The text came in at 6:40 in the morning, before the coffee had finished dripping. Somebody in another state had tried to open a credit card in your name, and the bank wanted to know whether that was you. It wasn’t, and the next two hours went to phone trees, frozen accounts, and a new password with more symbols than anyone could remember. The strange part is how personal it feels, even though the thief never wanted you at all. He wanted your name and whatever doors it would open.

Most of us live life assuming our identity is something nobody would bother to steal. The people who steal identities know better. A name carries access, standing, and privilege, which is why banks now guard it behind two and three layers of verification.

The apostle John wrote to a group of ordinary believers about an identity of an entirely different kind. It was given rather than stolen, and the One who gave it knew exactly who He was giving it to. It came with privileges, and (as privileges usually do) responsibilities came along with it too.

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” (1 John 3:1)

Soccer has a term for a player who dresses for the match, warms up along the touchline, sits through ninety minutes, and goes home. He is an unused substitute. The phrase appears on the team sheet without any embarrassment, but it raises an interesting question. If he never went in for anyone, in what sense was he a substitute? He had the title, the uniform, and the readiness, but he never actually did the work.

That question is more than nebulous wordplay. Scripture builds the gospel around the idea of substitution because the Christian claim is that one man stood in the place that belonged to somebody else. Scripture then turns the word back to us. So it matters that we understand what a substitute actually is, and one of the clearest pictures of it appears in a chapter of Job that many readers are tempted to skip.

The Man the Whole Town Stood Up For

People who love the book of Job usually mean chapters 1 and 2 and the final five chapters. The middle section can be difficult to follow, and it has something of a reputation for being where Bible-reading plans go to die. But the Holy Spirit did not waste ink on those chapters. Part of what they show us is what a substitute looks like when the need is right in front of him.

By chapter 29, Job has lost his health, his wealth, and his children. His friends have spent several rounds arguing that a man in his condition must have done something to deserve it. Bad things happen to bad people, they reasoned, so Job’s suffering must be evidence of Job’s sin. Their reasoning is wrong, and God makes that clear at the end of the book when He condemns Job’s friends and vindicates Job. For now, Job is arguing back by remembering what his life used to be like.

He remembers how his days used to begin.

“When I went out to the gate of the city, when I prepared my seat in the square, the young men saw me and withdrew, and the aged rose and stood;” (Job 29:7–8)

The gate was the town hall, courtroom, and conference table all at once. Legal disputes were settled there, business was conducted there, and a man’s standing in the community was visible in the way people responded when he entered the square. The young men stopped talking. The older men stood up.

Job could have explained that reception in several ways, and the obvious explanation would have been money. He was the greatest man in the east, and people have always known how to defer to wealth. But money is not the reason Job gives. Neither does he point to his reputation for wisdom, even though later in the chapter he says men waited for his counsel like they waited for rain. When Job explains why the city rose when he arrived, he talks about the people he had helped.

“because I delivered the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to help him. The blessing of him who was about to perish came upon me, and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy… I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy, and I searched out the cause of him whom I did not know. I broke the fangs of the unrighteous and made him drop his prey from his teeth.” (Job 29:12–17)

The word substitute never appears in the passage, but the idea is hard to miss.

The Offices Job Filled

Job’s list sounds like a series of vacancies. Each person he mentions has some need that nobody else is meeting, and Job steps in to fill the gap.

The poor had no benefactor, and Job provided for them. The fatherless had no father, and Job took that role. The man who was about to perish had no one to rescue him, and Job showed up before it was too late. The widow had little legal standing or means of support in that culture, especially without sons, and Job cared for her so faithfully that her heart sang for joy. The blind had no eyes, so Job became their eyes. The lame had no feet, so Job became their feet.

Then Job says something that takes this even further. He searched out the cause of a man he did not know. The word cause refers to a legal case. Job went looking for other people’s lawsuits. He walked into the courtroom at the city gate and represented a stranger who had no relationship with him, no claim on him, and nothing to offer him in return. The man simply had a case and nobody to argue it.

The final picture is deliberately violent. Job says he broke the fangs of the unrighteous and made him drop his prey. It is the picture of a man walking up to a predator that already has someone in its jaws and forcing its mouth open. If you were preying on someone in that town, Job was going to intervene, even if it cost him dearly.

