More than 50 years ago, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., a young sociology professor assigned his class the task of interviewing 200 inner city youth residing in downtown slums. After the students interviewed the residents living in abject poverty, they were then asked to predict the future of each person they interviewed. The students predicted that 90% of the youth would serve time in prison.
Twenty-five years later, the same professor asked another sociology class to track down the boys originally interviewed and discover what had actually happened to them. One hundred eighty of the original two hundred boys were located and only four had ever been in jail. The obvious question is, “Why were the predictions of this college class so far off?”
Looking for common factors, over 100 of the boys mentioned the strong influence of a teacher they all had in school. The college students then located the teacher, 70-year-old Sheila O’Rourke who was now living in a Memphis nursing home. Puzzled by the interest in her, Sheila could only exclaim, “All I ever did was love each of them.” That is the power of human love. If this is the result of being loved with an imperfect human love — what are be the results of being loved by a perfect and divine love?
Pastor and author Stuart Briscoe illustrated the results of God’s sacrificial love well when he wrote: “Years ago, when I was a young banker, we used big leather ledgers where all accounts were entered by hand. I remember daydreaming about those ledgers and God’s ledgers in Heaven. We are told those books will be opened (Rev. 20:11-15). I imagined my name, David Stuart Briscoe, and God adding up the sum total of my indebtedness against Him. I could never cancel the overwhelming indebtedness. In my mind’s eye, I saw God take His pen and transfer the sum total of my indebtedness to the account of the Lord Jesus Christ. On the account of the Lord Jesus, He wrote, ‘Transferred from the account of David Stuart Briscoe.’
“I thought God was finished. But then I saw Him do something incredible. He added up the total righteousness of Christ and against it wrote these words, ‘Transferred to the account of David Stuart Briscoe.’”
It is simply incredible that God, in Christ, stands willing and able to forgive any and all sin. It is even more amazing that God would freely bestow upon us the sum total of Christ’s righteousness. This is a doctrine unique to biblical Christianity and why it is that when the believer enters the presence of the Lord, he or she will sin no more. We will be righteous even as Christ is righteous.
Has Christ transferred your indebtedness to His account and transferred His righteousness to yours? When this happened to me — it was the greatest day of my life!
