Free The Power of Right Believing: 7 Keys to Freedom from Fear, Guilt, and Addiction by Joseph Prince Page A

question, and if you were to answer this question honestly today, it would reveal what you really believe in your heart about God.
    Most people, when things are going well, believe that God is well pleased with their behavior and conduct. However, they believe all that changes when they fail and make mistakes. It could be losing their cool on the road, visiting a website they shouldn’t have, or saying hurtful words to someone they love. At that moment of failure, they believe when God looks at them, He sees nothing good. They believe He is angry and disappointed with them and wants to punish them for their failures.
    What hope is there in the belief that when you do right, you are blessed, but when you fail, you are cursed? This was exactly how the old covenant of the law worked. The old covenant was an imperfect system. Notice how in the book of Hebrews, God Himself found fault with that covenant and sought to replace it: “For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second… ‘Behold, the days are coming, says the L ORD , when I will make a new covenant…’ ” (Heb. 8:7–8).
    Heard about the New Covenant of Grace?
    My friend, I am here to announce to you that God has already made a new covenant. The new covenant that He instituted is the covenant of grace that you and I get to enjoy today. It’s a covenant in which He declares, “For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more” (Heb. 8:12). Hallelujah!
    God can be merciful to all your unrighteousness and remember your sins no more because the payment for your sins has already been made in full upon the body of Jesus at the cross. Therefore, when God looks at you today, He doesn’t judge, esteem, and measure you according to your imperfections. He sees you in the Beloved—He sees you in Christ, and He sees the blood that has been shed for you by His dear Son.
    When God looks at you today, He sees Jesus. Because of this, His thoughts toward you are thoughts of loving-kindness, forgiveness, blessings, and favor. Jesus paid an immensely heavy price on the cross so that you can live life completely accepted and unconditionally loved by God. Knowing and believing this will make all the difference in how you live your life—no matter what is staring you in the face.
    But Pastor Prince, I don’t deserve this love from God!
    You are absolutely right! If we go by what we deserve today, all of us (myself included) deserve to be punished for our sins. Do you know that the punishment for sin is not simply a slap on the wrist? This isn’t something we can sugarcoat—the wages of sin is death(see Rom. 6:23). In other words, if you and I go by what we deserve, the punishment we deserve for our sins is death. And even then, our deaths can never pay adequately for our sins because our blood isn’t sinless blood. That’s why I like to remind people who desire to be justified by their own righteousness that it’s simply impossible. All of us owe a debt we can never pay.
    The good news is that Jesus bore the death sentence on our behalf at the cross. Did He deserve to be crucified on the cross? Absolutely not! He chose the cross so that His sinless blood could cleanse us from all our sins. The cross stands—for all eternity—as a declaration of Jesus’ everlasting love for us. At the cross, Jesus was suspended between heaven and earth as the sacrifice for our sins. He bore every punishment that we deserved. He absorbed every penalty the law demanded for our sins.
    The cross stands—for all eternity—as a declaration of Jesus’ everlasting love for us.
    Only Believe
    Do you know why Jesus chose the cross? John 3:14–15 gives us the answer: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
    He went to the cross so that whoever
believes
in