Have you ever heard the word “justification” while you were at church?
Maybe when you gave your life to Jesus, someone told you that you were justified.
That can be a confusing word at first, but it is actually pretty simple!
To help you understand justification, here’s a story!
Imagine that Danny is at school and it is time to go outside and play at recess.
Recess is Danny’s favorite part of the day and he is so excited to slide on the slide and swing on the swings with all his friends.
One of Danny’s friends, let’s call her Grace, is the smartest kid in school. Grace has a badge on her shirt that shows she makes the best grades in the entire class!
Danny is a very smart student as well, but he has just made a few B’s and Grace has ALWAYS made A’s and NEVER made a B. That is pretty impressive! Keeping straight A’s in school can be really tough sometimes.
Danny and Grace decided to head over to the monkey bars, because it is Grace’s favorite thing to do at Recess.
As Danny walks up to the Monkey Bars, he notices a BIG YELLOW SIGN that says “Monkey Bars are broken. DO NOT climb on them.”
Even though there is a sign there, he looks up at the monkey bars and they seem fine! They don’t look very broken!
In a moment of weakness, Danny decides to climb on the monkey bars anyway. Grace tells him that this is not a very good idea, but he goes ahead anyway.
He places one hand on the first bar and everything is fine.
He grabs the bar with the other hand and leaps off the edge!
“There’s nothing wrong with these monkey bars,” Danny thinks to himself.
Suddenly, as he grabs the next bar, everyone hears a loud CRACKKKKKK!
The monkey bar breaks and Danny comes tumbling to the ground.
The crack is so loud that the teacher, Mrs. Rush, rushes over to make sure everything is okay!
“What happened here?” Mrs. Rush asks.
As soon as Danny confesses that he climbed on the monkey bars anyway, Grace pipes up and says:
“Teacher, I know that I was not the one to climb on the monkey bars, but I take full responsibility. Danny knows that what he did was wrong, and I would like to take his punishment for him. I will even let him wear my badge for the rest of the day.”
As you continue to play for the rest of Recess, Grace has to go a sit by the fence.
Even though Grace was the perfect student and didn’t do anything wrong, she loved her friend Danny and did not want him to suffer punishment for his mistakes! What a great friend Grace must be!
There is actually someone we know that has done something very similar for us! His name is Jesus. Just like Danny made a mistake, we all make mistakes and do the wrong thing from time to time. Luckily, like Grace, Jesus loves us and took our punishment for the bad stuff we do by dying on the cross!
Just like Grace let Danny wear her badge of honor, Jesus gives us His honor so that when God looks at you and I, he does not see the bad things we do, but see’s the perfection of His son Jesus!
That is justification! We have done wrong, but because of Jesus, our sins are washed away and its as if we haven’t done anything wrong!
If Grace was such a good friend to Danny, how much more of a friend do we have in Jesus, who died for our sins to justify us before a perfect God?
That is pretty incredible! And the cool thing is that Jesus did not just do that for you. He did that for everyone in the whole world! That’s why its so important to tell your friends at school about Jesus! He can justify them too!
Cognitive Panorama 