A substitute acts. The unused substitute sitting on the bench is really a contradiction in terms. The word substitute describes a function, not merely a position. If a man never performs the function, he has the title but not the substance.

In a rural county, this probably looks pretty ordinary. It is the second vehicle someone lends you for a week when your transmission goes out. It is the man with a compression tester in his trunk who answers the phone at nine at night. It is the woman who takes the hospital shift nobody wants so a daughter can get some sleep. It is the family that has kept a young mother supplied with freezer meals since March without announcing it. It is the person who shows up at the ball field to watch a boy play because his father is not going to be there.

All of those things require somebody to actually do something. None of them require a title.

But where does a man like Job come from? Most of us can name people who live this way, but we may not know what makes them different.

Righteousness That Wears a Man

The answer appears in the middle of Job’s list. His catalog of action runs from verses 12 through 17, but verse 14 interrupts the list with something that isn’t an action at all.

“I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban.” (Job 29:14)

The robe and turban were associated with the work Job was doing at the city gate. In our courts, a judge puts on a black robe. In Job’s world, the clothing he wore communicated something about the role he was about to perform. Job describes himself getting ready in the morning and putting on righteousness as part of getting ready for his work. Before he went out to the gate, he put on the character that his position required.

Clothing has a way of becoming part of how we think about a person. A coat can hang on a hook by the back door for a year after someone dies, and nobody in the house can quite explain why moving it feels wrong. At some point, the thing on the hook becomes associated with the person who wore it. It is no longer merely a coat.

Job’s righteousness worked in a similar way, and the wording of the verse takes the idea even further. He put righteousness on, and righteousness clothed him. The garment was not merely something Job wore. It was becoming part of the way he was known.

One older commentator made this observation: righteousness itself became more visible and more honored because it had taken a man like Job as the form it wore in public. Job did not merely wear righteousness. Righteousness wore Job.

That gives us the second part of the definition: A substitute acts because he is a man of character. The action is what the substitute does, but character is what makes him the kind of person who will do it. If we only look at Job’s actions and skip verse 14, we see the fruit without seeing the root.

Every human being is a person of character because character is simply what you are actually like underneath what you present to other people. The problem is that none of us naturally has righteous character.

Imagine a friend agrees to help you move, gives up his Saturday, carries your piano down two flights of stairs, and then hands you an itemized invoice when you reach the curb. He had character that entire afternoon. His actions simply revealed what kind of character it was, and the answer was not generosity.

“as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one;’” (Romans 3:10)

Job does not solve this problem for us. God calls Job blameless, but that describes a man of real integrity, not a man who never sinned. That becomes clear when Job eventually repents in dust and ashes after God speaks. If even the man Scripture presents as a model of upright character still fell short of the righteousness required for his calling, then none of us can produce that righteousness from our own resources.

The Substitute Who Had No Substitute

There is a detail in the next chapter that should make us stop.

The young men who had withdrawn in respect when Job approached the city gate show up again one chapter later.

“But now they laugh at me, men who are younger than I, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock.” (Job 30:1)

The man who had been eyes for the blind and feet for the lame is now the man who needs someone to carry him, and nobody does. The advocate who searched out a stranger’s lawsuit is sitting on an ash heap while three friends prosecute him. Job had stood in for half the town, but when his own turn came, there was no one to stand in for him.

That is the limitation built into every human substitute. Eventually, every substitute needs someone to substitute for him. Job points beyond himself to the only man who ever stood in for others without needing someone to stand in for Him.

If being a substitute requires a righteousness we do not possess, then we need someone to give us that righteousness. Jesus does both parts. He is the righteousness of God, and He died as our substitute so that we could be made righteous.

The first part is painful to hear. Our sins are treason against God. Romans describes us as storing up wrath for ourselves for the day when God settles His accounts. Our sin is not a minor bookkeeping problem that can simply be filed away. It creates a debt that we can never pay. Christ willingly stepped into that liability and took our place.

“But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5)

Peter describes the exchange simply: the righteous for the unrighteous, with the purpose of bringing us to God (1 Peter 3:18). Christ could stand in our place because He was righteous, and that brings us to the second half of His work. His substitution did not merely absorb our penalty. It gave us a new standing before God.

“Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” (Isaiah 53:11)

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

That gives us the third part of the definition: A substitute is a person who has been made righteous by the Substitute. The work requires a righteousness we cannot produce. Christ provides it at His own cost and gives it as a gift.

