preferences and its habits and its social identity and its professional competence. But it does not know the deep truth about itself: that it is fallen, that it is sinful at the root and not merely the branches, that it stands under the righteous judgment of a holy God, that it is poor and miserable and blind and naked in exactly the ways that matter most.
The wisdom that Christ imparts begins with this self-knowledge — not the morbid, self-absorbed rumination that mistakes introspection for insight, but the clear-eyed recognition, worked by the Spirit of God through the Word of God, of what we actually are apart from grace. When a person has been truly brought to Christ, they begin, for the first time, to see themselves as God sees them. Not as their admirers see them. Not as their critics see them. Not as they prefer to see themselves in their most self-flattering moments. As God sees them — which is to say, with perfect clarity and perfect accuracy — and they find in that seeing not despair but the beginning of genuine freedom.
The second dimension of this wisdom is knowing God. Not knowing about God — that is available to anyone with access to a theology book. Knowing God: having the personal, experiential, transforming knowledge of the living God that the Scriptures describe as eternal life itself. The wisdom Christ gives includes the capacity — absent before conversion and impossible to manufacture by any natural means — to read the Scriptures and hear them as the voice of a Father addressing His child. To enter into prayer and encounter a genuinely present Person rather than speaking into what the natural man suspects is an empty room. To look at the created world and see, behind its beauty and its order, the signature of the One who made it and sustains it and will one day redeem it.
The third dimension of this wisdom is knowing what matters. The world's wisdom is constantly telling us what to pursue — wealth, status, reputation, pleasure, security, approval. These things are not nothing; I am not so otherworldly as to despise all of them. But the wisdom Christ gives reorganizes the hierarchy of value in a person's life with a clarity that the best secular philosophy can only approximate. It says: what matters is not what you have but what you are. What matters is not what men think of you but what God knows about you. What matters is not the success of this brief, uncertain life but the character that is being formed in you by the Holy Spirit for an eternity that makes this life look like a single sentence in a very long book.
I pressed this on every congregation with specific application. I asked people to examine what they were actually pursuing with the energy of their lives. Was it wisdom? Was it the one thing needful? Or was it vanity — the beautiful, intoxicating, entirely temporary vanity that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes describes with such unflinching accuracy? (Ecclesiastes 12:13 KJV): "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." The whole duty. Not one part of a balanced life. The whole. Fear God and keep His commandments. Everything else — every ambition, every achievement, every relationship, every pleasure — finds its proper proportion only when it is ordered around that central reality. Disordered from it, even the best things in life become idols. Ordered by it, even the ordinary things in life become worship.
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Christ as Righteousness: The Robe That Covers Everything
The second thing Paul says Christ is made to us is righteousness — and this is the most astonishing of the four, the one that stops me cold every time I approach it, even after thirty-five years of preaching it. Because what Paul is saying here is not merely that Christ makes us better than we were or gives us help to be more righteous than we could be on our own. He is saying that Christ's own personal righteousness — the full, perfect, unblemished righteousness of the eternal Son of God — is credited to the account of every person who comes to Him in faith.
Think about what this means in practice. You stand before the judgment seat of God. The books are opened. Every thought you have ever had, every word you have ever spoken, every deed you have ever done — publicly or privately, waking or sleeping, in your best moments and your worst — all of it is there. And the accounting begins. And you know, with a clarity that no self-deception can survive in that moment, that the account does not balance. That there is an infinite gap between what the holy God who made you had the right to expect from you and what you actually delivered across the span of your life.
But the person who is in Christ Jesus — truly, genuinely, savingly in Christ — has something to offer in that moment that no human achievement could ever provide: the righteousness of the Son of God, imputed to their account by grace through faith. Not their righteousness. Not their improved record since conversion. His. The righteousness that perfectly obeyed the Father's will in thirty-three years of life in a fallen world, that went to Calvary and endured the cross not for His own sin but for theirs, that satisfied every demand of the divine law on their behalf. That righteousness stands to their account. It is theirs as surely as if they had lived it themselves — not because they earned it, but because the covenant of grace transfers it freely to all who receive it by faith.
