The Great Exchange
Here's a post from John Piper's Solid Joys that takes us to the very heart of the gospel- if you want to get these daily delivered to your email you can arrange that at the bottom of the website page here Solid Joys :
The Great Exchange
By John Piper
The Great Exchange
By John Piper
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed. (Romans 1:16–17)
We
need righteousness to be acceptable to God. But we don’t have it. What we have
is sin.
So,
God has what we need and don’t deserve — righteousness; and we have what God
hates and rejects — sin. What is God’s answer to this situation?
His
answer is Jesus Christ, the Son of God who died in our place and bore our
condemnation. “By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for
sin, he [God] condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). Whose flesh bore the
condemnation? His. Whose sins were being condemned? Ours. This is the great
exchange. Here it is again in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to
be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God.”
God
lays our sins on Christ and punishes them in him. And in Christ’s obedient
death, God fulfills and vindicates his righteousness and imputes (credits) it to
us. Our sin on Christ; his righteousness on us.
We
can hardly stress too much that Christ is God’s answer to our greatest problem.
It is all owing to Christ.
You
can’t love Christ too much. You can’t think about him too much, or thank him too
much, or depend upon him too much. All our forgiveness, all our justification,
all our righteousness is in Christ.
This
is the gospel — the good news that our sins are laid on Christ and his
righteousness is laid on us, and that this great exchange becomes ours not by
works but by faith alone. “By grace you have been saved through faith.
And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so
that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).
Here
is the good news that lifts burdens and gives joy and makes strong.
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