The definitive work in justification is outside us, not inside us.

For those who seek to better understand what justification really is and why it has to be outside of us.

Excerpts from "CHRIST HAVE MERCY How to Put Your Faith in Action" Pgs 58-60
by Matthew C. Harrison, LCMS President.

I highly recommend this book to all!

Please note that all bracketed [] sections are my additions for further exposition, not by way of saying what President Harrison failed to say, but saying what I want the reader to grasp about the reality of our constant need for the salvific justification - completely other than and outside of ourselves.

"We are justified “for Christ’s sake,” not because we changed something within ourselves. It may be easy to conclude that we are better people under the Law because faith does create love and motivate good works. However, though we do grow in grace, no matter how we grow, “the Law always accuses us, always presents an angry God to us. ... Afterward, we begin to keep the Law …. In the flesh we never satisfy the Law.””

Thus justification is not a one-time event. God, “justifies the ungodly” (Romans 4:5). To be just, we must also always be “ungodly” under the Law. And the text that demonstrates this dual saint/sinner, justified/condemned, Gospel/Law nature of being a Christian is Romans 7, which is presented by the apostle Paul in the present tense: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing …. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand …. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through ; Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:19, 21, 24-25).
[Notice the constancy of sin in us, “the evil I do not want is what I KEEP ON DOING.”
This testifies to the constancy of our need for justification. There is never a moment in this life where we are not the “wretched man” in need of constant need God's eternal justification.  The more one strives against this reality the more entraped one becomes in their helplessness to free themselves from it.  Many do not like this truth because it is humbling and humiliating. Yet it is a truth that is constantly knocking at our door. We may ignore the knocking of our wretchedness for a time, but it is a truth of the Law dthat will kick in the doors of our lives and rightly rob everyone their treasured illusions and ideas of themselves as good people. Only then will we look outside of ourselves.]
We are justified [that is made holy and blameless, i.e. un-wretched, in God’s sight because of what God has done in Christ (Eph 1:3-14)], not because of something that has changed “within us.
Adolf Koberle’s book “The Quest for Holiness” demonstrates how perpetual attempts at self-justification occur along three persistent paths: attempts at perfecting the mind, the will, and the emotions.
In real life, it works out this way:
[Those seeking to perfect their mind, their thinking, their thoughts, i.e.] the intellectual, seeks to comprehend and define the divine.
[Those seeking to purify their mind, their speaking and their doing, i.e.] the moralist, strives to possess pure moral thought and action.
[Those seeking perfection of the inner self, i.e.] the mystic, seeks to empty himself of everything that is not “god” and seeks to feel god by his ecstatic presence.
All three of these are fruits from the same tree [of self-justification or a self-awareness of their justification apart from its forensic declaration of God’s Word in Christ].
All of this is the antithesis of, [the complete other and contrary to] grace. “For Christ’s sake” we are just.
The definitive work in justification is outside us, not inside us.
This work was performed by Jesus Christ, not us, and it occurred on Golgotha more than two thousand years ago. “It is finished!” Jesus cried out from the cross (John 19:30).
The apostle Paul explains: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19) [not to yourself or the world].
This act transcends all of history. It was justification for me and for everyone who ever lived before and after Jesus. Peter testifies, “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
We are justified by grace through faith.
In justification (God declaring me not guilty) faith is passive; it only receives the gift.
• If salvation is by grace, then it is free and not our doing.
• If salvation is for Christ’s sake (because of His work), then its cause and source are outside of us, that is, apart from us.
• Faith is nothing in and of itself. It merely lays hold of Christ, His accomplished work, and the forgiveness of sin.
There is no stepping forward in the glare of the Almighty and pleading, “Look at my faith! I have faith. I have made a decision to believe.” If that were so, then justification would no longer be free and by grace. St. Paul writes: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this [faith] is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8-9). To plead that one has Christ is very different than to say that faith lays hold of Christ. No faith, no Christ. His promised grace is itself a gift, and because it is a gift, it is sure.
George Spenlein had been in the monastery with Luther for four years. In April 1516, Luther wrote to him because Spenlein was suffering under the weight of his own sin to the point of despair:
My dear brother, learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to pray to him and, despairing of yourself, say:
• “Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I all thy sin.
• Thou has taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine.
• Thou has taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not:’
Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will I not wish to be looked upon as a sinner, or to be one. For Christ dwells only, in sinners. Theodore G. Tappert, ed. And trans., Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, Library .. of Christian Classics 18 (Philadelphia and London: Westminster Press and SCM, 1955), 110.•
There is no middle ground. Justification by grace for Christ’s sake through faith–or self-justification.
Wilhelm Lohe wrote, “Where there is a false security and the illusion of self-righteousness, there the gruesome air of death blows across deathbeds.” (Holger Sonntag, trans. Lohe on Mercy, (St. Louis: LCMS World Relief and Human Care, 2006).

- pmwl