For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. -Proverbs 23:7

 Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. –Proverbs 4:20

Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. –Galatians 2:16

 But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise, grace would no longer be grace. Romans 11:6.  

 

Give me Righteousness

Lord, help me to walk righteously before you.
Help me to be grateful for your gifts.
Don’t allow me, Lord, to become indifferent
So, I won’t allow my faith to drift.

Lord, my soul is crying out to serve you.
Give me wisdom for I am a mere beginner.
Help me Lord to walk out my righteousness
The gift you gave while I was still a sinner.

Abram, you called righteous for his faith,
You saved Noah for his righteous faith as well.
Cain was righteous for the sacrifice he brought
It is that righteousness to which I am compelled.

Allow me the righteousness of Job, Lord,
Help me to hunger and thirst for it.
Show me just where you want for me to go, Lord
With directions from your Holy Spirit.

I vow to always be your servant, Lord
I promise I will never turn away.
For as long as you keep me on this earth,
It will be my aim to please you every day.

And when you decide to call me home, Lord,
When you ask for an accounting of my days,
I hope my righteousness will go before me
That you will know I was steadfast and obeyed
©Linda Troxell, 10/07/2019

 

As Christians, we have Christian words and phrases that we commonly use without even thinking about what they actually mean. Of course, we know their connotation within the context they are being used, but often we do not know their actual definition and therefor perhaps we do not use them correctly. I recently came across a couple of examples of this.

Many Christians either don’t know or disregard in conversation that Christ is not a part of Jesus’ name but a title meaning “The anointed one”. That’s why He is often referred to in the Bible as Christ Jesus rather than Jesus Christ as if Christ was His last name.

Likewise, original sin is often misunderstood. Many think that this term refers to the first sin committed by Adam and Eve in the garden. When, in reality, original sin is a term referring to the first willful sin committed after a person reaches the age of reason when they are capable of knowing right from wrong beyond the concrete consequence of punishment.

This brought me to think about some of the “Christianese” that I might use despite having only a vague idea of its definition. I often use the words righteous or righteousness and I have not ever, until now, really thought about the meaning of these words.

I assumed by the words themselves that they mean consistently doing the right thing or consistently being right, and that is how I used them. Of course, this led me to believe, logically, that a righteous person is consistently right and consistently does the right thing. I decided to look into it to see how close I was.

I was surprised at what I found. It seems that righteous and righteousness are important words. They appear 540 times in 520 verses in the Bible. Even more surprising for me is that there are 1.5 times as many scriptures that mention righteous, in one of its forms, than scriptures that mention faith in any form. I would not have guessed righteous would be in the Bible more often than is faith.

My definition of righteousness was okay as far as it went. Righteousness actually means “the quality of being morally correct and justifiable. The way I thought of righteousness, the way I used the word, indicated that righteousness is being right and doing the right thing consistently. Pretty close, right?

Well, it was pretty close in one sense and not at all close in another. Let me explain. Of course, righteousness is one of the main attributes of God. In the Old Testament, then, righteous meant, behaving in the right way but more specifically, holy and upright living, in accordance with God’s standards. This definition was synonymous with following God’s laws. Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness. Genesis 16:6

My definition was not really close in the sense that in the New Testament, at the death of Jesus, righteousness was no longer about obeying God’s law. Because we were no longer living under the law after Jesus atoned for our sins. Jesus’ death on the cross was the beginning of the covenant of grace.

Righteousness then came to mean being in right standing with God that can only happen through faith and dependence upon Christ. We can be righteous no other way.    

As you can see, in researching the word righteousness I found out that it is not a small word to throw around without thought.

I believe many of us Christians have a difficult time understanding righteousness because we are confused by, or even completely unaware of, what righteousness is and how we obtain right standing in the sight of God. I know I’ve never heard a sermon that addressed how we become righteous; at least not one I understood.

Until writing this blog I was ignorant of exactly what righteousness is and how it is attained. For me, righteous before God was just one more example of the Christianese I often heard but of whose definition I had only a vague notion. So, I am going to try here to explain righteousness as I understand it, in terms as simple as possible.

I think many, if not most, Christians, while we profess to understand that our salvation is a gift of grace that we don’t deserve and could not have earned, we continue to believe that it is our behaviors that make us righteous. Perhaps we believe that God judges our righteousness by our behavior because we are desperate to think we have a measure of control.

The Pharisees made the same mistake. But Jesus taught the opposite. He taught us that we must change our hearts to change our actions. And while some people still feel pressured to rely on their own behavior to become righteous, it will never work. Because as Proverbs tells us, For as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. Proverbs 23:7

All of us know or have been told, that in order to truly worship God we must be righteous in our hearts. So, we want to believe we have some control over our hearts being righteous. We reason, that if we can behave well, if we can produce the behavior God wants from us, our hearts will become righteous.

However, it’s a mistake to believe that our behavior can change our hearts. Because, in fact, the opposite is true. It is the condition of our heart that produces our behavior. And it is only salvation that can produce changes in our hearts that make us righteous before God. Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. –Proverbs 4:20

Because while we may be able to produce behavior that pleases God for a while through self-will, it is our right standing with God that produces the right actions that last. We cannot be made righteous by our good works. Rather, it is our righteous hearts that produce our good works.

It’s difficult for us to wrap our heads around the fact that God loves us so much that he would humble Himself by becoming flesh with His only goal to die to save us. But He did just that. He came as fully man and fully God, lived a perfect life without sin, only to atone for our sins by taking them upon Himself as He died on the cross.

