Yesterday when we were eating at the Chicken Salad Chick, I was filling up my cup with soda and I flashed back to a memory from long ago.  It was my very first date.  Like, the first time I took a girl out.  I was 15 years old.  I remember that only because I didn’t drive that night, my mom did.  She dropped us off and I was going to call from the restaurant as we were getting done.  So, it’s my first date ever and we went to a restaurant I’d end up working at, Darryl’s, a chain like Chili’s but they didn’t make it.  Anyway, there I was on my first date ever.  Can you guess how I was feeling?  Nervous.  I was really nervous.  But we managed to get seated (it was a busy night and we had to wait a bit) and get our drinks ordered.  That was going to be the problem, as it would turn out.  We ordered Cokes and soon the waitress brought them out.  Now remember, I’m nervous.  And as a response, what do I do?  Well, I end up drinking like a prodigious amount of Coke.  I’m not kidding, I think I had like seven refills.  It all went really well, to be honest.  I was (mostly) pretty suave.  But it was all undone in an instant.  You see, when the waitress brought the bill over, there was a glaring problem.  The total bill, even without a tip, was more money than I had brought.  You see, unlike today, back then, refills cost you per fill up.  And even though it was only like .75 cents, the volume of refills had thrown off my mental calculus of predicting the bill.  Long story short – I actually ended up having to borrow money from my date to pay the bill.  Now look, I was just 15 and this was my first date.  I was mortified.  But it reminds me.  Always know what you’re ordering and what it costs ahead of time.  You don’t want to get caught making a mistake like I did way back when.

Last week I mentioned a phrase that you hear a lot.  I shared with you about being a relatively uneducated candidate in the Presbyterian Ordination process and hearing this phrase bandied about.  We are “justified by grace through faith.”  It seemed like all of the more knowledgeable candidates said that so I wanted to learn more about it.  You know what?  I’ve been studying all of the ins and outs of what that statement means and I continued to be astounded by the Biblical depth it conveys in just a few words.  And while as I shared last week, you don’t know everything about Christian theology in understanding it, if you do, you will have gone a long way into penetrating the depth of Christian belief.

Last week we talked predominantly about justification.  “Simply put, to justify is to declare righteous. Justification is an act of God whereby He pronounces a sinner to be righteous because of that sinner’s faith in Christ.”  Chief to keep in mind that justification is a one-time act of GOD.  It is not ongoing.  Sometimes we do a disservice to the fullness of what being justified means.  A lot of times, we collapse justification into mere forgiveness.  And while being justified does mean that you are forgiven, it means far more than that.

There are really three dimensions to your justification.  The first, as we just mentioned, is that in being justified by God, you are forgiven of your sins.  This is a good thing, right?  I mean, the one unmistakable truth of our lives is that we are sinners who stand in desperate need of forgiveness.

But forgiveness, as I’ve said, is just one part of the whole.  It’s a good beginning, to be sure.  Because I think there have been times where you’ve been forgiven but you remain unreconciled.

I had a best friend growing up.  His name was David and we met in the fifth grade.  We did lots of things together, living in the same neighborhood made it easy.  I could walk to David’s house and vice-versa.  Ah, but somewhere around the 10th grade, a problem arose.  You see, we both liked the same girl.  Long story short, I promised not to ask her out and then, one day, I did.  It was wrong, a betrayal.  And David did forgive me.  We hung out together in groups, didn’t share cross words or anything.  But something had changed.  Although I was forgiven, that relationship wasn’t reconciled.

In order to get at just how much more than forgiveness justification is, it helps us to look back at the story of the Prodigal Son.  Now, again, the prodigal son is a parable told in the 15th chapter of the Gospel of Luke.  There, one of two son comes to his father and says, essentially, give me my share of the inheritance right now.  Now look, this was a horrible thing to have even asked.  It was like saying to your father, you’re dead to me now, just give me what I want so I can be free of you.

Amazingly, the father out of his love for his son does exactly that.  But we all know this story, don’t we?  The young man heads out on his own.  Pretty soon, he’s blown all of his father’s wealth through dissolute living.  He sinks so low that he’s reduced to feeding pigs as a day laborer.  Even with that job, he’s starving.  He looks at the food that he’s giving the pig and he’ envious.  It’s then he has a notion.  The servants do better than this at my father’s house.  I will return to him and beg for the right to be just a mere servant in my faither’s home.  So, he sets off, returning from that far country.  And as he sets foot at the far edge of his father’s property, what should he see?  The most amazing thing.  For he sees his father at a run coming towards him.  Now look, at that time, it was considered undignified for an older man to run, that was reserved for the young bucks.  Yet here was the father, racing towards his homebound son.  And the words of apology fall out of his mouth, the words of apology and begging for forgiveness.  And how does the father reply?  Is the young man reduced in his status?  Surely that’s the right outcome here, isn’t it?  The one where you have to be punished to learn your lesson.  That’s the way of the world, isn’t it?