Why God Hands the Work Back to You

At this point, a reasonable question comes up. If God Himself cares for the fatherless and the widow, why does He expect me to do it?

The question is worth taking seriously because it starts with something true. God is the one who cares for the vulnerable, and He says so plainly.

“Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.” (Psalm 68:5)

Moses makes the same point in Deuteronomy 10. God takes no bribe, executes justice for the fatherless and widow, loves the sojourner, and gives him food and clothing. It sounds like the matter is settled. God cares for the vulnerable, so perhaps the rest of us can get back to our own business.

Then comes the next verse.

“He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:18–19)

That word therefore matters. God’s care for us in our need is the reason His people care for the powerless during their time of need. It is not an excuse for us to leave the work to Him.

And this is not merely an Old Testament concern. James describes acceptable religion as visiting orphans and widows in their affliction (James 1:27). The same people are still on the list after the cross.

God often cares for people through His people.

But we need to be clear about what that does and does not mean. No believer does the work of Jesus. Only Jesus reconciles sinners to God. Only Jesus bore God’s wrath. Nothing we do adds anything to what He finished. What Christians do is step into the ordinary gaps that a fallen world keeps creating.

A mother needs three hours to get to a specialist, so somebody watches the kids. A young wife wants to run her household on one income but does not know how, so somebody teaches her how to put up green beans. First-generation Christian parents are raising children without a template for what that looks like, so an older couple takes them to dinner once a month for two years.

How does any of that glorify God? God is invisible. No one has seen Him, and the world often forms its picture of His character through the people who claim to belong to Him. When you do something good for someone who cannot repay you, you give that person a small glimpse of what God is like. Your actions make His attributes visible.

“In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)

Putting all four pieces together, you get the full definition: Substitutes are people made righteous in order to glorify God through their actions.

How the Work Actually Begins

Job’s account tells us where to begin, and it takes us back to the same words from verse 14. He put on righteousness. Paul uses the same picture and tells us what we are to put on.

“But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” (Romans 13:14)

Putting on righteousness means putting on Christ, who is our righteousness. And that happens before you ever get in the truck to help somebody.

The order moves from the inside out. You spend time in the Word, and then you spend an afternoon cleaning out your neighbor’s gutters. You pray before dawn, and then you bake the birthday cake for the widower whose wife isn’t around to do it this year.

Two objections tend to surface here: The first comes from the person receiving help. Some people are too proud to accept help. If that describes you, there is a theological problem underneath the practical one. A person who has accepted the righteousness of Christ that he could never earn has already admitted that he cannot provide what he most needs. You cannot depend completely on Christ for your standing before God while insisting that you must remain completely independent from Christ’s people when your furnace breaks. If you are willing to let Christ carry the weight of your sin, you can let your neighbor carry a casserole up your steps.

The second objection comes from the person doing the helping, and it sounds like this, “I’ve already done my part.” To some degree, that’s fair. Some of you have no business on a ladder, behind a chainsaw, or chasing a four-year-old around the yard. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. But filling a vacancy doesn’t always require a strong back.

A grandmother who prays by name for a boy nobody else is praying for is standing in a gap. So is the man who teaches a restless kid to play euchre on a Thursday after school. So is the woman who has sent a card every month for six years to a girl whose own mother has gone radio silent.

Someone within a mile of your house has a vacancy that matches something you already have. Maybe it is the car sitting in your driveway most of the week. Maybe it is a free afternoon while everyone else is working. Maybe it is a skill you spent thirty years learning that someone else could start learning in thirty minutes.

Christ stood in your place. He gave you His righteousness. And now He sends you into an ordinary week to stand in for somebody else.

When someone tells you something on their heart that was heavier than you imagined, it’s easy to sit in stunned silence. A coworker mentions on the walk out to the parking lot that her marriage has been coming apart for a year. A man you have known for a decade says his son has stopped speaking to him. The conversation you thought you were having is gone, and in its place is a conversation with a person who is suffering. The first thought you might have is that somebody qualified ought to be handling this.

That instinct can come off as humility, but often that instinct isn’t humility. We have taught ourselves to hand off hard cases to specialists. He needs a professional. She should talk to a counselor. That is really a question for the pastor. Some of those referrals are wise, and a person in crisis sometimes needs help a friend is not equipped to give. The instinct to hand off the hard conversation isn’t entirely wrong. However, that instinct can’t survive a sentence Paul writes near the end of Colossians 1, where he describes his own life’s work and uses one word three times in a row.