It’s difficult to believe because as humans and sinners we have never experienced that level of selflessness. But by faith, we know it happened. We know Jesus’ death on the cross saved us from eternal separation from God that is spiritual death.

From the moment of Jesus’ death, when God gazes upon those of us who, by faith, believe and accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, He sees not the ugly sinners that we were, but the beauty of the perfection of Jesus that we have become. That’s why we as sinners can have a relationship with a Holy God who cannot abide with sin.

As Christians, we are all aware that we were given salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. We know the elements we must believe in order to actually be believers; that Jesus is the son of God, He died on the cross to atone for our sins and He rose from the grave on the third day. There is no confusion about this.

What I think many Christians are less aware of is that at the same time that Jesus took our sin from us, He also exchanged His righteous, pure and honest heart for our impure, dishonest, and deceitful hearts, making us righteous in God’s sight. In other words, both salvation and righteousness are ours by grace through faith.

This then is known as justification. In Christian theology, justification is God’s righteous act of removing the guilt and penalty of sin while, at the same time, declaring the ungodly to be righteous through faith in Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. Galatians 2:16

Just as the gift of our salvation requires our full faith and dependence on Jesus, so does the gift of righteousness. It is our faith and trust in Jesus that puts His righteousness into our new spirit at the moment of salvation and gives us righteousness before God. 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

I think that most Christians understand that Jesus dying to save us from sin, is a gift of grace by faith. Even those who don’t fully understand grace, accept that they did nothing and can do nothing to earn or deserve this act of love from God. But, we know that some of them continue to fall prey to the fear and anxiety of never being good enough, never doing good enough, to please God and hold on to their salvation.

I wonder how much more so it is confusing, then, to understand that righteousness, the right standing with God, was an ancillary gift of salvation. I could be wrong but I think that many, many Christians don’t even understand, as I didn’t understand, what righteousness really is. Once I understood righteousness, I was able to rest easier about my lingering fears that I don’t do enough, really that I am just not enough, to be acceptable to God.

For, isn’t that really what righteousness is, being acceptable to God just as we are? For me, learning that my righteousness is a gift of grace, given to me at the same time as the gift of salvation, is huge. Knowing that there is nothing I did or could have done to receive it, and therefore there is nothing I need to do or even can do, to keep it, dispels one of my most persistent anxieties.

There will probably always be those who don’t understand righteousness or that it is a gift of grace from God. They will continue to try to establish their righteousness, to become acceptable to God through doing good works or having Godly behavior. I feel really bad for those people because they will be engaging in an exercise in frustration and maybe something more dangerous than that.

We’ve learned that this process of salvation and righteousness is a package deal. We get both or we get neither. That means that we must depend on Jesus’ for our salvation and our righteousness. We must believe we have both through grace by faith in His sacrifice for us in order to benefit from any of it.

We can’t have faith that Jesus provided our salvation but trust only in our own goodness and behavior to become righteous and expect to benefit from the atonement Jesus made for our sins. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise, grace would no longer be grace. –Romans 11:6.  If we can’t accept that Jesus’ gift to us was both salvation and righteousness than do we really have the faith it takes to be saved at all?

While I have to say that writing this blog has been beneficial to my growth, I hope that it wasn’t only helpful to me. I hope that what I have written here will be helpful to someone else as well. Hopefully, it will help more than one person to have an AHA! moment, as I did, in their understanding of righteousness.

Or if not that, I hope it will inspire you to research it for yourselves. I don’t claim to have an experts knowledge. I am only relating what I understood from my reading. I encourage you to do your own research.

Or, I guess it’s possible that all other Christians already had this understanding and that somehow I was the only one to miss that sermon. But it’s been my experience that if I don’t know something, or I have a question, it’s likely at least a few others are in the same boat.

 

Let’s Pray;

Lord, we are so grateful for your generosity in allowing us to continue learning about you and your Word. We love the fact that we can read about you or read your Word many, many times and each time we find something new. Lord, we ask that you help us to let go of the doubts and fears that keep us feeling like we need to earn your love and acceptance by our works and behaviors. Help us, Lord, to fully accept your wonderful and beautiful gift of grace. Forgive us, Lord, for continuing to I worry about our salvation and our righteousness when you have assured us that it is ours unconditionally as your gift of grace just by accepting it through faith. We know that it doesn’t please you, and Lord we want to please you. We are grateful that you sacrificed so much so that we can have a personal relationship with you. Help us, Lord, to just be grateful and accept it without second-guessing. We pray this prayer in the most holy name of Christ Jesus, Amen!

 

The Seven Ps

Points for Pondering or Prayer or Perhaps for Putting Pen to Paper

Did you have an understanding of righteousness, what it is, how we obtain it, etc. before reading this?

If yes, did what you read agree pretty well with what you understood before reading?

Whether or not what you read agrees with your prior understanding of righteousness, perhaps you could list what in this blog did or did not agree with your prior understanding.  If what you read did line up with what you already understood, list what lined up and how. If it didn’t agree, list what you understood differently and how.

Did this blog help you to understand or clarify anything about righteousness?  Write what it helped you to understood or what was clarified by reading this blog?

If you were unclear about anything you read here, do you think you will research righteousness on your own?      Why?   Why not?

Have you ever worried about your salvation even though you are a believer and understand grace?

Have you ever known or discovered that you were doing good works, like volunteering, serving at church, etc at least partially because you believed it would help make up for your sins or help your standing with God?