Foundations in Seven Days

Everything in the Christian faith begins with God — so we begin where Israel began, with the words a faithful Jew recited every morning and evening: Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God. The LORD is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). There is one God, not many; He is personal, not a vague force; and He is to be loved with everything we are — heart, soul, and strength.

This one God has revealed Himself more fully in the New Testament as eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When Jesus sends His followers out, He tells them to baptize in the name — singular — of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). One God, three Persons: not three gods, and not one Person wearing three masks, but the one true God who has always existed in a communion of love. We won't fully comprehend it — a God we could fit inside our minds wouldn't be worth worshiping — but we can truly know Him.

Notice too how knowing God is meant to saturate ordinary life: talk of Him when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way (Deuteronomy 6:7). Worship isn't a compartment; it's the air a whole life breathes. Before we ask what God wants from us, we start here: who He is.

If God is the foundation, Jesus is where that foundation meets us. John makes a staggering claim: the Word who was God and through whom all things were made became flesh, and lived among us (John 1:1,14). The Creator entered His own creation as a human being. Fully God, fully man, one Person.

Paul presses the same truth in Colossians: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, the one who holds all things together (Colossians 1:15-17). Jesus is not a wise teacher we admire from a distance or a lesser being God created. He is God with us — and that is why He alone can save us.

Why does this matter so much? Because only one who is truly God could rescue us, and only one who is truly man could stand in our place. Take away His deity and the cross is just a tragedy; take away His humanity and it can't be for us. Hold both together, and the cross becomes the place where God Himself bears our sin. Everything else in the faith rests on getting Jesus right.

This is the hardest day of the week, and the most necessary. Paul builds a careful case and reaches a verdict that spares no one: There is no one righteous; no, not one (Romans 3:10). Religious and irreligious, moral and immoral — all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Sin isn't just the bad things a few people do; it's a condition we all share, a turning from God that runs through every human heart, including our own.

This is meant to humble us, not crush us. We can't receive a rescue we don't think we need. As long as we imagine we're basically fine, grace will seem unnecessary — even insulting. Honest diagnosis is what makes the cure precious.

And watch where Paul goes. He doesn't leave us in the verdict; he turns, on one of the most hopeful words in Scripture: But now (Romans 3:21). A righteousness from God has been revealed, offered freely to all who believe, justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 3:24). The bad news is real — but it exists to make room for news far better than we dared hope.

Today we stand at the center of the entire Bible. Isaiah, writing seven centuries before Jesus, describes a servant despised and rejected, pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities — one upon whom the LORD has laid... the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:3-6). Read it slowly; it reads like an eyewitness account of the cross written long before it happened.

The key word is substitution: He stood in our place. Peter, who watched it happen, puts it plainly: He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24). The punishment that brought us peace fell on Him. He took what we deserved so we could receive what only He deserved.

And He did it willingly, in love. Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter... he didn't open his mouth (Isaiah 53:7). This was not God reluctantly tolerating us, nor an angry deity needing to be appeased against His will — it was God Himself, in Christ, absorbing the cost of our sin so the relationship could be restored. The cross is where God's justice and God's love meet and embrace. Don't rush past it.

If the cross is where our debt is paid, the resurrection is the receipt — God's proof that the payment was accepted and that death itself has been defeated. Paul lays out the gospel in its earliest form: Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day, then appeared to hundreds of witnesses, most still alive and able to be questioned (1 Corinthians 15:3-6).

Paul refuses to soften it. He stakes the entire faith on whether it actually happened: if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins (1 Corinthians 15:17). Christianity is not a set of timeless principles that would survive an empty-tomb hoax; it is a claim about an event. Either Jesus walked out of that grave, or the whole thing collapses.

But He did. Now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20). 'Firstfruits' means His resurrection is the beginning of ours — a promise that those who belong to Him will follow. For the believer, death is no longer a wall but a doorway. The tomb is empty, so the future is full.

After the diagnosis (sin), the cure (the cross), and the proof (the resurrection), today asks the most personal question: how does all this become mine? Paul's answer is grace. We were dead in trespasses — not sick, not struggling, but dead, unable to save ourselves — but God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ (Ephesians 2:4-5).

Then the line to memorize for life: by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). Salvation is a gift, start to finish. We don't earn it, climb to it, or contribute to it; we receive it with empty hands. That is what keeps the Christian life from being either pride or despair — it was never about our performance.

And it is gloriously available. Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:13) — no exceptions, no qualifications. If you've never received this gift, you can today, in your own words: turning from sin, trusting that Jesus died and rose for you, calling on Him as Lord. Grace runs downhill to the empty-handed. Come and receive.

We end the week where the Christian life is actually lived day to day: in the power of the Holy Spirit. And it opens with words worth carving over the door of your heart: There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). For the one who belongs to Christ, the verdict is already in, and it is not guilty — settled, permanent, resting on His record and not on ours.

From that security flows new life. God doesn't save us and then leave us to grit our way forward; He gives us His Spirit to dwell within us — the very Spirit who raised up Jesus from the dead (Romans 8:11). The Spirit is how God is present in us, changing us from the inside, giving life where there was death.

And the Spirit assures us of who we now are: you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, 'Abba! Father!' (Romans 8:15). Not slaves, not orphans, not employees anxiously hoping to keep their job — but beloved children, secure in the family of God. This is the foundation you now stand on: no condemnation behind you, the Spirit within you, and a Father ahead of you who will never let you go.