The Cross and Being Right Part 2

[HKHaugan]

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 successful we are by worldly standards there is no ultimate satisfaction. We always seem to ask ‘What if?’ What if I had done things differently? What if I had been a better person? What if I had done a better job? What if I had tried harder? What if I had done something different with my life? ‘What if?’ is the self-judgment we inflict on ourselves. Personal fulfillment only comes relationally as God has planned it in the first place.

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. We all die. This applies to every endeavor of human undertaking, in a profession, in personal relationships and in the general ‘pursuit of happiness.’ There is always another stone to be turned over for that elusive sense of being right in the heart and right with the world. When Jesus took up His Cross to die in faith it became the way for us to take up our cross which is faith in Him as He commanded.

The path to right has many ‘cross’ roads, self-justifications, until we face one day that unless the One who is right is received at each one, all those paths are dead ends without Him. Our momentary justifications were puffs of smoke and mirages of false promises. It’s at these moments 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 with His right in that moment. This is the way of the Cross.

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, we are not alone. There is nothing that we go through in our individual hearts and minds that He has not been through. He moved perfectly through all the invisible processes of temptation to choose self apart from His Father. He always considered His Father’s will first. His Spirit was at one with His Father and that faith in His Father 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 Jesus’ 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 Jesus who is perfectly right with the Father justified him from within.

Second, Jesus died just like we do. 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 be a perfect substitute for us, to be that perfect sacrifice to bridge the gap between sin and righteousness, being truly right and justified by faith. His death as a perfect human being answered our negligent sinful hearts’ condition because no fallen human being could meet that challenge. He died 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 us.

Third, Jesus rose from the dead. His resurrection is the proof of what His death accomplished. It sealed the promise of being right in the mind, the heart and the spirit in each of us. Having a personal relationship with Him is the source of the inner stability called peace, that 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 faith in Him 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. This is the way of the Cross.

Jesus 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).”