I called this the great exchange, and I preached it with everything I had, because I believe it is the most wonderful transaction in the history of the universe. He took their sin. They received His righteousness. He was made sin for them — He who knew no sin — that they might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Two thousand years have not diminished the wonder of it. It was staggering in Paul's day and it is staggering still. The King of heaven takes on Himself the guilt of His subjects' rebellion, and drapes His own spotless record around their shoulders like a robe, and presents them before His Father as perfectly righteous in His sight. Not because they are. Because He is, and because His righteousness is theirs by covenant and by grace.
I asked my congregations: do you know this? Not — have you heard it? Have you agreed with it as a doctrinal proposition? Do you know it the way a man knows something that has changed the deepest level of his relationship with reality? Because the person who truly knows that Christ is their righteousness before God walks differently through the world than the person who does not. They are freed from the exhausting, impossible labor of trying to be good enough — because the standard has been met, once and for all, by One who was perfect. They are freed from the paralysis of guilt — because the guilt has been dealt with at Calvary, finally and completely. They are freed to pursue holiness not as the desperate effort to earn something they lack but as the grateful response to something they have received. (Romans 8:33-34 KJV): "Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us." Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? The answer, in the original Greek, carries the force of a challenge thrown down in open court: no one. Nothing. No charge can stand against the person for whom Christ has died and risen and is even now interceding at the right hand of the Father. That is your standing, if you are in Christ. Stand in it. Walk in it. Let it free you from every fear that does not come from love, and fill you with every love that drives out fear.
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Christ as Sanctification: The Work That Never Stops
The third gift is sanctification, and I want to spend considerable time here because it is both theologically rich and practically urgent — and because it is the one of the four that requires the most from us in terms of daily cooperation with what God is doing.
Righteousness, as I have described it, is imputed — credited to our account from outside ourselves by the grace of God, received by faith alone. Sanctification is imparted — worked into the fabric of our actual character and behavior by the Holy Spirit over the course of a lifetime, through the means of grace and the furnace of circumstances and the daily discipline of a will submitted to God's will. The two things are distinct but inseparable. You cannot have genuine justification without genuine sanctification following from it. And genuine sanctification is always grounded in and directed toward the imputed righteousness of Christ — it does not add to that righteousness, it reflects it.
Let me describe what I mean by genuine sanctification, because the word has been debased in some quarters to mean merely the adoption of better habits or the avoidance of the most visible sins. That is not what I mean. Genuine sanctification is the progressive transformation of the whole person — mind, will, emotion, habit, desire — into conformity with the character of Jesus Christ. It is not the outward polish of a respectable Christian life. It is the inward renovation of a soul that has been captured by the grace of God and is being, day by day and year by year, remade in the image of the One who captured it.
This transformation is not passive. God works it, but He does not work it without our cooperation. The Apostle Paul commands us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, precisely because it is God who is at work in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. The two halves of that sentence are not contradictory — they are complementary. Because He is working in you, you are enabled to work. Because His Spirit is present and active in your soul, your effort is not in vain. You are not hauling yourself up by your own bootstraps. You are responding, in the power He supplies, to the drawing and the enabling of the God who has already claimed you as His own.
The means of sanctification are not mysterious. They are the ordinary, daily, repeated practices that every serious Christian understands in theory and often neglects in practice: the Word of God, read and meditated and applied; prayer, offered in faith and persistence; Christian fellowship, in which believers speak honestly to each other about the state of their souls and hold each other accountable; the Lord's Supper, received in genuine repentance and genuine faith; suffering, endured with patience and interpreted through the lens of a God who is sovereign and good. These are the instruments through which the Holy Spirit does His transforming work. They are not magic. They do not work automatically or mechanically. But the person who consistently, faithfully, perseveringly engages them will find, over the arc of a lifetime, that they are genuinely different from what they were — that the rough edges are smoother, the dominant sins have less grip, the virtues are more deeply rooted, the love for God is more real and more constant.
