Today’s Scripture: Galatians 3:24

“The law was our guardian until Christ came.”

The primary purpose of the law is not to curse us but to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24). God does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23). Rather, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). The language is emphatic. Christ literally became a curse in our place as our substitute. He experienced the full fury of the curse that we should have experienced. It’s true he did it for us, but he did so by doing it in our place as our appointed substitute.

Here we see the importance of our legal union with Christ. As our God-appointed legal representative, he was legally qualified to endure the curse in our place as our substitute. There’s no adequate analogy for this union in human experience. One person may pay a financial debt for someone else, but no one can serve a prison sentence as a substitute for another. In human jurisprudence, a moral debt such as a prison sentence can be served only by the person who incurred it.

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Today’s Scripture: Philippians 4:11

“I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.”

There’s a place for legitimate discontentment. All of us should, to some degree, be discontent with our spiritual growth. If we aren’t, we will stop growing. There’s also what we might call a prophetic discontentment with injustice and other evils in society, coupled with a desire to see positive change. But there’s also a sinful discontentment that negatively affects our relationship with God. It can easily lead to resentment or bitterness toward God or other people.

Whatever situation tempts us to be discontent, and however severe it may be, we need to recognize that discontentment is sin. We’re so used to responding to difficult circumstances with anxiety, frustration, or discontentment that we consider them normal reactions to the varying vicissitudes of life. But that just points out the subtleness and acceptability of these sins. When we fail to recognize these responses to our circumstances as sin, we’re responding no differently from unbelievers who never factor God into their situations. We’re back to our ungodliness as the root cause of our sins.

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Today’s Scripture: Psalm 61:5

“You, O God, have heard my vows.”

Commitment to the pursuit of holiness is, first of all, a commitment to God to pursue a way of life that is pleasing to him. It is commitment to a life of obedience. Such a commitment must allow for no exceptions, no secret sins we want to hold onto, no sinful habits we’re unwilling to give up. We must make it our aim not to sin.

This doesn’t mean we can arrive at sinless perfection in this life, for even our best deeds are stained with sin. But it does mean that our firm intention must be not to sin willfully. Commitment to a life of holiness without exception is a requirement for consistently making the right choices. There’s no point in praying for God’s help in the face of temptation if we haven’t made a commitment to obedience without exception.

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Today’s Scripture: Deuteronomy 28:19

“Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out.”

What are the effects of the curse? According to George Smeaton, the worst effect “is the loss of God, or the absence and complete withdrawal of God from a human soul.” I’m sure many people think they would be happy to lose him. But remember that as Jesus hung on the cross bearing the curse in our place, he cried in anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

In Deuteronomy 28, Moses listed God’s promised blessings for Israel’s obedience of God’s law (verses 1-14) and his curses for disobedience (verses 15-68). The threatened curses were horrible beyond anything imaginable. For example, it includes a siege so severe that women would be driven to cannibalize their own children.

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Today’s Scripture: 1 Peter 1:18

“You were ransomed.”

We associate the word ransom with kidnapping, but this hasn’t always been its primary association. Centuries ago, ransom was the payment given an enemy country to secure the release of prisoners of war. In Bible times a ransom was the price paid to gain freedom for a slave. To pay a ransom was to purchase back someone from captivity or slavery.

Jesus said, “The Son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28, NIV). To fully understand his meaning we must examine the related word redeem, which means to buy back or release someone from slavery or captivity by paying a ransom. Redemption, then, is the action to secure release; while ransom is the price paid to effect the action.

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Today’s Scripture: Romans 6:13

“Present yourselves to God.”

How did the apostle Paul approach the subject of commitment and discipline? Paul’s letter to the Romans is the foundation for the Bible’s teaching on salvation; in it, the teaching of justification by faith in Jesus Christ alone is set forth most cogently and completely. However, Paul wrote the letter to people who were already believers. He referred to them as those “who are loved by God and called to be saints.” He thanked God that their “faith is proclaimed in all the world,” and he longed “that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith” (Romans 1:7-8,12). Clearly he was writing to believers.

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Today’s Scripture: Psalm 37:5

“Commit your way to the Lord.”

When Paul turned his attention from his masterful exposition of the Gospel in Romans chapters 1?1 to practical issues of Christian living, the first thing he did was call for commitment: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (Romans 12:1, NIV).

As we look at Paul’s call to commitment, we can see one obvious difference between the commitment of the devoted athlete and the commitment Paul called for. The athlete’s commitment is to himself or herself or perhaps to the team. The commitment Paul urged upon us is to God. Commit yourself to God. Offer your body to him as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to him.

