Preach the Gospel to Yourself

The single girls (and a couple married :D) in my Church are going through the book, “The Discipline of Grace” by Jerry Bridges and this morning we went over chapter 3 titled, “Preach The Gospel to Yourself” and it was an outstanding chapter!

He expounded on Romans 3:19-26 and verses 23-24 really stuck out to me, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

He sums these verses up as, “all who put their Faith in Jesus Christ are justified freely by God’s Grace”

He states, “We must keep in mind that our justification by God is based solely on the meritorious work of Christ and our union with Christ that what He did, we did when He lived a life of perfect obedience. When He died on the cross to satisfy the just demands of God’s law, it is just as if we had died on that cross. Christ stood in our place as our representative, both in His sin-bearing death.

“Grace, as we have already observed, is the undeserved favor of God shown to those who deserve His wrath. Grace presupposes guilt on our part. By definition, it is sovereign grace; that is, God is under no obligation to grant to any of us such undeserved favor. The decision to grant such favor to us originated solely within His own goodness.”

“To preach the gospel to yourself, then, means that you continually face up to your own sinfulness and then flee to Jesus through faith in His shed blood and righteous life. It means that you appropriate, again by faith, the fact that Jesus fully satisfied the law of God, that He is your propitiation, and that God’s holy wrath is no longer directed toward you. To preach the gospel to yourself means that you take at face value the precious words of Romans 4:7-8-“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”

“To live by the gospel, then, means that we firmly grasp the fact that Christ’s life and death are ours by virtue of our union with Him. What He did, we did.”

What truth! Thank you, Lord for once again revealing to me, how little I am and how big you are!

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.