I warned my congregations against two errors in relation to sanctification. The first was the error of thinking it had already been achieved — the self-satisfaction of the person who has been a Christian for twenty years and has stopped growing, who has confused the absence of dramatic visible sin with the presence of genuine holiness. The Apostle Paul, at the end of his life, described himself as pressing toward the mark, straining forward, not having yet apprehended. If Paul had not yet arrived, none of us should imagine we have. The second error was despair — the paralysis of the person who sees how far they are from Christhkeness and concludes that the distance is too great to be crossed. (Philippians 1:6 KJV): "Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." He who began the work will perform it. The sanctification of a believer is not a project that God starts and then abandons when it becomes difficult. It is a commitment He makes at the moment of new birth and fulfills without fail until the day of Christ — the day when what He began in us is finally and perfectly completed. Between here and there: press on, trust Him, use the means, endure the furnace, and do not mistake the distance remaining for evidence that the journey has stalled.
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Christ as Redemption: The Final and Complete Deliverance
The fourth and final gift that Paul names is redemption — and this one has a particular quality of future-orientation that the previous three do not quite have. Wisdom, righteousness, and sanctification are all present realities for the person in Christ, however imperfectly realized. Redemption, in the full sense that Paul intends here, points toward the completion of what has been begun — the final, total, irreversible deliverance of the whole person — body and soul — from everything that sin and death and the curse have done to them.
The redeemed soul has already received something of its redemption. The chains of guilt have been broken by justification. The power of sin has been progressively weakened by sanctification. The fear of death has been replaced, in the genuinely converted person, by the confident hope of resurrection. But the full redemption — the resurrection of the body, the renewal of all things, the final removal of every last trace of corruption and pain and death from the life of the believer — that lies ahead. It is coming. It is as certain as any promise God has ever made. But it has not yet arrived.
I preached this future dimension of redemption with increasing urgency as my own physical deterioration made it more personally relevant. When a man's body is failing — when breathing is difficult and the face that looks back from the mirror is older than the person inside feels — the resurrection becomes more than doctrine. It becomes the object of an active, specific, daily hope. The hope that this body, worn and weakened and ultimately mortal, will one day be clothed with a body of glory — a body that does not age, does not tire, does not struggle for breath, does not yield to the slow assault of time. A body fit for eternity. A body like His glorious body.
But redemption in this verse also carries the meaning of the complete liberation of the whole of created reality from the bondage of corruption. The Christian's redemption is not merely personal. It is cosmic. It is the first installment of a project that will culminate in the new heavens and the new earth — in the full renewal of all that God made and that sin has marred. The groaning of creation that Paul describes in Romans eight — the travail of a world straining toward its own redemption — will end when the sons of God are fully manifested, when the last enemy has been destroyed, when God is all in all. This is the horizon of the Gospel. Not merely saved souls in a disembodied heaven, but a redeemed cosmos in which righteousness dwells, in which the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, in which God walks with His people as He walked with Adam in the garden, and there is no more night, and no more curse, and no more death.
I told my congregations that this hope — this specific, concrete, bodily, cosmic hope — is not escapism. It is not the opiate of people who cannot cope with reality. It is the most thoroughly realistic thing in the world, because it takes seriously what the Bible says about what is wrong with the world and about what God intends to do about it. The world is broken. Deeply, pervasively, catastrophically broken. And the God who made it is not going to abandon it. He is going to redeem it — all of it, from the ground up, from the individual soul to the whole of created reality. That redemption has been secured by the cross and will be completed at the return of Jesus Christ. (Revelation 21:4-5 KJV): "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new." All things new. Not patched up, not restored to their former condition, not returned to the status quo before the fall. New. The new heavens and the new earth — a creation that has never been, a perfection that Adam in the garden was only a pale foreshadowing of. That is the destination of the Gospel. That is the end toward which the entire project of redemption is moving. And the person who belongs to Christ belongs to that end. It is their inheritance. It is waiting for them.
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The Unity of the Four: Why They Cannot Be Separated
I want to pause before we move forward and say something about the unity of these four gifts, because one of the most dangerous errors in Christian theology is to take one of them without the others — and every heresy in the history of the church is, at root, some version of exactly that mistake.
