Christian, no matter how far you've wandered from God, you can still come home. Repent and return to Christ. His mercy is greater than your failures. Hosea 14:1–4

Martin Luther was terrified by the righteousness of God. He knew God was holy and hell was real. He knew himself well enough to understand that he could never stand comfortably beside that holiness. So he tried to close the distance. He became a monk. He fasted until his health suffered. He disciplined his body and pressed himself harder, hoping righteousness might somehow be earned through enough devotion. The harder he tried, the more his conscience accused him. Then Scripture opened. While studying Psalm 22, Luther came to Christ’s cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He began to see that Jesus was forsaken so sinners could be received. Later, while lecturing through Romans, another phrase broke through the darkness: “a righteousness from God.” What had frightened him for years suddenly became good news. The righteousness God requires is the righteousness God gives through faith in Christ. That discovery explains why Romans 5:1 has carried such comfort to so many people: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Peace with God…those words are larger than a peaceful feeling. Paul is announcing that the hostility is over. The sinner who stood guilty before God can now stand accepted before Him because of Jesus Christ. To understand that peace, we have to understand justification. The word belongs in a courtroom. A judge hears the case and issues a declaration. One man is pronounced righteous, another guilty. Our problem is that Scripture has already told us which side of the courtroom we occupy: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So how can a righteous God declare a sinner righteous? The gospel answers through another word worth learning: imputation. Think of this wonderfully ordinary picture. A man once received a letter from his bank telling him he had fifty-one dollars left in his account. He had recently been paid, so he went to find out what happened. The bank eventually discovered the mistake. His salary had been credited to his son’s account. Something belonging to one person had been placed on another person’s account. That is imputation. At the cross, our sin was charged to Christ. He bore its penalty in His own body. In the same saving transaction, His righteousness is credited to the believer. Our guilt goes to His account. His obedience comes to ours. The gospel gives more than a wiped-clean record. It gives the sinner the righteousness of Jesus Christ. For thirty-three and a half years, He lived on this earth without one sinful thought, one corrupt word, one act that displeased His Father. He was tempted and remained pure. He obeyed where we failed. He loved perfectly where our love fractured. That life is counted to the believer. This is why faith can never become another achievement. Faith is simply the hand that receives the gift. The reason God accepts us is Jesus Christ. And justification happens as an act. Picture two women. One has followed Christ for forty years. The other believed forty minutes ago. The older Christian understands more. Years of obedience have shaped her character. She may have greater usefulness, steadier habits, deeper wisdom. Yet, she does not possess more righteousness. The newest believer stands before God with the same Christ credited to her account. That is why peace with God can become so sweet. Your standing before Him does not rise and fall with the quality of your week. A miserable day cannot stain Christ’s obedience. You may wake one morning and pray with warmth. Scripture seems alive. Gratitude comes easily. By evening, you are ashamed of something you said, disappointed by a thought you entertained, painfully aware that you failed someone you love. Repent. Confess it. Keep walking with Christ. Yet do not imagine the war with God has started again. The peace Paul describes rests on something stronger than your emotional weather. It rests on a declaration God has already made because of His Son. This is where many Christians quietly suffer. They know Christ died for sinners, yet they still live as though each day produces a new verdict. A good day feels like acceptance. A bad day feels like distance. Romans 5:1 pulls us off that treadmill. “Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God.” The sentence looks backward to a completed act and forward into a settled relationship. God has dealt with our guilt in Christ. The war is over. Of course, that does not make sin small. The cross proves how serious sin is. It also tells us where its punishment fell. Every sanction the believer deserved was laid upon Christ. The righteousness we needed was supplied by Him. That is why the Christian can be safe for time, death, resurrection, judgment and eternity. After preaching about the cross, the pastor stood near the church door as people left. A woman came toward him. She stopped and said, “I need no other argument. I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that he died for me.” Then she went on her way. There is something beautiful in that kind of settledness. She was not presenting a theological system in the doorway. She was resting in a Savior. That is what Romans 5:1 gives the believer. Tomorrow your feelings may change. Your conscience may ache over fresh failure. Circumstances may become harder than they are today. Christ will still be righteous. His cross will still have answered for your sin. The Father’s verdict will still stand. And because it stands, you can say something the guilty sinner could never have said on his own: I have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Islam denies that Jesus is God. Christianity declares that He is God in the flesh. Islam denies that Jesus died on the cross. Christianity declares that He died for our sins and rose from the grave. Islam honors Jesus as a prophet. Christianity worships Him as Lord and Savior. These are not two different paths leading to the same God. They are two completely different answers to the most important question in human history: WHO IS JESUS CHRIST? And here's what I want every Muslim to know. Jesus Christ didn't come merely to teach you how to live. He came to die so that sinners could live. You cannot earn His forgiveness. You cannot work your way into Heaven, but you can repent, believe the Gospel and receive eternal life through Him. The cross is not where Christianity and Islam meet. It's where they part ways and the risen Christ is still mighty to save.

