Someone Else-ness

HT: Ray Ortlund

It’s the objectivity, the exteriority, the out-there-ness, the Someone Else-ness of our justification that sets us free, as John Bunyan reminds us:

“One day as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest all was still not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Your righteousness is in heaven.  And I thought as well that I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand.  There, I say, is my righteousness, so that wherever I was or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he lacks my righteousness, for that was just before Him.  I also saw that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday and today and forever.

Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. . . . I went home rejoicing for the grace and love of God. . . . Here I lived for some time, very sweetly at peace with God through Christ.  Oh, I thought, Christ! Christ!  There was nothing but Christ before my eyes.”

John Bunyan, Grace Abounding (Philadelphia, 1859), page 75, edited slightly.