John White - The Fight: A Practical Handbook for Christian Living

In the first place, you have been justified. This is to say that God looks upon you and deals with you as though you were perfectly righteous, as though you had never sinned and will never sin. However difficult this idea may be for you to grasp, it represents an event that has already taken place and that will never change.

It is not that God wears blinders and pretends you are better than you are. He knows about your sin. Yet his feelings toward you and his dealings with you are based on a righteousness Christ has given you. God treats you as though you were as righteous as Jesus. You may be uncomfortable with this idea. I shall deal with it more fully later on. As the impact of it breaks over your understanding you will marvel. Far from wanting to sin you will sense how you have been set free to be holy.

Your justification is both a heavenly event and a time-space event. It is a heavenly event insofar as Jesus is at this moment on the right hand of Gods throne acting as your personal guarantor and representative. It is a heavenly event, too, in that your name is now recorded in the not guilty annals of heaven. It is an earthly event since you, a creature of time and space, may boldly step into the presence of the God of eternity and hold a conversation with him. Indeed you are encouraged to do so. Notice, you are not given permission to crawl into Gods presence but to approach him with your head held high.

A second event that took place in your body is what is known as regeneration or new birth. By this event, eternity invaded space and re-established permanent links between your personality and the Eternal. Again, you may have experienced little or nothing when this most profound event occurred. By a miracle of divine grace a nonbiological life was implanted in you. It is a form of life that will enable you one day to inhabit eternity just as your biological life now enables you to live in time-space.

The life that entered you was the life of God himself. Your earthly parents gave life from their living bodies which became your life when you were born. In the same way God, in imparting to you his own life, became in very deed your heavenly Father. You are a child of God in a literal, not a metaphorical sense.

But the life must grow and develop. As it does so you will reflect, more and more, the likeness of the Father from whom the life came, just as some degree of likeness to your physical parents accompanies growth in your physical and emotional life. As Gods life within you grows, it will influence both your emotional and your physical development. You will become more mature emotionally. Other things being equal, you will enjoy better physical health. Your new birth does not guarantee that you will never be emotionally or physically sick, but it will move you in the direction of improved health.

For your new life to grow, it must be fed and exercised. The food it requires is the Holy Scriptures. Exercise will consist of obedience by faith to the commands of God. You will also need to breathe deep drafts of heavenly air as your prayer life develops. All of these factors which contribute to your spiritual growth will be examined carefully in the chapters that follow. For the present it is enough to know that you are a hybrida being with two types of life and two sets of parentage.