There was once a room in the mind where someone lived.
It is quiet there now — quiet where there used to be only noise and screaming. And if there was peace, it was merely a prelude to what was guaranteed to come next. Anything but that.
In that room lived an emotional economy built on chaos. Chaos created to release the chaos unowned within. Chaos projected outward and treated as an external enemy — because to accept it as one’s own would have been unbearable. When the sea inside finally stilled, then — and only then — sleep could come.
One day, somehow, the critic predicted its own death. And in that moment, it spoke to another thought — to be loved — and embraced it.
Years later, I saw what that embrace truly was. It was the food of her soul. The distraction from her limits. In being the god of her own chaos, she found a momentary and fleeting false peace.¹
I speak of the one I once called mom.
Before I knew the context of the world and its members, I knew her as mirror. Friend and foe. Grace and cruelty — where one tolerated shame and torment just to have proximity to the only perceived source of good available.
That one was I.
Her killing of your soul and your dreams was framed as killing your sin and despair — the righteous work of moral correction.² A sad reality: someone dealing with their own near-untouchable lack could only pass on the same scarcity of love to those who longed for affection from her.
To love freely, deeply, and truly requires that one open themselves to the same. Otherwise, all one can do is critique the very thing that, for humanity, is where necessities and desire collapse into one reality: love itself.
Cruciform love reveals this truth about God. Love upholds itself. It does not act against itself.³ It is indeed critical of anything that prevents it from finding its home in the hearts of people — but even if rejected endlessly, it can never be vanquished in its nature, from the imagined beginning of eternity to its end.⁴
Friend and foe. War and doe.
Two natures opposed in one body, fighting against and for the same unifying reality. The thread — the mediator — between the fracture of her worlds was the critic itself: her seeing everything she hated, and killing everything there was to love. Yes, even in her sin.
Damaged goods can be repaired in Christ — the Restorer, the Pax Supremus of reality.
Broken people can be renewed in Him. The Savior of the world is the only one capable of saving every world within every heart, from all hell — real and imagined.⁵ As long as it is understood as sufficient for all, effective for some.
And then, one day, I realized the room was no longer hers alone.
Why is it that when I look in the mirror, I can see the brilliance and beauty of Christ within me — and yet still harbor a room in my heart for a critic of the same kind she allowed herself to become? Different in aim and application, perhaps, but not in spirit.
Where her relief was to rule as a false god over the problems she projected onto others, mine does not rest.
Perfection is in output.
Perfection is in status.
Here is the secret: to always be moving was safety. Never resting gave her rest.
But God, in His goodness, is rest.⁶ He is His goodness. And whatever rests in Him can, at least inwardly, begin to move toward love and trust.
With Him, love is not something you generate as source. It is something you rest in — reflecting it back to the source from which it eternally flows.⁷ A love so precious and holy that you are changed by it: from unholy to holy, from wholly not to wholly whole, over eternity and beyond.
In life, to make sense of our suffering — and to appease the critic within — we descend. Hard. Even when we know better, blindness carries us forward.
But in Christ, through openness to the only One who can truly say I am love, we ascend. Out of death. Out of sin. Into the heights of eternal life.⁸ An infinite ascent into the divine nature, as Gregory of Nyssa once described it.
The critic steps off the road of love — the road of salvific relationship with God through the one and only Lamb, Christ Jesus, the only begotten.⁹
We are the critic. And when we are, we become the scourge of ourselves and of others. This posture of heart need not reach extremes to deeply interfere with living in the love of God made available through the Cross and Resurrection.
There is therefore now no condemnation in Christ Jesus our Lord.¹⁰
Even when we understand ourselves to be only propositionally just in Him, we are still justified. We do not need to stand as critic within Christ, as though the Father still watches with eyes of wrath, ready to hurl judgment for the slightest misstep.
Love covers a multitude of wrongs.¹¹
When we approach the Father as if Christ were insufficient — ineffective even for those who believe — we do not honor faith; we profane the gift by refusing to rest in it.¹²
I call to the stand John Calvin, and what he said with duplex gratia, the double gift.