Take wisdom without righteousness, and you get the intellectual Christian who knows everything about the faith but has never been justified — who can explain the atonement in precise theological detail but has never personally stood at the foot of the cross with empty hands and received its benefit. These people exist in every generation, and they are among the hardest to reach precisely because their knowledge has inoculated them against the very transformation that knowledge should serve.
Take righteousness without sanctification, and you get the easy-believism that content to announce that Christ has paid for everything and therefore nothing is required of the believer — that confession is the only act of faith, that obedience is optional, that the grace that covers sin is indifferent to the sin it covers. This is antinomianism — the belief that grace cancels the moral law rather than fulfilling it — and it is not only theologically false but pastorally deadly. Paul himself addressed it directly: shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid. He that is dead to sin — truly dead, through genuine union with Christ in His death — cannot live any longer therein.
Take sanctification without the assurance of ultimate redemption, and you get the exhausted, joyless Christian who is working frantically to maintain a standard they know they are failing — who has lost sight of the finished work of Christ in their anxiety about their own unfinished work. Sanctification is a genuine work and it requires genuine effort, but it must always be carried out against the backdrop of the certainty of final redemption. We do not press on in the hope that we will eventually earn God's final approval. We press on because final approval has already been secured by Christ, and the pressing on is our grateful response to what He has already accomplished.
And take any of the four without the source from which they all flow — Christ Jesus Himself, who of God is made all these things to us — and you have nothing but religious concepts floating free of their only genuine ground. Wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption are not abstract principles. They are not qualities that can be cultivated independently through discipline and study and good intentions. They are in Christ. They exist only in union with Him. They are received only by faith in Him. They are maintained only by abiding in Him. (John 15:5 KJV): "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing." Without me ye can do nothing. This is not false modesty. It is not spiritual rhetoric. It is the plain statement of the most important fact in the Christian life. Every good thing that a believer ever is or does or has flows from union with the Vine. Sever the branch from the Vine and it withers immediately, regardless of how green it looked while it was still attached. Stay in the Vine — in Christ, in His Word, in His Spirit, in the fellowship of His people — and the fruit is not the result of your effort alone. It is the life of the Vine flowing through the branch, producing what neither the branch nor the effort could produce on its own.
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Ministering to Individual Souls: The Pastoral Heart
The great sermons and the great revival meetings are the visible face of my ministry, and I do not minimize them — they were real and their fruit was lasting. But there is another face of the ministry that is less often described, and which I believe was equally important in the overall economy of what God was doing through those years: the ministry to individual souls, one at a time, in private conversation.
In the later years of my ministry, I spent more time in what I called pious conversation with individuals and less time in the dramatic scenes of mass outdoor preaching. This was partly a function of my declining health — the sustained physical effort of field preaching became increasingly difficult as the asthma worsened. But it was also a deliberate pastoral choice. I had learned something over thirty years of ministry that the early years did not teach me so clearly: that the work of genuine spiritual formation almost always happens in the particular, not the general. That a sermon can break the ground and plant the seed, but the slow growth into genuine Christian maturity usually requires the kind of patient, honest, specific engagement that only individual or small-group conversation provides.
I would sit with a person for hours — asking questions, listening carefully, pressing gently on the places where I sensed that something important was unresolved or unexamined, offering what I believed the Scripture said about their specific situation with as much directness and as much grace as I could manage simultaneously. I was not always diplomatic. I have never been particularly given to saying what people wanted to hear when what they needed to hear was different. But I tried always to speak the difficult things from a place of genuine love — love that honored the person enough to tell them the truth rather than protecting itself from their discomfort by telling them something comfortable but useless.