The Word Paul Says Three Times

“Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” (Colossians 1:28)

The repetition of the word everyone is doing work. He warns everyone, teaches everyone, and aims to present everyone. Paul could have said it once and moved on, but instead he stacks the same word into all three slots of a single sentence, which is the sort of thing a writer does when he expects to be argued with.

He had reason to expect it. Paul didn’t plant the church at Colossae and had apparently never visited them—plus he was writing from a prison cell to a congregation he knew mostly by report alone. What he knew was that teachers had arrived peddling an “upgrade.” Christ was fine as a starting point, they suggested, though the serious believer would want the fuller knowledge, the deeper insight, the practices that separated the advanced from the ordinary. Against a false religion of fuller and deeper insight, Paul writes three “everyones” in one line.

However, Paul isn’t just talking about his purpose as an apostle or the pastor’s job description as a minister. Paul is telling the church what the church is for, rather than instructing their minister on his job while the rest of the room happens to listen in.

What Christ Presents and What We Present

The verb Paul chooses in verse 28 is the same one he used a few sentences earlier, and the pairing organizes the whole passage.

“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,” (Colossians 1:21–22)

Christ presents. That is the first and governing use of the word, and everything about it is finished. The reconciling happened in a body, by a death, on a particular afternoon, and the three words describing the result leave no room for us to make a contribution to our salvation. A person presented holy and blameless and above reproach has nothing left to prove.

The Colossians were being sold a Christ who needed to be supplemented, which would mean Christ is not sufficient to present us blameless in the presence of God. The sufficiency of Christ to make holy and present us as holy supplies the hinge of Paul’s entire argument.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:15–17)

“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:19–20)

The One who made everything and holds everything together is the same One who was killed on a Roman cross so that the hostility could end. He left heaven and became a man without ceasing to be God, lived the life we have failed to live, died under the wrath our sins earned, and rose on the third day. Paul calls this the mystery now disclosed, and he sums it in four words that he seems unable to get over: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

With the two uses of the verb side by side, the shape of Christian ministry comes clear. Christ presents us holy. At the same time, we present one another mature, and that presenting is downstream of His, derivative of His, and impossible without it. What a believer does for another believer is help him grow up into what the cross already secured.

A Maturity You Can Recognize

Maturity is the sort of word that dissolves when you press on it, so it helps that Paul defines it elsewhere in concrete terms.

“until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” (Ephesians 4:13–14)

The first mark is stability under doctrinal weather. A child believes the last confident adult who spoke, and an infant is fed rather than feeding himself. For a child or baby, that’s fine. However, both are a problem for someone who has been a Christian for eleven years. Someone forwards you a thirty-second clip of a man with good hair saying something warm about God that turns out, when you slow down and check it, to be roughly four degrees off. A mature believer can tell the difference between what is true and what is merely going around, and that ability must be nurtured by handling the text often enough to know the difference by feel.

The second mark faces outward.

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,” (Ephesians 4:15)

Truth spoken in love requires community. A believer can accumulate knowledge alone, but nobody grows into the kind of love Paul describes without others to love by speaking truth. Paul says as much a few verses later when he grounds forgiveness between Christians in the forgiveness God extended in Christ (Ephesians 4:32), and again when he describes a life walked in the Spirit and expressed in worship offered together (Ephesians 5:18–19).

Salvation is a beginning. A believer who looks the same at fifty as at twenty has not stayed faithful to an original deposit, since the deposit of the gospel was meant to grow the believer. This is the target Paul is aiming at when he says he wants to present everyone mature. He is trying to produce adults, and mere attendance makes a poor proxy for that, since a congregation can show up consistently and still be highly immature.

Warning and Teaching Both Require a Room

Part of growing believers into maturity means warning and teaching. Most of us have a strong preference between those two activities.

Warning is the unwelcome half. No one enjoys delivering it, and no one enjoys receiving it, and anyone who has raised a child knows both facts intimately, since the warning that keeps a toddler out of the road is the least pleasant sentence of the afternoon while being the most necessary one. Warning a fellow believer runs on the same logic. You say the difficult thing because you can see where the road goes and because you are willing to risk the relationship to keep him out of it. A friend who will only ever affirm you is not being kind to you; he is protecting his own comfort at your expense.

