Welcome to Things Unseen today, especially if you're new to the podcast.

We spend a few minutes each weekday reflecting together on some aspect of the Christian faith

that we hope will be helpful to us.

And this week, we began to think about some of the big words in the New Testament,

big words that are used to help us understand what the Lord Jesus has done for us.

Yesterday we were thinking about the word propitiation.

That's a word that belongs to the temple and to the sacrifices that avert the wrath of God.

Today I want us to move from the temple to the law court, because in Jesus Christ we discover not only the propitiation for our sins, but we also discover that in Jesus Christ there is justification.

That's a huge and glorious subject, far too much to talk about in a few minutes.

But let me underline a couple of things that I think are helpful to us, about being counted righteous

in God's sight, which is what justification means.

The first is this.

What the gospel teaches us is this staggering truth that God justifies those who in themselves

are ungodly. So long as I think of myself as partly godly or more

or less godly or just as godly as the next person, I'm never going to understand the gospel,

and actually I'm never going to be justified either. Remember the parable of the tax collector

and the Pharisee when Jesus asked the question,

who went down from the temple justified, the tax collector or the Pharisee?

Every evangelical knows the answer.

It's the tax collector who was justified. But what if I retitled the parable as the

tax collector and the evangelical? That would be a bit of a shock. But isn't there still a tendency

in many of us who are evangelicals to thank God that we are not

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