I also, in those individual conversations, listened to the kinds of testimonies that never appear in published accounts — the quiet, private, unglamorous struggles and victories of ordinary Christian lives. The widow in some small colonial town who had been a Christian for twenty years and had never spoken to anyone about the secret doubts that had been eating at her faith. The prosperous merchant who had everything the world counted as success and a hollow emptiness at the center of it that all the success had never filled. The young minister who had been ordained with great expectation and had found, after five years of faithful labor, that the congregation was largely unchanged and he himself was growing cold. These were the people I spent time with in those later years, and these were the conversations that I believe did as much lasting good as any of the great field meetings, because they addressed real people in their real conditions with the specific, accurate, personally applicable truth that only genuine pastoral attention can provide.
What I found, in all those individual conversations, was the same thing I had always found in the crowds: the message that every human soul needed, whether they knew it or not, was always the same. Not the same words — the words had to be calibrated to the specific condition of the person before me. But the same substance. Christ is made to you wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. Whatever you lack, He has it. Whatever you fear, He answers it. Whatever you have lost, He restores it. Whatever you carry, He can bear it. (Matthew 11:28 KJV): "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." All. Not the specially qualified. Not the theologically sophisticated. Not the emotionally ready or the morally prepared. All. Every laboring, heavy-laden soul — the widow with her doubts and the merchant with his emptiness and the minister with his cold heart and every person reading these pages in whatever year and whatever circumstance they find themselves. Come. He gives rest. The rest of wisdom that finally makes sense of existence. The rest of righteousness that stops the exhausting effort to earn what has already been freely given. The rest of sanctification that trusts the One who began the work to complete it. The rest of redemption that knows the end of the story and is therefore free to live the middle pages without terror.
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The Particular Mercy: How Christ Meets Every Kind of Sinner
One of the things that distinguished my preaching from more abstract theological instruction was my insistence on the particular, personal application of the Gospel. I did not want to leave my congregations with the impression that the mercy of Christ was a general principle that applied to humanity in the aggregate and might apply to them in theory. I wanted them to know — with the kind of knowing that moves a person, that gets beneath the intellectual surface and reaches the place where real decisions are made — that the mercy of Christ was for them specifically, in their specific condition, with their specific history of failure and shame.
I would walk through a long list of the kinds of people to whom the mercy of Christ had come in the pages of Scripture, and I would let each one land with its full weight. Zacchaeus the tax collector — a man who had gotten rich by cheating the poor, who had climbed a tree to see Jesus out of what he thought was mere curiosity, who had not come to repent and had not come to believe but had simply come to look — and Jesus stopped under that tree, looked up, and said: Zacchaeus, come down, for today I must stay at your house. Not: when you have made restitution. Not: after you have demonstrated genuine contrition. Today. Now. Just as you are. The transformation could wait for the dinner table; the coming was immediate, unconditional, initiated entirely by the One who had stopped under the tree.
The thief on the cross. This man was not a sympathetic figure. He had done nothing to earn the position he occupied, except to occupy it. He had lived badly and was dying badly. He had, by his own admission, done wrong and was receiving the just reward of his deeds. And in the last hours of his life, with no opportunity to be baptized, no time to be catechized, no chance to demonstrate the fruit of genuine transformation, he turned to the dying man beside him and said: Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And the Lord answered: Today shalt thou be with me in paradise. Not: perhaps. Not: we shall see what the record shows. Today. Paradise. Come.
The woman taken in adultery. The woman at the well who had had five husbands. The prodigal son who had wasted his inheritance on riotous living and was returning home in shame, intending to ask his father to be received as a servant rather than a son — and the father running to meet him while he was yet a great way off, not waiting for the rehearsed speech of repentance, not requiring a formal period of probation, but throwing his arms around the muddy, pig-smelling returning son and calling for the best robe and the ring and the celebration. This is what the mercy of Christ looks like in its concrete particularity. Not a principle. Not a policy. A father running.
I told my congregations plainly: I despair of none of you, however vile and profligate you have been. I said this from the pulpit and I meant it from the bottom of my heart. Because if the mercy that met Paul the persecutor and Zacchaeus the extortioner and the thief on the cross and the prodigal son is the same mercy that is offered to every person in every field and every meeting house, then there is no category of person too far gone, no history too shameful, no record too damaged to be beyond its reach. (1 Timothy 1:15 KJV): "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." The chief of sinners. Paul did not write that as a rhetorical flourish. He meant it. And the God who had mercy on the chief of sinners has mercy enough for every sinner beneath that level — which is, as far as I can tell, the rest of us. Come, whatever you have done. Come, whoever you are. The running Father is already watching the road.
