Friday, October 05, 2012

Thought for today

Paul has a doctrine of the saving righteousness of God whereby God acquits and vindicates the ungodly because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and what is more, this enacted verdict is the gateway for membership into the cosmopolitan people of God. The saving righteousness of God means the end of all boasting whether it is in performance or possession of the law, whether it is in one’s ethnicity or religious effort. Justification is the act whereby God creates a new people, with a new status, in a new covenant, as a foretaste of the new age. Justification is forensic (it refers to status not moral state), eschatological (the verdict of judgment day is declared in the present), covenantal (Jews and Gentiles belong at one fellowship table), and is effective (sanctification cannot be subsumed under justification but neither can they be completely separated).—Michael Bird in The Saving Righteousness of God, page 4

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In other words, all inclusive of your entire life : )
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