Justification isn’t a term to understand, but the organic result of God’s love reaching man. In Romans 4, Paul tells us that Abraham was justified not from his works but by faith in God. Many know Abraham as the “father of faith,” but this faith of Abraham is not what we think it is. Outwardly, Abraham was a sojourner, a foreigner, a person living in a tent, a man who sold his wife twice, and who considered his body already dead (4:19). How could he be considered righteous? Yet what justified Abraham is God’s infinite love, personified as the true Husband, covering him unconditionally.
This love is powerful because of the Person. When we have Him, we are in a perfect state of being loved, right, joyful, satisfied, and glorious. We want nothing; there’s no desire that can take us from our Husband. We are owned by Him. We have love, grace, peace, life, hope, and glory only in the Lord. They are initiated by and from Him for yielding a testimony of a marriage. From the beginning to the end is this love. From our first day with the Lord, this unconditional love has been the ground for our justification before Him.
The church life is the place where we live out this justification. Here, through a living domain that is hosted by the saints, this personified Love can be revealed, experienced, and realized. We are able to live in a daily condition filled with subjective and transfusing moments in Christ, all for us to enter into the reality of being the bride who is in a perfect and happy marriage with our true Husband today. When we are in this divine and experiential relationship, we cease all the self-driven wanting from the nature of Cain. We are settled and one with Christ who loved us first and ushered us into the household of God to know the hope of our calling.
(Above are notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 7/3/2024, not reviewed by the speaker.)