It is not a question of being a child of God, and, as such, a saved person. Many of the children of God are very far from knowing the full results, as regards themselves, of the death and resurrection of Christ. They do not apprehend the precious truth, that the death of Christ has made an end of their sins forever, and that they are the happy partakers of His resurrection life, with which sin can have nothing whatever to do. Christ became a curse for us, not, as some would teach us, by being born under the curse of a broken law, but by hanging on a tree. (Compare, attentively, Deut. xxi. 23; Gal. iii. 13.) We were under the curse because we had not kept the law; but Christ, the perfect Man, having magnified the law and made it honorable, by the very fact of His obeying it perfectly, became a curse for us by hanging on the tree. Thus, in His life He magnified God's law, and in His death He bore our curse. There is therefore now no guilt, no curse, no wrath, no condemnation for the believer; and, albeit, he must be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ; but even there the question of _sin_ is not raised. The cross of Christ has settled that forever; so that it is written of those that believe, "_And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more_." (Heb. x. 17.) The Christian's whole course must indeed be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ; but the Judge Himself has put away all his sins, and is his righteousness, so that the judgment-seat cannot but be friendly to him. He surely will not condemn His own work. The righteousness that was required, God Himself has provided it. He surely will not find any flaw therein. The light of the judgment-seat will be bright enough to disperse every mist and cloud which might tend to obscure the matchless glories and eternal virtues which belong to the cross, and to show that the believer is "clean every whit." (John xiii. 10; xv. 3; Eph. v. 27.)