Your Righteousness – 7/23/2017

WARNING PREACHY…

We desire that God is happy with us, but too often we don’t believe that He is.  We look to the many sins in our lives, the many failures, the many times that we did not act as we should in certain situations, and we become unhappy with ourselves.  And since we are unhappy with our own performances it is easy to visualize God as unhappy with us too. 

But we have it wrong.

Isaiah 51:1

¹“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness
    and who seek the Lord:
Look to the rock from which you were cut
    and to the quarry from which you were hewn;

Isaiah was talking to the Children of Israel who had been exiled and were in the shackles of the Babylonian empire.  They desired God and His righteousness but the prison they were in made it seem impossible for them to achieve this goal.

We may or may not be in literal captivity but we are all prisoners of our minds.  Our sins have separated us from God and we want to be right in His sight, but we keep looking to ourselves, our own actions, and our own performance to make us feel like we are making God happy.  And as we do we recognize that we cannot achieve this feeling for long because we find ourselves right back to where we began – feeling far from God.

But Isaiah tells us to look to the Rock from which we were cut and the quarry from which we were hewn.

We prisoners tend to look at our present circumstances or environments in order to feel righteous, but Isaiah informs us that the trick is to not look toward ourselves, but to look at Him.

2 Corinthians 5:21

²¹ God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

You see, one of the biggest lies that the devil can have you believe is the self-help lie that “you can do it”, but the reality is that when it comes to pleasing God you cannot.  Only Jesus can satiate God’s desire for Holiness and we must accept and receive the gift that Christ gives to us – His Spirit.

John 16:8-11

⁸ When he [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹ about sin, because people do not believe in me; ¹⁰ about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; ¹¹ and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.

The truth of the matter is, as long as you focus on your own circumstances, your own situations, and your own best efforts, you will always find righteousness will elude you as well as God’s warm embrace.  But when you learn that you are righteous by faith in Christ alone then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Do you seek God’s approval today?  Then look to Jesus for He is the righteousness of God.

Ephesians 2:8

⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—