(from Chuck)

“That word justified is important. It refers to your status before God.  When you put your faith in Jesus, God the judge hands down the verdict that you are righteous. He transfers the perfect, sinless record of Jesus to you. This is amazing grace at its most amazing. In the moment that you first believed, your past sin didn’t cease to exist. You hadn’t done any good work that could somehow make up for your disobedience. Yet, God completely and totally forgave you.  He not only wiped the record of your sin away, He credited the righteousness of His Son to you.”  CJ Mahaney