Q. 32. What benefits do they that are effectually called partake of in this life?
A. They that are effectually called do in this life partake of justification, adoption, sanctification, and the several benefits which, in this life, do either accompany or flow from them.
“He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord." (1 Corinthians 1:30-31, NRSV)
“In printers' language to "justify" means to set type in such a way that all full lines are of equal length and are flush both left and right; in other words to put the printed lines in the right relationship with the page they're printed on and with each other. The religious sense of the word is very close to that. Being justified means being brought into right relation.” - Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (Harper & Row, 1973), 48.
One day an individual asked a church elder, if he was a Christian. He replied, “In spots.” All of us find ourselves faced with making a similar confession. God graciously came to us in Jesus Christ, called us, gave us faith, and the gift of grace, yet we often find our faith “spotty.” We have moments of steadfast faithfulness and others where we come up short and sometimes very short of the glory of God.
One of the mistakes many of us make is that we keep trying to have a better past. Life does not work that way. Your past is never going to improve, but your future can improve if you turn loose of the past. The greatest battle in our lives, however, is not with these forces that lie beyond our control, as frightening as they may be. Our greatest battle is with ourselves. Most of our defeats come because we have not learned to fight effectively against the enemy within.
Remember the scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan? When Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is dying, he says to Private Ryan to make it worth it. Earlier, he had said, "He better be worth it. He better go home and cure a disease, or invent a longer-lasting light bulb."
When the old Ryan stands before the grave of Miller, he asks his wife if he was a good man. "Tell me I have led a good life," he says.
His wife responds: "What?"
"Tell me I'm a good man."
"You are," she says. Ryan, even in his old age, was not sure he had lived a life of meaning, a life that meant something - especially in light of the fact that someone had died so that he might live.
Many of us were raised with the idea that in order to please God we have to try to be good and hope at the end our good stuff outweighs the bad. Sound familiar? Trouble is, we're never really sure how "good" good really is. Is God just sitting and watching from the heavens waiting to give us a big whack in the back of the head at the end? How do I know God is pleased with me?
"By grace you have been saved;” Paul wrote to the Ephesians, and grace was Paul’s key word. Grace and Salvation was free. There was nothing you had to do to earn it and nothing you could do to earn it. "This is not your own doing, it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast;” and God knows Paul work hard at achieving it and he boasted at how hard he worked at it, too. Paul worked as a Pharisee, boasting about the high marks he earned until the sweat ran down the forehead of all the Christian heretics, only to discover on his way to Damascus that he'd been barking up the wrong tree from the start, trying to beat and kick his way through a door that had stood wide open the whole time. "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works;” he wrote; in other words, good works were part of it, all right, but after the fact, not before (Ephesians 2:8-10).
After we are justified by faith, little by little the forgiven person becomes a forgiving person, the person who found he or she was loved became capable of love, the slob that God had had faith in anyway became de-slobbed, faithful, and good works blossomed from his branches, from her branches, like fruit from a well-watered tree. Love was the sweetest and then "joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." (Galatians 5:22-23).
Following Jesus can get complicated; theology can become confusing and doctrines can be deceptive, but here is something simple you can hold onto and understand. It is that silent force that holds the world together and ties us to the world to come. It does not change. God calls us out to partake of the life found in Jesus, in the midst of an intimate relationship, which calls us to be justified by faith, to become the children of God through adoption and to grow in holiness as we work toward sanctification.
Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning Psalm: 50
Evening Psalm: 6, 62
Jeremiah 11:1-8, 14-17
Romans 6:1-11
John 8:33-47
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