Are You Living in Reality?

Our culture is saturated with delusion. Just google “otherkin” or “trans-species ideology” and you’ll discover a world of people living in denial of reality. One woman I read about spoke of her “cat soul,” another man identified as a dragon, and another as a Dalmatian. These are people made in the exalted image of God, rejecting reality in favor of a delusion. It’s tragic.

But there’s a deeper tragedy: the Christian who drifts into the delusion that his salvation somehow rests on his own performance, or that God is still at odds with him, or that God’s love is contingent on his personal holiness. In a fallen world, we’re all prone to this sort of “delusional drift” as we elevate our self-perceptions above what God has declared to be reality. Yet, our job as Christians is to constantly realign our perceptions with reality as defined by God.

While the Bible is full of truths to correct this “delusional drift,” in this article we’ll just look at three of these glorious realities from Romans 5:1–2. These truths define reality for everyone who trusts in Christ alone for salvation: we have been justified, we have peace with God, and we stand in grace.

Reality #1: We Have Been Justified

Verse 1 makes the definitive declaration that all who rest their faith on Christ have “been justified.” That’s the controlling reality of Romans 5:1–11 and the fountain from which every other blessing flows.

To be “justified” means that God has acquitted (or cleared) us of all sin—past, present, and future—and declared us to be perfectly righteous in His sight. This is a truth so glorious that it’s almost impossible to believe. In Christ, by faith, God has declared every Christian to be innocent of all the charges that could ever be brought against them. Consequently, God now relates to us as if we were perfectly righteous. That is reality.

No matter how you feel about your sin and failure, no matter how you groan under its weight, the truth is that if you are trusting in Christ, God has already cleared you of it all. And what is more, our justification was entirely His idea and His accomplishment. Our responsibility is to simply receive what He has done by faith and to live in that reality (Romans 3:24).

Reality #2: Peace With God

The immediate effect of having been declared right before God is that we now have “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). Before God’s intervention, hostility and alienation defined our reality (Colossians 1:21). We were objects of His wrath rather than of His affection (John 3:36). Yet through the cross of Christ, God has brought the war to an end (Romans 3:25) and established objective peace between us. We now “have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” That is reality for the believer.

We may drift into the delusional mindset that God is still at war with us—like the Japanese soldier who stubbornly kept fighting WWII nearly thirty years after Japan had surrendered—but it’s totally irrational. God defines reality, not us. When God says the war is over and peace has been established, we bow to His declaration and start enjoying the sweet gift of settled harmony.

Reality #3: Standing in Grace

Paul gives us one more sweet dose of reality in Romans 5:2. Not only are we justified, not only are we at peace, but now “we have also obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand.”

This is a startling truth. Once we were rebels against the God of heaven but now Jesus has taken us by the hand, as it were, into the Holy of Holies, and has re-introduced us to the Father as those who have been clothed in perfect righteousness, acquitted of all sin, and fully acceptable to Him as beloved children.

The consequence of Christ’s work is that we are now given permanent access into God’s presence and into the realm of His grace “in which we stand.” In other words, we’re not just shown grace on occasion. Grace is now the permanent sphere in which we exist. We were transferred from the sphere of darkness, hostility, and judgment, into the sphere of grace, favor, and total acceptance with our God.

No matter our “delusional drift” from this reality, God has declared that nothing in all of creation can ever push us out of this blessed position (Romans 8: 28–39)! Our job is to simply receive this truth and live in this happy state.

Living in Reality

These three truths—justification, peace, and grace—remind us that reality for the Christian is very sweet indeed. God has justified us. He has ended the war between us and established objective peace. He has brought every Christian into a permanent state of grace. And this is only one and a half verses! Paul continues down through verse 11, and through the whole book of Romans to shape reality for us (that’s not to mention the entire Old and New Testaments). Our job is to bow to these reality-defining truths and walk in them day by day. So here’s the question: are you living in reality?