The Righteousness of God vs. Our Righteousness

Sometimes I don’t get around to blogging because everything I write is so long and takes an hour to write.

I wrote the following on a young friend’s blog, and I thought I should make it my own blog post.

She wrote:

I was just thinking about how we say that we want to follow Him, and we deny ourselves, but only one time. And then when someone asks us what we’ve given up to follow Him, we bring up the one big thing we’ve given up to follow Him, but in our daily lives, there’s so many things we hold on to.

Insightful, isn’t it?

Anyway, I didn’t leave it alone. I added, in her comment section:

One thought on giving up things. One other way that we fool ourselves is to give up things that are easy and never notice the places that we don’t let God in.

The example I think of is the rich, young ruler. He came to Christ, and he’d kept all the commandments, but he knew he was lacking something. When Jesus asked for that something–selling his possessions, giving to the poor, and following Christ–the young ruler went away sad.

There’s a righteousness that’s ours, and there’s a righteousness that is from God by faith. The righteousness from God will touch the areas we don’t want touched. Our own righteousness will sacrifice where it’s easy, gloat over it, condemn others who aren’t where we are, and hide the “one thing you lack” in our self-righteousness.

About Paul Pavao

I am married, the father of six, and currently the grandfather of five. I teach, and I am always trying to learn to disciple others better than I have before. I believe God has gifted me to restore proper theological foundations to the Christian faith. In order to ensure that I do not become a heretic, I read the early church fathers from the second and third centuries. They were around when all the churches founded by the apostles were in unity. My philosophy for Bible reading is to understand each verse for exactly what it says in its local context. Only after accepting the verse for what it says do I compare it with other verses to develop my theology. If other verses seem to contradict a verse I just read, I will wait to say anything about those verses until I have an explanation that allows me to accept all the verses for what they say. This takes time, sometimes years, but eventually I have always been able to find something that does not require explaining verses away. The early church fathers have helped a lot with this. I argue and discuss these foundational doctrines with others to make sure my teaching really lines up with Scripture. I am encouraged by the fact that the several missionaries and pastors that I know well and admire as holy men love the things I teach. I hope you will be encouraged too. I am indeed tearing up old foundations created by tradition in order to re-establish the foundations found in Scripture and lived on by the churches during their 300 years of unity.

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2 Responses to The Righteousness of God vs. Our Righteousness

Shammah says:

02/08/2010 at 11:59 am

Miraculous …

Yep, that’s what the Christian life is supposed to be.

In fact, that’s what it better be, or an awful lot of us are going to end up fooling ourselves.

John Bob says:

02/08/2010 at 11:45 am

This is a very good topic to dwell on. That last paragraph hits me especially hard.

You and Noah brought this up a few weeks ago in that Friday night teaching, and I’ve been thinking about it since. But not in a way that’s like, “Yeah! I want God’s righteousness! WooHoo!”

I mean, it’s easy to say that with words, but when it comes time to walk it out, this hurts like crazy. So I find myself being careful of what I ask for. If you ask God to give you His righteousness… He really will.

I’m discovering just how self-righteous I am. Just how often I love to talk about my sacrifice and so forth. There’s a whole lot of areas that I simply don’t want him touching, and that’s not okay.

BUT!!! Every single time that I back my stubborn self down and let the Father handle me, and bring in His righteousness… in the end, it’s miraculous. It’s always worth letting Him do it.