Devotional Blog Saturday, July 30

Daily Devotional for Saturday, July 30

Our Substitute

A man in our church sings a song. It is called “I Traded with Jesus.” Although I cannot quote it exactly, it tells of how Jesus traded His salvation for your sins and how you traded your sins for His salvation. I wonder if whoever composed this song was reading 2 Corinthians 5:21 at the time. 

Yes, I traded with Jesus. I traded my sin for His righteousness. He traded His righteousness for my sin. He never once had any personal experience with sin. He never thought a sin, much more committed one. Yet, He became sin for you. As you have been studying Hebrews and the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, you have seen that the sacrificed animals represented the sins of the people. Christ’s death on the cross embodied your sins. Christ was regarded and treated as a sinner even though He had never sinned. 

Conversely, I never knew righteousness, never committed one righteous act. “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). Yet I have become righteous in God’s eyes as He looks at me through Jesus. Just as God imputed your sin and guilt to Christ, so God also imputes the righteousness of Christ to all who believe. As Christ was not a sinner, but was treated as if He were, so a person who is not righteous according to God’s standards is treated as righteous in Christ when he accepts Jesus as his personal Savior.

Thought: Jesus bore your sins so that you can bear His righteousness.

Phillip Miller