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The Privileges of the Believer: Living in the Light of What You Have
I want to turn now from the gifts themselves to the question of how a believer is meant to live in the light of them — what it looks like, practically and daily, to inhabit the reality that Christ has been made to you wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.
The first practical implication is gratitude. A person who has genuinely understood what they have received in Christ cannot move through ordinary life in a state of spiritual neutrality. Gratitude must be the fundamental atmospheric condition of the Christian life — not the performed gratitude of someone who is trying to be appropriately thankful, but the spontaneous, overflowing gratitude of someone who has been reached by what they did not deserve, saved from what they fully deserved, and given what they could never have earned. This gratitude is not reserved for Sunday mornings or for the great moments of spiritual experience. It colors everything — the ordinary meal, the ordinary conversation, the ordinary morning, the ordinary difficulty. All of it is seen through the lens of what God has done in Christ, and that lens transforms the entire spectrum.
The second practical implication is boldness. A person who knows that Christ is their righteousness before God has nothing to prove to anyone — including themselves. The perpetual anxiety of the almost Christian, who is never quite sure whether they have been good enough and must therefore constantly maintain the performance, is not available to the person who has genuinely received the imputed righteousness of Christ. Their standing before God does not fluctuate with their performance. It is secured by His. This produces a kind of freedom — a boldness to speak truth, to take risks in the service of the Gospel, to stand for what is right even when it is costly — that is one of the most attractive and most distinctive marks of genuine Christian character.
The third practical implication is compassion. A person who has genuinely received mercy tends, though not automatically and not without effort, to become more merciful. The person who has stood at the foot of the cross and seen what their sin cost the Son of God has a changed relationship with the sins of others. They cannot look at another human being's failure with the cold contempt of someone who has never needed to be forgiven, because they know they have needed it — abundantly, repeatedly, specifically. They may still feel the sting of being wronged. They may still need to process the pain of betrayal or injustice. But underneath the pain, if their faith is real, there is a reservoir of mercy that draws from the infinite reservoir of the mercy that has been shown to them.
I tried to communicate this in my preaching on the Lord's Prayer, specifically on that petition: forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. The connection that Jesus draws between our reception of forgiveness and our extension of it to others is not accidental and not optional. It is the logic of the Gospel working itself out in daily life. We forgive because we have been forgiven. We show mercy because mercy has been shown to us. And when we find ourselves unable to forgive — when the bitterness sits too heavy and the grievance is too real and the mercy seems simply beyond our capacity — the answer is not to try harder to be more forgiving. The answer is to return to the cross, to look again at what was done there for us, to receive again the mercy that was purchased there. Out of genuine reception of that mercy flows the capacity to extend it. (Colossians 3:13 KJV): "Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye." Even as Christ forgave you. That is the standard and the source simultaneously. The standard is very high. The source is sufficient for the standard. Go to the source. Stay at the cross. And what flows from it — in gratitude, in boldness, in compassion — will surprise you with its generosity.
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To the Doubter: Assurance of Faith and the Witness of the Spirit
I cannot close this chapter without speaking directly to the person who has heard everything I have described — the wisdom, the righteousness, the sanctification, the redemption, the particular mercy, the privileges of the believer — and who finds, with honesty and some distress, that they are not sure whether any of it applies to them. The person who cannot say with confidence that they are in Christ, who is uncertain about the genuineness of their faith, who goes through the motions of the Christian life while carrying a persistent secret doubt about whether they have truly been born again.
I have met these people in every congregation I have ever addressed. They are not the skeptics or the rebellious. They are often the most conscientious, the most serious, the most genuinely seeking members of any congregation — people who take the demands of the Gospel seriously enough to be alarmed by the gap between what they know should be true of a genuine Christian and what they observe in their own experience. These people are not my hardest cases. They are, in many ways, my most hopeful ones — because the very fact of their concern, the very fact that they are not comfortable with their spiritual condition, suggests that something is working in them that is not working in the person who rests comfortably in the almost-Christian life.
