“Then I turn to Christianity and, to my unutterable and indescribable delight, I encounter the rare and refreshing words: ‘It is finished!’ Are there any happier words in the universe?” David Murray begins the 3rd chapter of The Happy Christian with the observation that our to-do lists are an exercise is frustration and futility, since no matter how much we accomplish, the list just continues to grow. When it comes to our salvation, however, the Bible teaches that Christ accomplished it in full. There is no to-do list involved, and believing and appreciating this reality will lead us to greater happiness.
DONE > DO = POSITIVE+
The problem we face which prevents us from fully enjoying our salvation in Christ Jesus is that we struggle to believe the simple truth that it is completely finished. In this chapter, Pastor Murray identifies several handicaps to believing “the Gospel of Done,” and then follows them with several helps to enable us to believe it better.
Handicaps
The first handicap is an accusing conscience, that inner voice which constantly tells us to do more and do better. “We do what we can, when we can, as we can, and hope we have enough in the can. And yet the can is still rattlingly empty, isn’t it?” The only solution to our accusing conscience is to constantly return to Jesus’ cry from the cross: “It is finished!” Otherwise, we will spend our entire lives listening to this demoralizing internal echo.
Another handicap, ironically, can be the church. If we preach and teach always on Christian duties: parenting, giving, marriage, vocation, citizenship, communication, etc., believers tend to hear only a condemning conviction of our personal failures. While we cannot neglect to speak of Christian duties, we must always place them in the context of the finished work of Christ.
A third handicap is our work-for-wages culture, which teaches us to think in terms of work equals reward. You get paid to work, and if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. This can easily transfer to our thinking about the Christian life, but the Gospel truth is “Christ works, but I get the reward.” We need to pray for God’s grace to break this cultural rule that has us in a stranglehold.
Fourthly, we are often handicapped by unbelief. We simply struggle to believe what God’s word says, that salvation is by grace through faith and not of works. Pastor Murray says, “I’ve asked many seniors about their hope of heaven, and despite listening to thousands of…sermons their entire lives, many still answer, ‘I’ve done my best. I’ve gone to church. I raised my children to go to church. I pray and read my Bible, and so on.’ But I’m longing to hear them say, ‘I’m done with my doing and working; I’m resting on Christ’s work and Christ’s Done alone.’”
The final handicap in this chapter is our own failure. We keep failing even after we have believed on Jesus Christ, and we tend to think that it is up to us to continue to believe and keep ourselves in Christ. But Murray warns that if this is true, we’re in trouble, because we can never do enough. “We get in by His Done. We stay in by His Done. We finish by His Done. If not, we’re done.”
Helps
Thankfully, there are helps which God has provided so that we might believe and rest in the finished work of Christ rather than our own up-and-down performance. First, we must rebelieve the gospel. We cannot just assume that since we’ve heard and believed the gospel at some point in the past, that we know it, and we don’t need to come back to it again. As Jerry Bridges put it in The Discipline of Grace, we must preach the gospel to ourselves. “To preach the gospel to yourself, then, means that you continually face up to your own sinfulness and then flee to Jesus through faith in His shed blood and righteous life. It means that you appropriate, again by faith, the fact that Jesus fully satisfied the law of God, that He is your propitiation, and that God’s holy wrath is no longer directed toward you.”
A second help is to refocus our Bible reading from “How does this apply to me?” to “What does this reveal about God?” When we go to God’s word hoping to fix our own problems, we distort the Scriptures and end up failing to actually deal with our spiritual problems. But when we go to the Bible, look away from ourselves, and discover who God is and what he has done, we will find our spiritual health and strength increasing.
Another help is to study the doctrine of salvation. There are so many different aspects to our salvation, that we can spend the rest of our lives studying them without ever figuring it all out. Subjects such as justification, redemption, victory, reconciliation, atonement, and adoption for instance will occupy years of Bible study and meditation. Murray offers this invitation: “why not take one of them every year, explore it through sermons, books, and articles, and experience angelic delight as you expand your mind and heart with the joy of your salvation.”
Another important help is to repent of sin immediately. When we’ve blown it again, we tend to think we need to wait for a time before confessing or generate some tears or feelings of guilt, but this is foolish. Confess your sins without delay and believe that God is faithful and just to forgive and cleanse your unrighteousness.
Finally, Pastor Murray suggests that we should take time out to rest and be at peace in our souls. He suggests that we ought to make better use of the principle of the Sabbath in the Bible, that God intended for us to rest one day in seven in order to reinforce the completion of God’s work, first in creation and then in salvation. For most of us, the Lord’s day would be better spent meditating on Christ’s work and resting in him than our usual entertainments and activities.