No one ever told me that the last couple weeks before your oldest graduates could be fraught with so much fear and anxiety. It’s the culmination of an 18 year journey and so naturally this has causes me to think back and evaluate what’s happened. But in thinking this way I am prone to focus solely on my performance as a mother.

No wonder my stomach has been in knots and I’ve felt like I’ve been riding a roller coaster!

So praise God for this morning because I got to discuss the doctrine of justification!

What? How can that help? Isn’t doctrine something that’s boring and relegated to the seminary?

I give you an emphatic NO! my friends.

Everyone is prone to evaluate their own performance, especially parents, and especially mothers, and even more especially at this time of your child’s life. And I must honestly confess that more than half the time I don’t know what I’m doing here as a mother.

So I desperately needed this discussion of justification this morning because justification says this: God has declared me completely forgiven of sin, past, present and future, AND, Christ’s righteousness has been credited to my account. It belongs to me. Listen even to what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21:

“For our sake he made him to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

It’s not just that I have Christ’s righteousness like a possession that I carry. In Christ I have become the righteousness of God!

So in the next two weeks I will look back on the last 18 years and want to evaluate how it’s gone and I’ll be tempted to judge myself according to the results. But because of doctrine, because I know and believe this doctrine of justification, I can be honest, I can admit that I am not perfect, I have made mistakes as a parent (duh!) and that’s OK. Why? Because I know that God has lavished His abundant grace on me in Christ. He has imputed my sin to Christ, counting it as belonging to Him. And more than that, God has imputed Christ’s righteousness to me, counting it as belonging to me.

This knowledge of doctrine changes my beliefs which in turn will, by God’s grace, change my actions. And even now, this knowledge of doctrine is starting to unravel the anxious knot in my stomach.