Last Sunday Len Finn continued in our sermon series – Marks of the True Christian. You can listen to his sermon – ‘Christian Justice’ here.
Here are 12 truths to preach to your soul from ‘Christian Justice’.
1. Who you are ‘in Christ’ trumps who you are in the mirror. The image of Christ is also the image of every christian – you and me, even on our worst days, simply because we are ‘in Christ’. This reality trumps every other reality.
2. Genuine love is freedom from resentment, freedom from anger, freedom from standing over another in judgment, freedom from the need for vengeance and retaliation, an openness to forgiveness, pity, compassion, and reconciliation.
3. What keeps us from looking like who we really are? Our trust is misplaced, and our hope is too narrow.
4. The justice of the world, the setting of all things to right, is secure in God’s hands.
5. Human justice just relocates hurt – divine justice is redemptive and cosmic in scope.
6. You are not called to judge your neighbor, you are called to love them – to be the good in their life that overcomes the evil.
7. In Christ, God has declared us His child, His sons and daughters, His friend. What God says about you matters far more than anything you think about yourself.
8. God doesn’t repay evil for evil, instead He has overcome the evil in us with good – His good.
9. “‘Vengeance is mine – I will repay’, says the Lord”, and indeed he does with the shed blood of His Son.
10. Paul, in Romans 12, is not calling us to work on our anger management issues, rather he is telling us who we are – despite who we might see in the mirror.
11. The old you – the enemy in you who doesn’t trust God, doesn’t define you anymore. Christ took that old you to the cross with Him and let it die there and buried it with Him in the tomb. That old person isn’t you anymore.
12. You are the former enemy, now made God’s beloved, overcome by God’s good.
