ICS Daily Devotions
Justified in Him
Ephesians 1:4 Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.
Very often we will slip into thinking of ourselves, our own effort to come before God, thus causing us to feel unworthy. The Adam thinking in us will cause us to feel condemned but the wonderful truth is we are no longer in Adam! We are in Christ and we identify with His death, burial and resurrection! He has given us tremendous spiritual blessings in Christ!
We need to keep reminding ourselves these truths daily so that we can be strengthened in our inner man daily.
We need to renew our mind or change our way of thinking by choosing not to focus on what we have done to cause God to accept us but to meditate on what we have in Christ. We should have no confidence of self but full confidence and faith in Christ! The more we remind ourselves or as the Holy Spirit remind us, the stronger we get and we will act out in line with what the word of God says that we are. We are one with the Lord in the new covenant, all that He has belongs to us and all that we have belong to Him. These truths strengthen us and cause us to be grounded in love!
This scripture tells us that we are without blame or blameless before God. This is a positional truth in Christ regarding how our God looks at us in Christ! However, we still need to walk out these truths in our daily walk by having our minds renewed! This is a state that we will never be able to attain based on our own strength no matter how hard we try. He has already decided long before we even existed that we will be holy and blameless before Him. God calls those things that are not as though they are in this present moment.
During the time in the Old Testament, the animal to be sacrificed must have been inspected and only the ones without blemish could have been used as a sacrifice to God. It was used literally of the absence of defects in sacrificial animals and figuratively of the Lamb of God as unblemished. Just as Jesus Christ was the spotless Lamb of God, we have become blameless or spotless in Christ. It has nothing to do with us but it has everything to do with Christ’s redemptive work which allows us to be hidden in Him, thus blameless.
There are people who close their prayers with the “unworthy sinners” prayer showing they are still very much dependent on themselves in Adam-like style to come before God. We should be living a victorious Christian life by believing that we have God’s nature in us and we are in Christ, thus making us worthy to approach the throne of grace to find help and mercy.
This truth helps us to fully comprehend the length, depth, breadth and the height of God’s love because this is something that is not attainable based on our own strength! This leads us to the positional truth that we stand righteous before God in Christ.
2 Cor 5:21 For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
We become the very righteousness of God when we are in Him. It is being in Him that makes us righteous and not our own good works. Jesus bore our sins to the cross, that we might now receive His righteousness. It was the Great Exchange that took place at the cross. He identified with us that we might identify with Him. He took our sins that we might receive His righteousness!
Sermon series: Inner Man