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Today’s Scripture: Romans 12:1

“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.”

Most of my understanding of scriptural truths has come gradually through personal study and the teaching of pastors and other capable teachers. On a few rare occasions the Lord has been pleased to enlighten my understanding of some aspect of his truth in a rather sudden fashion. This was the case in my understanding of the sovereign grace of God. I’d been a confirmed legalist, and I dutifully sought to live the Christian life that way. But suddenly one day, I understood God’s grace in an entirely new way.

I was spending a half day with God, seated in a basement room with a cold, hard tile floor. As my understanding of God’s grace was enlightened, Romans 12:1 came to mind: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (NIV). I fell on my knees on that cold, hard floor and said something like this to God: “Lord, I have presented my body to you as a living sacrifice before, but I’ve never understood as I do now your mercy and your grace. And in view of my deeper understanding of your grace, I now present myself to you in a new and deeper way. I give myself wholly to you without any reservation.”

Now, more than thirty years later, I still build on the commitment I made in the basement room that morning. But more than that, I still seek to grow in my understanding of God’s grace because I know that only my growing understanding of his grace will make the commitment stick through thick and thin.

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Today’s Scripture: Psalm 62:7

“My mighty rock, my refuge is God.”

I believe one of the chief characteristics of our sinful nature is an attitude of independence toward God. Even when we know and agree that we’re dependent on him, we tend out of habit to act independently. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons God allows us to fall before temptation so often is to teach us experientially that we really are dependent on him to enable us to grow in holiness.

One of the best ways, apart from those painful experiences of failure, to learn dependence is to develop the discipline of prayer. This forces us in a tangible way to acknowledge our dependence on the Holy Spirit. Whatever else we may say about prayer, it is a recognition of our own helplessness and absolute dependence on God.

It’s this admission of helplessness and dependence that is so repugnant to our sinful spirit of self-sufficiency. If we’re prone by temperament to be disciplined, it’s more difficult to acknowledge that we’re dependent on Christ and his Spirit instead of on our self-discipline.

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Today’s Scripture: Mark 16:15

“Proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.”

We’ve loaded down the Gospel of the grace of God in Christ with a lot of “oughts”: I ought to be more committed, more disciplined, more obedient. When we think or teach this way, we’re substituting duty and obligation for a loving response to God’s grace.

As one pastor expressed it, we often don’t make the Gospel “good enough.” We preach grace to the non-Christian and duty to the Christian. As Richard Gilbert has written, “It sometimes seems that there is plenty of grace for you if you are not a Christian, but when you become a Christian then there are all sorts of laws you must obey and you feel like you were better off before you were converted.” Even our terminology betrays the way we dichotomize the Christian life into “grace” and “works” compartments.

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Today’s Scripture: 1 Peter 2:24

“He himself bore our sins in his body.”

To subjectively benefit from the work of the high priest in the scapegoat ritual on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:20-22), the individual Israelite had to exercise both penitence and faith. Penitence is a sincere and humble acknowledgment of one’s sins. Faith, in this instance, is believing God’s testimony that his sins were transferred to the goat and that the guilt of them no longer hung over his head.

Of course, the scapegoat could not itself carry away the sins of the people. It was only symbolic of the true scapegoat to come, Jesus Christ. Today we see the reality of the symbol. We see Jesus as the one who not only propitiated the wrath of God, symbolized by the sacrifice of the first goat, but who also removed our sins from God’s presence, symbolized by the second goat led away into the desert, bearing the sins of the people.

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Today’s Scripture: Psalm 32:5

“I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. ”

Put yourself in the shoes of a devout Jew on the Day of Atonement. He sees the high priest slay a goat as a propitiatory sacrifice. He watches as the priest disappears into the Tent of Meeting, to enter the Most Holy Place and to sprinkle the blood of the slain goat on and before the Mercy Seat. Only the high priest is allowed to enter that room (after ceremonial cleansing), and even then only once a year and only with the blood of the sacrificial animal.

The devout Jew waits with some degree of anxiety for the high priest to return, very conscious that atonement for his sins is conditioned on God’s acceptance of the high priest’s ministry.

Finally, the high priest comes out. He lays his hands on a live goat’s head and confesses over it all the sins of the people, symbolically transferring those sins to the goat. He solemnly confesses, perhaps with weeping, the people’s wickedness and rebellion. Then the goat is led away, bearing their sins into the desert.

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