I feel like I'm living a ping pong game these days - I'm the ping pong ball and God has a paddle in each hand. And that sounds like it needs an explanation.
We are studying the topic of grace in our small group and forgiveness in our ladies' Wednesday night Bible study. These are pretty heavy duty studies and doing both, well, let's just say there are days my head is swimming. Let me just deal with one side of the ping pong table today.
The topic of forgiveness has been revealing God's character to me in such incredible ways. The beginning of The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness (a book by John MacArthur we are using as a launch pad for the Bible study) went back to the foundation of where forgiveness came from and why it is so important in our life.
I need to insert here that our ladies' Bible study has typically used studies written by women. You know - the type of book by just looking at the cover you know it is definitely for the female gender! We've used some excellent books which has made a huge impact on lives.
This book, however, is definitely something you could find on a man's study shelf. NO frills, plain cover and no cute stories or life applications... but excellent material. And with HUGE words that can be very intimidating to anyone who has not been to seminary. (Words like propitiation, righteousness, atonement, justification, etc.) And three guesses who taught that first chapter with all those mile long words? Yup, you got it on the very first guess - me. Thankfully I have a husband who was able to loan me a book that gave some very concise definitions for all those huge words.
What a blessing this study was to me. I spent a lot of time chewing over these definitions and was able to see the progression through these big words of what God did for me. This is how I summed it up:
The Bible says we all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.
We can do nothing to satisfy the demands of God’s perfect righteousness.
So God provided salvation through His Son – who lived a perfect, blameless life so He could be our perfect, blameless substitute.
God imputed (assigned) our guilt of sin to Jesus and then imputed (assigned) His righteousness to us. This means we have been justified = restored to a state of righteousness (the state of being just or morally pure) in God’s sight.
This is all done by faith – a single minded reliance on Christ alone for our salvation.
What an awesome place to be!! A place where we can celebrate the goodness of God for providing all this for us.
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