Justification of sinners by grace alone lies at the heart of the gospel. It is the proof and consequence of the fact that Christ is so entirely all-sufficient a Saviour that His work needs no supplementing by us. While this may be good news, it is not an easy truth for the fallen to swallow.
The fact that Jesus pronounces a foul sinner righteous while condemning a life committed to religious uprightness (see Luke 18:9-14) offends our pride. For the humbling effect of Jesus’s teaching, so entirely condemning our self-reliance, makes it far easier to reserve the message of justification by grace as one only for beginners or outsiders. Justification may be an essential evangelical truth, but it is one that all evangelicals struggle to live by.
There are a number of telltales when Christians fall into the self-reliant mindset of the Pharisee. The first is that heartfelt love for Christ and treasuring Him is eclipsed by a treasuring of substitutes. We trust in our performance, our feelings, our abilities, our ministry. The success of this substitute, and the praise we receive for it, becomes of paramount importance.
Our trust in self then produces an atmosphere in which there is little grief for sin and little joy in God. We become so invested in the appearance of our sanctity that we cannot admit to errors. Yet to who all will hear it, that self-protection unintentionally trumpets a far deeper folly: a loss of true knowledge of ourselves as sinners.
Self-dependence is also fertile soil for discontentment and anxiety. Self-reliant Christianity is workaholic, hamster-wheel Christianity. Unlike Christ, who would not break a bruised reed (Matt.12:20), the Pharisees would ‘tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves [were] not willing to move them with their finger’ (23:4). Not knowing the loving mercy of God, they were more prone to unsparing and hard censoriousness than kindness and compassion. Their high sense of self also made them equate the gospel with their own particular style of presenting the gospel: their buzzwords, their mannerisms, their particular culture.
All these ills are easy to dismiss as trifling peccadilloes or minor blemishes. After all, they are not open adultery or murder. But to trivialise them is to use the logic of the Pharisee who concealed the vileness of his heart (even from himself) under a show of being pious and ‘not like other men’. What Jesus exposed in Luke 18 was that the pride of the Pharisee was not the footling lapse of a good man but the proof of an unbelieving heart.
When we see these symptoms of the same attitude of self-reliance in our midst today, we should be deeply concerned. They betray more than a petty ailment. They betray the weakness of our hold on the gospel we claim to affirm. More than a moral problem, this trust in self is a refusal to trust in the gospel.
The real need
What can be done? Perhaps the worst thing we could do – the instinctive solution of the hypocrite – would be to propose some hollow acts of penance to ‘handle’ the public relations. The real need is for something far deeper: repentance. That is, a real change of heart and mind.
Justification by faith alone is not merely a doctrine concerning how to be saved: it is the solution to our trust in self. It is only when we appreciate Christ’s complete sufficiency as a Saviour that we will be weaned off our self-sufficiency.
It is only at the foot of the cross, where the depth of our sin is supremely revealed, that the full horror of our thoroughgoing internal rottenness strikes us. Such realisation of our wretchedness sounds unpleasant. But where the accuser would make our sins great so that we despair, Christ reveals the awfulness of our sin in the moment of its annihilation. The true cry of self-despair – ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ – therefore comes from a heart full of delighted confidence in the steadfast love and abundant mercy of Christ.
Alternative gospels, according to which Jesus is merely a king, merely an enabler, or merely a passport to prosperity (either now or in eternity), can never have the same effect as one that centres on Jesus as the all-sufficient Saviour. Cross-lite gospels, like that of the Pharisee in Luke 18, fail to diagnose the depth of our problem. As a result, they can bring no relief, no true humility, no lasting joy. If we evangelicals are to replace the scourge of self-reliance with the glad notes of grace, it can only be through a hearty embracing of the humbling, ‘happifying’ truth that sinners like the tax collector are justified by faith alone.
If Christians are to have integrity as people of the gospel, the message of the cross and the justification offered through Christ’s blood alone cannot be treated as a message beyond which anyone graduates. It must be our humbling and ‘happifying’ meat and drink. It must continually ring in our ears and sound on our lips, tearing down our self-confidence and giving us instead faith’s bold gladness in God.