Let me say several things to such a person. First: the assurance of faith is not the same thing as faith itself. A person can be genuinely in Christ — genuinely saved, genuinely born again — and yet lack the full assurance of that fact. This is not an ideal state, and the Scripture encourages us to pursue assurance actively. But the absence of assurance is not evidence of the absence of genuine faith. If you have genuine repentance — if the memory of your sin genuinely grieves you and you genuinely hate it and are genuinely turning from it — and if you have genuine faith — if you are genuinely trusting in Jesus Christ as your only hope, not in your own goodness or your religious performance or any other foundation — then you are His, whether the feeling of certainty attends that reality or not.
Second: the testimony of the Holy Spirit is real and available. The Apostle Paul speaks of the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God — a direct, inward, Spirit-worked assurance that is more than argument and more than inference, though it is consistent with both. I have experienced this testimony, in its fuller and in its lesser manifestations, throughout my Christian life. It is not a permanent, unvarying experience — there are seasons when it is present with great clarity and seasons when it seems withdrawn, and the withdrawal is often connected to sin or to negligence in the means of grace. But it is real, and it is available, and the person who diligently pursues the means of grace — who reads the Word, who prays in faith, who lives in genuine repentance and genuine obedience — tends, over time, to find the assurance growing rather than diminishing.
Third: act on what you have, not on what you lack. If you are doubting the genuineness of your faith, do not wait for the doubt to be resolved before living as a Christian. Live as a Christian — use the means of grace, obey what you know, serve where you can, confess what you must — and trust that the God who rewards those who diligently seek Him will, in His time and His way, give you the assurance that you lack. Faith is not primarily a feeling. It is a direction. Turn your face toward Christ and walk toward Him, however haltingly, however uncertainly. He will meet you on the road.
And finally: remember that the Gospel is for the helpless, the doubting, and the uncertain as surely as it is for the confident. The invitation of Jesus was not addressed to those who had their spiritual act together. It was addressed to those who labored and were heavy laden — the burdened, the exhausted, the uncertain, the struggling. (Romans 10:13 KJV): "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." Whosoever. That word has carried more weight in my preaching than almost any other in the Bible, because it closes every possible escape route from the Gospel's universal offer. Not the worthy. Not the certain. Not the spiritually advanced. Whosoever — which includes the doubter, the struggling one, the person who is not quite sure whether they qualify — shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Call. That is all. Imperfect, uncertain, doubting call — still call. He hears the cry of the struggling as surely as He hears the praise of the triumphant. He is that kind of God. And that God is what all of us, in our better moments, know we need most.
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The Believer's Boast: Glory Only in the Lord
The Apostle Paul concludes his argument in 1 Corinthians 1 with a single, pointed quotation from the prophet Jeremiah: let him that glorieth, glory in the Lord. He is wrapping up the entire discussion of human wisdom and divine foolishness, of the things the world esteems and the things God has chosen, with the one principle that governs all of it. There is one legitimate boast available to the human person. One. Not your intellect, however sharp. Not your moral record, however clean. Not your religious achievements, however sincere. Not your conversion experience, however dramatic. Not even your faith itself, which is, after all, a gift. The only legitimate boast is in the Lord — in what He has done, in who He is, in the mercy He has shown that no one deserved and no one earned.
I found that this principle, fully absorbed, produced a particular quality in those who genuinely lived by it — a quality that I can only describe as a kind of cheerful groundedness. The person whose boast is truly in the Lord is freed from the anxious need to defend their own reputation, because their ultimate standing does not depend on their reputation. They are freed from the consuming ambition that drives so much of human striving, because the prize they most value has already been given. They are freed from the bitterness of wounded pride, because they are not investing their identity in the things that wounded pride requires. None of this happens automatically or fully in this life. But the direction is clear, and the people I have known who have made the most progress in genuine holiness have, without exception, been people who boasted less and less in themselves and more and more in Christ.
