Justified by Faith: Why the Details Matter — A Lesson from Making Bread

By James R. Morrow

How hard could it be? I had just tasted one of the best slices of homemade bread I’d ever eaten. Perfect texture, with a delightful taste (especially when slathered in butter!). I decided right then that I would make bread too. After all, it’s just flour, water, and yeast … or so I thought. Hours later, I tasted the most disappointing slice of bread I’d ever eaten.

A quick watch of “Bread Week” on The Great British Baking Show could have saved me a lot of trouble. It turns out, bread-making is more complex than it looks. You’ve got to pay attention to the type of flour, make choices about hydration levels, and don’t forget to activate the yeast! Then there’s rising and proofing times (cue Paul Hollywood declaring, “It’s underproved!”) and the mysterious world of gluten development. Yes, bread is bread, and we can find it almost anywhere. But the details make a huge difference. The more we understand about each part of the process, the greater our enjoyment of the final product.

Salvation is a lot like that.

Many of us can remember the first time we truly tasted salvation — an initial encounter with God’s grace that changed everything. That moment matters! But if we stop there, we risk missing the deeper beauty. Like baking bread, the details and distinct movements of human salvation matter. The more we understand what’s happening beneath the surface — what God has done, is doing, and will do — the richer our experience becomes. Paying attention to what occurs in salvation leads to a richer experience of the whole.

In the Wesleyan tradition, salvation is more than a single moment; it is the entire life of grace — a journey marked by God’s initiative and our continued response. God’s love meets us before we are aware of God (prevenient grace), pardons us from our sin (justifying grace), and reshapes us in holy love (sanctifying grace). Salvation is God’s work from beginning to end, from rescue to being made perfect in love, from alienation to union.

One of the first major movements in salvation is justification. It isn’t the whole story, but it is a vital part. It is the doorway to experiencing the fullness of salvation. Every subsequent experience of salvation rests on justification. That’s why it’s worth pausing to pay attention to what happens in this moment of grace.

What is Justification?

Simply put, justification is pardon. I like the way that John Wesley puts it in his sermon “On Justification”: “The plain scriptural notion of justification is pardon, the forgiveness of sins.” Justification brings a relative change in our status — from guilty to acquitted, from alienated creation of God to child of God, from lost to welcomed home. It is the work God does for us. (Regeneration and sanctification involve the work that God does in us.)

One way to picture this is through a legal metaphor. In the American legal system, a president or a governor can pardon someone who is awaiting trial or sentencing. That pardon nullifies all legal proceedings and releases the person from liability. When we are justified, God pardons us — fully. All of our past sins  —whether in thought, word, or deed — are forgiven. All of them. We are washed white as snow. Our record is clean. The punishment is lifted.

The legal metaphor also helps us see how justification restores relationship. A criminal, once pardoned, can live again in good standing with society. Similarly, justification reconciles us to God. Once alienated from God by sin, we are welcomed into a right relationship and restored friendship with God.

Why We Need Justification

Reflecting on justification reminds us just how fallen we were. To be pardoned means that we were once guilty, condemned, and alienated from God. Scripture describes our natural condition as one of spiritual death, separation, and bondage to sin (Romans 3:23; Ephesians 2:1-3). We are not merely wounded or weakened; we are lost and utterly incapable of saving ourselves. This is true for all people, regardless of their status, morality, or religious efforts. Unless God acts, we are lost.

What God Has Done

Thankfully, God has acted. Romans 5:10 reminds us that we are “reconciled to God by the death of his Son.” Justification is possible because, in love, the Father sent the Son, who lived perfectly, gave his life for the world, rose from the dead, and now intercedes for us. And the Holy Spirit awakens our hearts, gives us grace to believe, and applies Christ’s saving work to our lives. (Notice how salvation is a Trinitarian thing!)

This is all God’s doing, accomplished through God’s love, for the sake of sinful humanity. No one deserves it, nor does anyone have the capacity to earn it — even those who have done seemingly good deeds. God justifies the ungodly, and all people prior to salvation qualify for that group.

The Role of Faith

There is only one necessary condition for justification: faith. As Ephesians 2:8 says, we are justified by “grace through faith.” Now, faith is not simply belief that God exists, that Jesus is real, or that forgiveness is a possibility. Wesley preaches that faith is “a sure trust and confidence that God both hath and will forgive our sins, that he hath accepted us again into his favor, for the merits of Christ’s death and passion.” In the spirit of Wesley’s own faith journey, we are reminded that faith is the conviction that Christ died for us, that our sins are forgiven, and that we, like the young prodigal son, are welcomed back into relationship with the Father.

I want to be clear here so that we don’t get tripped up by the YouTube apologists: faith is not a human work. It is only made possible by the grace of God. Without God acting first — by what we refer to as prevenient grace — we would have no capacity for faith. Our capacity for faith is an act of God to which we respond through surrender. God makes faith possible through grace, but God will not force someone to have faith. Justification, like all of salvation, is entirely an act of grace.

Let’s Talk About Some Questions

First, what about repentance — isn’t that important? Yes! While we can examine the various parts of the journey of salvation, that doesn’t mean they can be separated or cleanly delineated in real-life experience. Like ingredients in a loaf of bread, they’re all baked together. You can marvel at the results of gluten development and proofing, but you can’t separate them from the loaf. Wesley reminds us that repentance is a fruit of faith. Although it’s often all wrapped up together in experience, justification follows repentance as God’s pardoning work.

Second, isn’t this just “getting saved?” When people talk about getting saved, they’re often describing justification. And they’re not wrong. Justification is the moment when we’re pardoned, accepted, and set right with God. But that’s not all there is! Even in our initial experience of conversion, God is doing distinct but related work in us — namely, regeneration. If justification is the work that God does for us, regeneration begins the work that God does in us.

Wesley puts it this way in his sermon, “The Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God”: justification “is the taking away the guilt,” while regeneration takes “away the power of sin.” He reminds us that “although they are joined together in a point of time, yet are they of wholly distinct natures.”

We don’t want to reduce salvation to justification any more than we want to reduce bread to flour, water, and yeast. But neither should we overlook the beauty and power of reflecting on what justification means in the life of salvation.

Why the Details Matter

Paying attention to the details of salvation — those distinct yet interconnected works of God — doesn’t complicate salvation. It enriches it. Justification isn’t just a theological concept; it’s a powerful work of God. It is a doorway. Through it, we step into the joy of full salvation.

When we pause to reflect on that moment — the pardoning mercy, new standing with God, the doorway swinging open to the fullness of salvation — we can celebrate just how deeply we are loved and find assurance that God has pardoned us.

That kind of reflection feeds our faith. It awakens worship, increases our gratitude, and sets our feet on the path of transformation. Justification may be the entryway, but from there, salvation unfolds one grace-filled room after another.

I’m a little better at baking bread these days, and I have a deeper appreciation for every bite of it I take. The details matter. And justification is one worth savoring.

(If you’d like to take a deeper dive into justification, I recommend reading John Wesley’s sermon, “Justification by Faith,” and grabbing a copy of Seedbed’s The Faith Once Delivered: A Wesleyan Witness to Christian Orthodoxy.)

James R. Morrow is an elder in the Global Methodist Church and lead pastor of the First Methodist Church of Albany in Albany, GA. Along with First Methodist Church, Jim is passionate about offering Christ from the heart of downtown for an awakening in Southwest Georgia.