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Guest Post by Dane Ortlund

Justin, thanks for letting the five of us keep your blog moving along this week. And more importantly, on behalf of all of us who daily benefit from Between Two Worlds, thank you for your efforts brother! You’re serving us well.

Back to business: I’ll first chime in with some wonderfully stabilizing words from Luther when he was afflicted with (the universal Christian experience of) moral accusation. No one knew how to apply the gospel to a distraught conscience like Martin Luther.

When I awoke last night, the Devil came and wanted to debate with me; he rebuked and reproached me, arguing that I was a sinner. To this I replied: Tell me something new, Devil! I already knew that perfectly well; I have committed many a solid and real sin. Indeed there must be good honest sins–not fabricated and invented ones–for God to forgive for His beloved Son’s sake, who took all my sins upon Him so that now the sins I have committed are no longer mine but belong to Christ.

–Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 105-6

When our conscience cringes at the memory of past failures, it is bringing those failures out into the light and defiantly receiving Christ-wrought forgiveness–not trying to ignore the failures and stuffing them back down–that lets us breathe again.

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