This is the life to which the four gifts summon us. Wisdom that knows God and knows ourselves and orders everything in between by that double knowledge. Righteousness that stands on the finished work of Christ and is freed from the labor of earning what has already been given. Sanctification that presses steadily toward the image of Christ, not in our own strength but in the power of the Spirit who has taken up residence in every genuinely converted soul. And redemption that lifts the eye beyond the present difficulty toward the certain completion of what God has begun — toward the new heavens and the new earth, the resurrection of the body, the restoration of all things, the day when God will wipe every tear from every eye and make all things new.
This is the Gospel. This is the whole of it, compressed into a single verse: But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. Of him. Not of us. Not of our effort or our merit or our choosing or our faith, which is itself His gift. Of him — of the sovereign, gracious, freely giving God who loved His people before the foundation of the world and has not stopped working for their good and His glory for a single moment since. Everything we are as Christians, everything we have, everything we hope for — it is all of Him. (1 Corinthians 1:31 KJV): "That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." In the Lord. Only in the Lord. Always in the Lord. That is the believer's boast, the believer's rest, the believer's inexhaustible and unfailing ground. And it will be more than sufficient — it will be more than we can hold — when we stand before Him on that final morning and see, at last, face to face, the full magnitude of what He has done for those He chose to love.
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Building the Body: Fellowship, Accountability, and the Community of Faith
The four gifts of Christ — wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption — are received individually by faith, but they are meant to be lived out in community. This is something I pressed with increasing conviction in the later years of my ministry, having seen too many revived individuals drift away from genuine Christian community and gradually lose what the revival had given them. The isolated Christian is a vulnerable Christian. The lone believer, unaccountable and unchallenged, slowly and almost imperceptibly drifts toward the shallows.
I encouraged — and where possible, helped to establish — the small society meetings that had been one of the most fruitful fruits of the revival years. Not the large gathering of thousands in a field, which was a regular feature of the awakening's early season. The small gathering of four or five people, meeting weekly to share honestly what God had been doing in their souls, to confess their faults to one another, to pray specifically for each other's specific needs and specific struggles. These small societies were, I believed, the nervous system of the revival — the network of living connections through which the life of the Spirit could flow from person to person and community to community.
I told the people in those societies plainly what they were for and what they were not for. They were not prayer meetings in the conventional sense, where familiar prayers were offered and familiar psalms were sung and everyone went home having performed a religious ritual without actually having been reached by it. They were laboratories of honesty — places where the masks could come down, where the real state of the soul could be named without shame, where the question 'how are you actually doing with God?' could be asked and answered truthfully. Satan, I told them, loves for us to keep his temptations to ourselves. He has far less power over a sin that has been brought into the open and laid before believing brothers and sisters than over a sin that is carried alone in secret. Confession to one another — not in the sacramental sense of the Roman tradition, but in the mutual, brotherly sense of James chapter five — is not an optional add-on to the Christian life. It is one of its essential means of grace.
The four gifts of Christ sustain and deepen in the context of genuine community. Wisdom grows through the shared reading of the Word, through the honest exchange of what God has shown us in our individual meditations, through the questions that other believers ask that push us past our comfortable conclusions into deeper engagement with the truth. Righteousness is guarded by the accountability of people who know us well enough to notice when we are drifting. Sanctification is accelerated by the witness of a believer who has, by God's grace, made genuine progress in an area where we are still struggling — whose life is a living argument that growth is possible. And the hope of final redemption burns more brightly in the company of people who share it and speak of it freely. (Hebrews 10:24-25 KJV): "And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching." As ye see the day approaching. The assembling matters more, not less, as the end draws near — because the nearer the consummation, the greater the need for the mutual encouragement and the shared hope that genuine Christian community provides. Do not forsake it. Do not let the busyness of this world or the self-sufficiency of a proud spirit keep you from the irreplaceable gift of brothers and sisters who know your name and speak truth into your life and stand with you through the long run.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —