Romans 4:7 pulls back the curtain on what true happiness really is. It is not a life without failure, but a life where our failures are forgiven and our sins are no longer exposed before a holy God. Paul reaches back to David’s words and shows that the deepest joy belongs to those whose record before God has been changed, whose guilt has been answered, whose shame has been lovingly “covered” by Another.

The Blessing You Can’t Earn

When Paul says, “Blessed are those whose lawless acts are forgiven, whose sins are covered” (Romans 4:7), he is celebrating a gift, not an achievement. The context is all about righteousness being credited apart from works. God justifies “the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly” (Romans 4:5). That means the very people who have no spiritual résumé, no moral leverage, and no excuses are the ones God is willing to declare righteous by faith in Christ. It is the upside-down logic of grace.

David had tasted this long before the cross and wrote, “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered” (Psalm 32:1). Yet David only saw in shadow what you see in full light: the crucified and risen Jesus. On the cross, your unrighteousness was placed on Christ, so that “in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). You do not climb up to this blessing; it comes down to you in the nail-pierced hands of your Savior.

Sins Covered, Not Hidden

When Scripture says your sins are “covered,” it is not talking about God sweeping them under a cosmic rug. Every sin is either exposed in judgment or covered by atonement. At the cross, your specific lies, lusts, pride, and rebellion were brought into the blazing light of God’s justice and dealt with fully in Jesus’ body. God is not pretending you never sinned; He is proclaiming that the penalty has already been paid in blood.

Micah declared of God, “You will tread our iniquities underfoot and hurl all our sins into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). That is what the covering of Christ’s blood does: it removes your sin from the courtroom and buries it where it can never rise to condemn you again. This is why “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). If God has covered your sin in Christ, you no longer need to cover yourself with excuses, denial, or self-punishment. You are free to step into the light, because judgment has already fallen—on Him, not you.

Living as the Forgiven

If you are truly forgiven, it cannot remain just a doctrine on a page; it becomes a way of living. Forgiven people talk to God honestly, because they no longer fear that confession will ruin them. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). You can bring today’s failures to the same cross that covered yesterday’s shame and tomorrow’s weakness. Grace breaks the cycle of hiding and pretending.

Forgiven people also extend what they have received. How can you cling to grudges when God has covered an ocean of your own sin? How can you stay enslaved to the old patterns when you have been declared righteous in Christ? Let the covering of your sin become the courage to obey, to forgive, to risk loving people who may wound you, knowing your identity is already secured. The more deeply you believe Romans 4:7, the more confidently you can walk into a messy world as someone truly, eternally blessed.

Lord Jesus, thank You for covering my sin with Your blood and calling me blessed. Today, help me to live like a forgiven person—quick to confess, quick to forgive, and ready to obey You in faith.

For those nations of the earth which have known the story of Jesus, Christmas is undoubtedly the most beautiful time of the year.

Though the celebration of the Savior's birth occurs in the dead of winter, when in many parts of the world the streams are frozen and the landscapes cold and cheerless, still there is beauty at the Christmas season--not the tender beauty of spring flowers or the quiet loveliness of the full-blown summer, or yet the sad sweet graces of autumn colors. It is beauty of another kind, richer, deeper and more elevating, that beauty which considerations of love and mercy bring before the mind.

Though we are keenly aware of the abuses that have grown up around the holiday season, we are still not willing to surrender this ancient and loved Christmas Day to the enemy. Though those purer emotions which everyone feels at Christmas are in most hearts all too fleeting, yet it is something that a lost and fallen race should pay tribute, if only for a day, to those higher qualities of the mind--love and mercy and sacrifice and a life laid down for its enemies. While men are able to rise even temporarily to such heights, there is hope that they have not yet sinned away their day of grace. A heart capable of admiring and being touched by the story of the manger birth is not yet abandoned, however sinful it may be. There is yet hope in repentance.

The blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel. - Hebrews 12:24

That dim figure, standing on the very horizon of time, has a tragical significance. Abel’s was the first death, the first murder, the first fratricide, the first martyrdom. And so, according to the energetic phrase of the Book of Genesis, his blood had a dolorous voice. It cried to God from the ground for retribution. It prophesied of much more to follow. It proclaimed the hatred of the evil against the good, and so it was a voice of lamentation and of woe.

The blood of Jesus Christ has a significance broadly distinguished from that of all innocent martyrs. Abel is the first of the class, the type of the whole, and "in his hand a glass which showed many more" to follow; for the same causes will produce the same effects. The death of Christ belongs to that class. He, too, is an innocent Victim; He, too, dies because bad men hate the good with a murderous hatred; He, too, dies because He bears witness to the truth, and for the truth to which He bears witness. He is a Martyr.

And is that all? Does the blood of Christ speak the same things as the blood of Abel, only more tenderly and more loudly? Nay; there are some of us, I am afraid, to whom it does; to whom it only reiterates the old lesson of the world’s wages to the world’s teachers; to whom it is nothing more than the highest, the most touching, the most tragic example of what the good man has to meet with when he asserts the principles of his own life against the principles on which the world’s lives are mostly regulated. Let me urge upon you that if Christ’s blood says nothing more to you than that He is the foremost of the martyrs and the innocents, who have died because the world hated them and their goodness, Christ’s blood is dumb to you.

It speaks other lessons altogether than these, dear brother; does it speak them to you? Have you penetrated beneath that surface significance which, blessed as it is, is only surface, and have you come down to the characteristic thing, the something more, which makes Christianity all that it is, of blessing and power? And do you hear another proclamation altogether from the shed blood than the proclamation of innocent martyrdom, as over the fate of the good and the pure?

"We love Him, because He first loved us." Very simple words! But they go down into the depths of God, lifting burdens off the heart of humanity, turning duty into delight, and changing the aspect of all things. He who knows that God loves him needs little more for blessedness; he who loves God back again offers more than all burnt offering and sacrifices.