Know Before Whom You Stand

“Indeed, there are so many people who call themselves Christians, but who have never really faced the question of how do they stand before God. they have assumed, like the Pharisees, that if you do this, that and the other, you are all right. They have never though about God; they have never considered their own relationship to Him. But this is what righteousness makes us do. It does not start wit hus and our behaviour and our ideas and our worships and our rituals and all the paraphernalia. It says, ‘There is God and there are you; and you have got to meet Him. You will have to stand before Him, face Him, and give an account of your life lived in the body.’ So we know nothing about righteousness until we have faced that old quesiotn of Job’s: ‘How should a man be just with God?’ (Job 9:2). You see, we can go though life and never stop to think of that. We live from day to day; we live on our own activities, on our own goodness and we are nice and self-contained and we have never faced this question. ‘it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment’ (Heb 9:27), and God will judge us in a holy , righteous manner, because ‘it is He that hast made us and not we ourselves’ (Ps 100:3); and He has put certain powers into us and He expects certain things from us.” -Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Kingdom of God p.76.