Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:1)

The complaint is old and rehearsed: seeker-friendly preaching offers grace without judgment, comfort without confrontation. And so, many who consider themselves faithful have made it their mission to emphasize sin. They have turned themselves into professional accusers of man, convinced that they are protecting the gospel. But in the end, they merely reinforce the diagnosis and withhold the cure. They speak of corruption, but scarcely of righteousness. They preach the wrath of God, but only whisper the gift of Christ. They begin with sin and end with silence, or they append grace as a theological afterthought. Those who confess Christ after hearing them get more of the same, as if Christ has made no difference.

Paul preached something else entirely. In his letter to the Romans, he wrote that where sin increased, grace increased all the more. The comparison is not even. Grace overwhelms sin. The gift of Christ exceeds the trespass of Adam in every way. It does not merely undo the Fall, but overthrows it. If sin buried me ten feet deep, Christ raised me a thousand stories high. My righteousness is not just enough to cover my guilt, it surpasses it by infinite measure, because it is not mine at all. It is the righteousness of God, and it has been imputed to me.

Now I come before the throne of grace as if I were Christ himself. I enter with boldness, not with trembling and self-doubt. I do not ask whether I belong here. I belong here as much as Jesus belongs here, because I stand in his righteousness and not my own. Long ago, I counted my righteousness as rubbish and cast it away. So I come with no sense of inferiority or shame. I come with the same confidence that Christ himself would have in the presence of the Father.

When I face disease or demon, I do not try to muster up the authority to command it. It is easy to believe that Christ has that authority, and as his follower I walk in his righteousness and speak in his name. Human orthodoxy may have trained generations to describe themselves as worms before God, but any believer is a billion times more worthy than the sin-consciousness they insist on preserving. I approach God with the worthiness of Christ, not my own. If I had to repair my own worthiness before I approach him, I would never come at all.

His righteousness has become my natural environment and mentality. The more theologians speak of our supposed unworthiness before God, the more they reveal how far they are from the gospel. If they understood what it means to be in Christ, they would see that our righteousness is now complete, because his righteousness is complete. There is no need to approach God as a groveling sinner. Approach as a son in whom he delights, because God delights in Christ. He was crucified, and I was crucified with him. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and he is not a sinner. God will always answer someone like him. Therefore, God will always answer me.

They tell us to examine ourselves, and we do. But after that we turn our entire attention to examine the righteousness of Christ. A preacher may move himself to tears as he speaks of the glory of our future inheritance, but we rejoice in it now, because the Bible says, as he is, so are we in this world. This is true now, not later. The Bible says it is not fully known what we shall be, and this only shows that there is even more to come. A theologian may lecture us that we have a finite mind. But Scripture says God has given us the mind of Christ, and he has become wisdom for us from God. If a preacher or theologian does not acknowledge this, then is he a Christian at all?

Those who think they are defending the gospel often end up with less of it than the ones they criticize. They accuse false teachers of preaching a good news that is, well, too good. But they preach bad news with only a faint nod to the good news, if even that. Why? Because they do not believe the good news themselves. They do not believe the gospel, and they have invented an imitation that reflects their own inadequacies rather than the righteousness of Christ. They accuse us of triumphalism, as if the problem is that we believe the gospel too much, or at all. But if it is triumphalism to affirm a genuine salvation in Christ, then they must think that Christ is unrighteous and unworthy, even a sinner. Otherwise, why accuse us of anything, since we depend on Christ alone? Their charge of triumphalism is blasphemy.