Sinclair Ferguson

It's as though God is giving you a second chance to keep what the Westminster Assembly calls the covenant of works.

You're on your own, pal.

And so I think it's so helpful that the Westminster Confession and the catechisms emphasize that yes, on the one hand, it's the pardon of your sins,

but it's also you are now accounted righteous in Christ for Christ's sake.

And that means if I'm accounted righteous in Jesus Christ, the righteousness I have standing before God is as perfect a righteousness as Jesus' righteousness because it is His righteousness.

And one of the ways in which I think that is helpful to us is because I've had this sneaking suspicion that many Christians think that justification is something that happens in them, that the righteousness is in them, and don't realize actually that is medieval Catholicism, that righteousness is infused into you.

And what the divines are emphasizing there is, no, the only righteousness you ever have is not in you.

If you depend on any righteousness in you, you are a goner.

And that question then I think does something very important.

It teaches me to live the Christian life from the objective to the subjective.

It teaches me to look out away from myself to Christ who is my righteousness.

And then when I look out to Christ as my righteousness, not only in the sense that in Him I have forgiveness of sins, but also in Him I'm clothed in His righteousness.

That's what brings me assurance.

And when you think back to the pre-Reformation teaching of the church, which was at baptism, there's a righteousness infused into you.

You keep on losing it and simplifying it, but the sacraments kind of help you to recover it.

And if you cooperate with that sacramental grace, eventually there may be produced in you a righteousness

that is so righteous because your faith is suffused with a love for God that is perfect, that then you actually become justifiable.

So you are justified by grace, they would have said, they would have insisted it's by grace, on the basis of your cooperation with sacramental grace producing within you

A righteousness that's created, yes, by grace, that makes you justifiable, which is the reason why, by and large, in the medieval church, assurance was both denied and discouraged.

And why the Reformation was such an explosion, because people realized, but if our justification is in Jesus Christ, then we can be assured of our salvation.