ISLAM: Muhammad claimed an angel delivered a revelation that denies Christ was crucified. BIBLE: Even an angel from Heaven preaching a different Gospel is accursed (Galatians 1:8). One denies the cross. The other declares it our only hope. Both cannot be true.

Six years ago this week, a French schoolteacher was beheaded because an Islamist extremist believed he deserved to die for showing his students a picture. His name was Samuel Paty. He was forty-seven years old. On October 16, 2020, he was murdered near Paris after using caricatures of Muhammad in a lesson about freedom of expression. Three years later, another teacher, Dominique Bernard, was killed in an Islamist attack. Last week, schools across France observed moments of silence for both men. But now, another story is unfolding in France, quieter and far larger than any demonstration in the streets. The country has lost its Christian majority years ago. Pew Research Center estimates that Christians accounted for 46 percent of its population in 2020. Across Europe, the Christian share fell to 67 percent, while those claiming no religion grew to 25 percent. Muslims accounted for approximately 6 percent. Europe’s greatest religious shift has been away from Christian identity. Islam has grown and political Islam deserves scrutiny. In 2025, France’s Interior Ministry examined Muslim Brotherhood influence through religious organizations and associations. Yet a religious statistic cannot reveal what individual neighbors believe about violence or government. America has its own questions to answer. In 2007, 78 percent of American adults identified as Christians. By 2023–2024, the figure was 62 percent, though the decline has slowed in recent years. Muslims represented about 1.2 percent of American adults. The numbers describe a nation where fewer people even claim the name of Christ. What happens when a people inherit the language of Christianity and gradually forget its message? To understand the religious disagreement, we ought to understand Islam itself. Islam means submission. Muslim means one who submits. Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and later claimed to receive revelations through Gabriel. His wife Khadijah became his first follower. In 622 he fled to Medina, where he became a religious and civil leader. After his death in 632, Muslim rule extended across North Africa and into Spain. The sword played a part in that history, alongside migration and family life. Islam teaches that God is one, the Creator and Judge of all things. Muslims believe in angels, prophets, resurrection heaven, and hell. They honor Jesus only as a prophet, and they regard the Quran as God’s final revelation. Its familiar duties include confession of faith, regular prayer, giving to the poor, fasting during Ramadan and pilgrimage to Mecca when possible. There is a great deal of similarity, isn’t there, between some of these teachings and Scripture? We also believe in one Creator, judgment and the obligation to care for the needy. That should not surprise us. But there is a great cleavage between the Islamic faith and the gospel. We must never play up the similarities and ignore the immense difference that remains. That difference begins with Jesus Christ. Muslims honor His virgin birth and call Him a great prophet. Yet Islam rejects His deity. When Thomas looks upon the risen Christ and says, “My Lord and my God,” Christianity hears a confession of worship. When John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he identifies Jesus as eternal God, who took on flesh and dwelt among us. A prophet can tell us what God commands. Only the Son of God can accomplish what helpless sinners need. Then we come to the cross. Mainstream Islam denies that Jesus was crucified, as the Quran teaches in Surah 4:157. The New Testament is full of eyewitness testimony that the One who lived was the One who died, and the One who died was the One who rose again. Christ foretold His death. He went willingly to Calvary. There He bore the penalty of sin in the place of guilty people, satisfying God’s justice and opening the way for sinners to be reconciled to Him. Consider what that means for you and me. Our greatest problem is more serious than the political or religious changes taking place around us. We have sinned against a holy God. Every selfish ambition, every hidden cruelty, every proud thought belongs to a record we cannot erase by promising to do better. We need forgiveness. We need righteousness through a Savior whose obedience is perfect and whose sacrifice is sufficient. Here the New Testament gives us forgiveness and that lovely legal word justification. The righteousness of Christ is imputed to us on the basis of Another’s merits. His death was a substitution. The believer stands before God forgiven, declared righteous through faith in Jesus Christ. “For by grace are ye saved through faith,” Paul writes, “and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Our hope rests on what Christ has finished, rather than on what we might someday manage to accomplish. What a tragedy to know the name of Jesus and miss the salvation He came to bring. What a greater tragedy if Christians become so occupied with watching the spread of Islam that we lose our eagerness to tell Muslims about Christ. When Paul entered Athens, his spirit was stirred by the idols he saw. He reasoned with the people in the marketplace and proclaimed the God who made them, calling them to repentance and announcing the resurrection. His concern for false worship sent him toward lost people with the gospel. It should do the same for us. The Muslim family down the street deserves the truth about the Savior. We can study what is happening in France and take seriously the dangers of violent extremism. We can recognize that America’s Christian identity has weakened. But our churches must ask a more searching question: are we still proclaiming Christ crucified and risen with the urgency these souls deserve? It’s time for the Christian church to awaken to the fact that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. That still remains the message. The great need of the Muslim. The great need of Europe. And the great need of America.