The Cross and Being Right

[HKHaugan]

Here is the human condition; people have a mind, a heart and a spirit. They have the ability to trust and justify what they trust in. If all these gifts are used apart from God the end is disastrous.

There is another internal need lurking in those shadows, the need that urges the mind to say ‘It’s OK, you’re doing the right thing.” It’s called self-justification, the need to use our mind to give a logical reason for our behavior. It is the mind that is under attack as well as the heart. The mind without directions from the Creator of the mind will seek to justify, make logically right, whatever we do apart from Him. Somehow we believe that just justifying something makes it right.

So the need to be right in the heart brings with it the need to be right in the mind, to justify why we respond to the need to be right the way we do. There is a real problem here because no matter how much wealth one has there is no ultimate satisfaction. No matter how successful you have been at self-justification there is always the realization that all that energy still hasn’t made you right within. This applies to every endeavor of human undertaking, in the arts, in education, in personal relationships. There is always another stone to be turned over for that elusive sense of being right in the heart and right with the world.

The path to right has many crossroads until we face one day that unless the One who is right is met, all those paths have dead ends. Our momentary justifications were puffs of smoke, mirages of false promises and we stop. That is the moment a waiting Lord, the Lord Jesus, stands with arms outstretched to receive us, to make us right, to justify us within. In Him we find the Lord of right, the One who gives us right as a gift and the One who tells us when we receive Him that He has never left us. He has maintained us and sustained us for that moment.

How do we know that He is who He says He is and can remake us from within? There are three things He did. He lived in our aloneness, He died the same as the rest of us do and He rose from the dead.

First, there is nothing that we go through in our hearts and minds that He has not been through. He has moved relentlessly through the invisible processes of each us with all the temptations we have to choose self over His Father. He always considered His Father and His will first. His Spirit was at one with His Father and that sense of spiritual presence let Him know He was never alone. His heart was right with His Father so He was right in His heart and that gave Him a justified mind. He was justified by the belief, the trust, the faith He had in His Father through His Spirit. It is this fact of faith in His Father that Paul found to be the solution to his lonely needs to be right, to think right and to act right. He found that a relationship with the One who is perfectly right with God justified Him from within.

Second, what that means for each of us is that Jesus’ death on the Cross was His sacrifice on our behalf. He demonstrated, became the universal example, of what a relationship His Father meant. He was willing to die in our place to answer for our negligent sinful hearts because no human being could meet that challenge. He dies to forgive what we in our aloneness did to others and ourselves as we exploited them for personal gain emotionally and physically. Only He had the faith and the Spirit of life that could meet our ultimate aloneness, our ultimate need to be right in the heart and the need of a restless lonely mind to be justified. He meets that need to be right within and that need to be right in the world around you.

Third, the proof of what His death accomplished came to light when He rose from the dead. That sealed the promise of being right in the mind, the heart and the spirit in each of us. This relationship with Him is the source of the inner stability called peace, the sources of inner balance in a world that keeps a lonely heart always on edge, anxious and uncertain. It is the promise that what sin and evil have done to condition us in life without God can now be healed, turned around and used for helping others to gain the right balance in their lives. To as many as receive Him, trust Him, He gives them the inner sense of right, the right to be children of God and inheritors of the kingdom of justified hearts forever.

What these three things are basically saying is that accepting Jesus as a personal living standard in our hearts allows His right to be reproduced in us through faith. It is that faith that lets Him work His constant right in us and through us. We, through faith in Him, allow His right to replace our imperfections, our guilt and our tendency to go it alone. So when we are asked to justify how we think, justify how we act, justify our unjustifiable selves, we have the answer. We are justified by faith in Jesus. We no longer have to struggle to explain and justify ourselves. It’s not about self-confidence. It is about confidence in Him, simply trusting Him. As we trust His confidence He restores our confidence.

He is the Righteous One, which means the Right One, the One who is never wrong. He is right (totally confident within), right without (always right in what He says and does) and right with His Father (relationally perfect with His Father and recognized by His Father as such. His relationship with His Father is perfect. His relationship with the Spirit is perfect. God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are perfectly right with each other so it is their right we embrace through faith. That is why the Bible says, “The righteous (people who accept that God is right) shall live by faith (Hab.2:4)” and “Abraham believed the Lord, and He credited it to him as righteousness (Rom.4:3, Gen.15:6).”

The absence of right proves the point of a flaw in human nature, which is called sin. Sin is being spiritually separated from our Creator. The need to be right shows us that we are separated from the source of right, God. The fact that we have that need means we don’t have what meets it. In the beginning we were created in the image of God who is right to be right with Him, with ourselves, with others and with our physical environment.