The Protestant confession has always insisted — rightly — that we are justified by faith alone. That the sinner is declared righteous not by works, but by Christ. This declaration is true, objective, and unassailable. It does not rise or fall with our feelings, our obedience, or our self-assessment. In this sense, justification is propositional: a verdict spoken by God Himself.
But the Reformation, at its best, never meant for justification to stand alone.
For John Calvin, salvation is not a single benefit received in isolation, but one Christ received whole. And because Christ is not divided, His gifts cannot be divided either. From union with Him flow two inseparable graces — what Calvin called duplex gratia, the double grace.
The first grace is justification: the forgiveness of sins and the declaration of righteousness on account of Christ alone. The second is sanctification: the real renewal of the person by the Spirit, conforming us to the life of Christ. These are not sequential stages, nor competing explanations, nor optional supplements. They arrive together, because they arrive with Christ Himself.
Justification removes condemnation.
Sanctification removes the need for condemnation.
Where justification is isolated from sanctification, the soul is left legally safe but existentially terrified. In that vacuum, another voice rushes in to do the work grace was meant to do. The critic becomes the functional mediator of holiness — watching, accusing, driving, correcting — because something must keep order if grace is reduced to a status rather than a living power.
But duplex gratia leaves no such vacancy.
If we are truly united to Christ, then His righteousness is not merely credited to us while His life remains distant. The same union that declares us righteous also begins to make us whole. Grace does not merely silence condemnation; it displaces it. Not by ignoring sin, but by healing the sinner. Not by fear, but by participation.
This is why the critic has no lasting jurisdiction in Christ. Its function was never to save — only to control where trust had failed. When justification is received without union, the critic survives as a false guardian of holiness. But when justification and sanctification are held together, the critic is rendered unnecessary. It does not need to die; it needs to be redeemed and re-aimed.
Grace, then, is not fragile. It is not a legal fiction maintained by vigilance. It is the living presence of Christ shared with His people — declaring them righteous, and making them so, according to His time and wisdom.
This is not a denial of Protestant doctrine. It is its completion.
Christ does not justify those whom He refuses to heal.
And He does not heal those whom He has not already justified.
This is the double gift.
One Christ.
Two graces.
No condemnation — and no need for the critic to rule where love now reigns.
Being a critic of sin in others is not holy when taken to extremes. Being a critic of sin in ourselves is no holier. When done without mindfulness of grace — actual grace, unmerited and relieving — we participate in the very economy the devil himself inhabits.¹³
God’s grace does not merely cover you. It changes you.¹⁴ It does not simply silence the critic — it redeems the one who is the critic.
That one is you.
Looking into the mirror, we forget that we are allowed to choose which image we behold: the person we were in our sin, or the person we are — fully covered — in Christ.¹⁵
The critic does not need to die. In Christ, it is re-aimed. Its function is redeemed. What once accused substance now exposes the emptiness of sin itself. It no longer wounds people; it speaks against what destroys them.
The room is still there.
But the chair is empty.
The light is on.
And the voice that once condemned is learning, at last, to rest.
Creation redeemed.
Scripture Notes (Light Footnotes)
- Romans 1:21–25 — disordered worship and false peace
- Isaiah 10:1–2; Matthew 23:4 — righteousness weaponized
- 1 Corinthians 13:5 — love does not act against itself
- Romans 8:38–39 — love’s invincibility
- Colossians 1:19–20; John 1:29
- Matthew 11:28–29; Hebrews 4:9–10
- 1 John 4:7–10, 19
- Romans 6:4–11; Colossians 3:1–4
- John 14:6; Hebrews 10:19–22
- Romans 8:1
- 1 Peter 4:8
- Galatians 2:21; Hebrews 10:29
- Revelation 12:10; John 8:44
- Titus 2:11–14; 2 Corinthians 3:18
- 2 Corinthians 5:17; Colossians 2:13–14
Refine Thy Heart (Written by Aaron G.) 