Teaching is the half we prefer. It’s the positive work of putting truth in front of someone: here is what God has said, here is what it means, here is how a person actually lives in light of it.

To do either activity, you must have Christian relationships. You cannot warn a stranger, because a warning from someone who has no standing in your life registers as an insult. You cannot teach at a distance either, since teaching requires knowing what the person already believes and where they are stuck. Both require presence, conversation, repetition, and the kind of access to another person that only comes from time. There is a real difference between the neighbor you wave to from the driveway and the neighbor whose kitchen you’ve been in countless times. Almost everything Paul describes here can only happen in the second kind of relationship. Our habits of life have thinned that kind of contact, and it removes the conditions we need to obey Paul’s command.

Paul adds a qualifier to the teaching: it is done with all wisdom. He had already prayed for these people along the same line.

“asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God;” (Colossians 1:9–10)

Wisdom, in that prayer, is knowledge that has reached down to real life. Teaching with wisdom means the truth arrives in a form the hearer can act on, which puts a real demand on the teacher. Anyone who has tried to explain the atonement to a seven-year-old has discovered how much vocabulary he has been hiding behind, because a child won’t accept “propitiation” as a satisfactory explanation. That child will want a better explanation. Adults, on the other hand, are more polite about it, not demanding an explanation, but often not understanding either.

The source of that wisdom is the same Christ who is the message, which means the whole enterprise loops back on itself, since we proclaim Him and can do it wisely only insofar as we know Him. No technique can become a substitute for intimate knowledge of Christ, and no amount of communication skill will make up for spending time with Him.

The Right Answer Is That You Cannot

Having set the standard, Paul says what it costs him.

“For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” (Colossians 1:29)

Toil is the word for labor that leaves you emptied, and the term behind “struggling” comes from the athletic contest, where a man competes to the end of his strength and past it. However, that sort of intensity shouldn’t be filed under the category of athletic competition and rarely associated with our own walk with the Lord.

The most natural reaction to Paul’s sentence is a wince. Reading a description of ministry this demanding and concluding “I can’t do that” feels like a failure, but it’s actually the correct answer, arrived at one clause too early. Paul finishes the thought by naming whose strength he was operating on, and it wasn’t his own. He toiled with His energy, powerfully at work within him. The inability is the premise of the verse rather than an objection to it. We can’t present one another mature apart from the energy of Christ at work in us.

G.Campbell Morgan, who filled a London pulpit for years and was constantly told how brilliant he was. He reportedly hated hearing that compliment, because it implied that what he did couldn’t be imitated. The people who called him brilliant had not seen him at five in the morning with the text open. Their compliment explained the distance between his life and theirs in a way that excused them from not engaging in the ministry of helping others grow into maturity.

We use the same trick with different vocabulary. He is gifted with people. She has a real heart for that. They were raised in a strong home. Each of those may be true, but each can also function as a reason to excuse yourself. Paul closes that exit by locating the power somewhere other than natural temperament. The energy is Christ’s, given to the ordinary believer who has been made new, and it is available even to someone with no training and a full calendar.

Two things in this world are going to outlast you. One of them is the word of God. The other is people. Everything else you are pouring effort into, including the work you are measured by and the projects that will carry your name for a while, has an expiration date that is closer than it looks. The Wright brothers got flight, which is about as durable a legacy as a human being can manufacture, and even that will burn. A person you helped grow up into Christ won’t.

William Carey, who left England for India and spent forty years there without ever coming home, is remembered for a single line: expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. The first half is easy to get behind, since we are all prepared to expect from God. The second half is where most of us stall, because attempting requires choosing a person and a time and doing something about it, and opportunities of this kind are almost always challenging

Choose a person to invest in. It might be the young couple three doors down who have no idea how to lead their children and would say yes to dinner on a Thursday. It might be the kid at work whose father is not in the picture. It might be the woman in her eighties who cannot rake her own yard and has more to teach you about prayer than anyone you know. Look hard at Christ in the morning, open the book before the house wakes up, and then get in the car. The strength for ministry doesn’t come from you, which is the only reason any of this is possible. The One who supplies strength has already promised to present you holy and blameless and above reproach, so get out there and help others mature as well.