Becoming (2)

Becoming Righteous / Unbecoming Self-Righteous

Genesis 15:6 “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.”

Romans 5:1-21 (Message)

1–2  5 By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us—set us right with him, make us fit for him—we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that’s not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.

3–5  There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

6–8  Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.

9–11  Now that we are set right with God by means of this sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way. If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we’re at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life! Now that we have actually received this amazing friendship with God, we are no longer content to simply say it in plodding prose. We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!

12–14  You know the story of how Adam landed us in the dilemma we’re in—first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or death. That sin disturbed relations with God in everything and everyone, but the extent of the disturbance was not clear until God spelled it out in detail to Moses. So death, this huge abyss separating us from God, dominated the landscape from Adam to Moses. Even those who didn’t sin precisely as Adam did by disobeying a specific command of God still had to experience this termination of life, this separation from God. But Adam, who got us into this, also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.

15–17  Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man’s sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God’s gift poured through one man, Jesus Christ, will do! There’s no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence. If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, sovereign life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?

18–19  Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.

20–21  All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

What is unrighteousness?

Not being in right relationship with God.

Synonyms:

Pride

Wicked or wickedness

Sin or sinfulness

Self-Righteousness:

A moral self-confidence and superiority arising from satisfaction in one’s own achievements. True righteousness can only be found in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Self-Righteousness. The concept of a personally developed ethic as one’s standard for salvation. However, once the term “righteousness,” in relation to God, is properly understood to imply a faithfulness to his covenantal relationship, “self-righteousness” is revealed to be a dramatic misstatement of biblical principles.

While this concept can be viewed positively as an individual’s attempt to establish a moralistic lifestyle, the accompanying attitude usually associated with such an attempt involves one’s vain estimate of self-worth before God. This usually leads to a rejection of Christ’s saving work as well.

Galatians 5:3-4 “I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.”

(KJV) “Christ is become of no effect unto you...”

It is only God himself who may lay claim to this term. For, as related to the Hebrew ṣedeq, God is found to be righteous intrinsically. Thus, all other members of the created order can be so designated only in proper relationship to his judgment, and not by their own.

In Judaism, self-righteousness could be understood as a necessary evaluation of one’s “balance,” with regard to merit accumulated through good works as opposed to one’s inherited sinfulness. A Jew’s conformity to the Torah, plus his active development of his yēṣer haṭṭôb (good impulse) and restraint of his yēṣer hāraʿ (evil impulse), would be the standards by which he could judge his own righteousness.

However, this is precisely the type of righteousness, coveted by the Pharisees, that Jesus rejects (Matt. 5:20–48; 6:33–7:5; cf. Luke 18:9–14).

The shocking news of the gospel is that God declares humankind righteous only in Christ. Thus any attitude of self-righteousness is excluded (Eph. 2:9) and categorically condemned (Matt. 6:1–18). Righteousness is shown to be impossible as a person’s own accomplishment but has become a gracious gift to humanity because of Christ’s accomplishment.

William Owen Carver says:

SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, self-rī´chus-nes: A term that has come to designate moral living as a way of salvation; or as a ground for neglecting the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. The thought is present in the teaching of Jesus, who spoke one parable particularly to such as reckoned themselves to be righteous (Lk 18:9 ff). The Pharisees quite generally resented the idea of Jesus that all men needed repentance and they most of all. They regarded themselves as righteous and looked with contempt on “sinners.” Paul in all his writings, esp. Rom 3; Gal 3; Eph 2; Phil 3, contrasts the righteousness that is God’s gift to men of faith in Jesus Christ, with righteousness that is “of the law” and “in the flesh.” By this latter he means formal conformity to legal requirements in the strength of unregenerate human nature. He is careful to maintain (cf Rom 7) that the Law is never really kept by one’s own power. On the other hand, in full agreement with Jesus, Paul looks to genuine righteousness in living as the demand and achievement of salvation based on faith. God’s gift here consists in the capacity progressively to realize righteousness in life.

Anytime we try to be righteous in our own strength, that righteousness will be critical of others who aren’t as righteous as we and our righteousness will be short lived.

The Lord asked me a question that some of us may wrestle with that lit the torch for this study, He asked the question: Do you really think that you can clean yourself up?

The answer is no. Unfortunately, some of us are trying as if the answer is yes. The only issue is, we keep disappointing ourselves because God isn’t doing the cleaning so therefore, the success is short lived and we end up returning to our vomit.

Sanctification is only sustaining, if it is The Holy Spirit doing the work in us.