Imputation
There is no such thing in Paul’s epistles as a mechanical imputing of the righteousness of Christ to sinners. Everything turns upon faith. Justification does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a faith-pervaded atmosphere. … The sinful soul, confronted with God’s wonderful self-disclosure in Christ, and with the tremendous and subduing fact of the cross where the whole world’s sins were borne, responds to that divine appeal and abandons itself to the love that stands revealed: and that response, that abandonment, Paul calls faith. This is what God sees when He justifies the ungodly. Far from holiness and truth and all that makes a son of God, the sinner may yet be: but at least his face is now turned in a new direction. … It may be that the sinner is still woefully entangled in his sins; it may be that there is a long, weary road to travel before he can finally escape from the far country which he has made his home. But that matters comparatively little. What matters supremely is that his life has found a new orientation. … His position may not have altered much, but his direction has been changed completely; and it is by direction, not position, that God judges. Once the sinner had his back to Christ: now his face is Christward. This is faith, and it holds the potency of a glorious future. This is what God sees; and seeing it, God declares the man righteous. God “justifies” him. Is this a “legal fiction”? The question answers itself. There is nothing fictitious about it whatever. It is the deepest most genuine of realities.
(James S. Stewart, A Man in Christ, 256-257)
