Transcript
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Stephen: One of the words that we need to understand if we're going to understand the life and teachings of Christ is the word righteousness. Joel, can you define righteousness?
Joel: In our culture, I think righteousness has a kind of negative connotation—sort of self-righteous, holier than thou. That's not the Bible idea at all. It's also not just a legal or forensic thing. Well, it has that, but in biblical righteousness there's a relational aspect. It's being found acceptable to one that you want to please—passing an assessment in the eyes of someone who counts. And that's what it really means to be found pleasing to the heart of God: to have the joy of knowing that you're acceptable to him, that you're beloved of him, and that you are able to appreciate and bask in that love.
Stephen: What's really interesting, and maybe confusing, is that when we come across the Bible and Christians talking about these kinds of things, on one hand we have the fact that God really cares about righteousness and seems to want us to live righteous lives. But then we hear people preaching that our own righteousness can't save us. Our own good works can't save us. So how are we to make sense of this conflict?
Joel: Absolutely. We need to be clear that there is a standard—a high standard, and actually an impossibly high standard for us as human beings. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus says, "If a man has looked at a woman with lust, he's committed adultery in his heart. If he's looked on his brother in anger, he's committed murder in his heart." Every single person on the planet has failed those standards and many more besides. So you're right to identify that God cares about righteousness. And what we need to understand is that you and I as individuals come nowhere near to that.
So the question then arises: how can we be found pleasing to God? How are we found acceptable in his sight? And that's the whole point of Christ coming into the world. He said again in the Sermon on the Mount that he has come to fulfill all righteousness. He's come to do for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Sometimes when people speak about the fact that we're saved by grace through faith—“the only thing that we contribute to our salvation is the sin that makes it necessary”—they say God doesn't care about your good works. I know what a person means when they say that. But actually that's the opposite of the truth. God cares so much about good works that for us to enter heaven, to be found acceptable in his eyes on that basis, we would need to do good works 100% of the time for 100% of the right reasons. And it's not just the actions we do but the motivations behind them. We have not done that, as we've discussed, but Jesus Christ did.
He lived that life of perfect righteousness, fully submitted and committed to the will of God. So when he goes to the cross and dies, he becomes the righteous sacrifice that our sins needed. He stands in our place and takes the consequences of our sinfulness so that in a future coming day we can stand in his place, clothed in his righteousness.
Stephen: We are now acceptable to God. We are pleasing to him—not in ourselves. In ourselves we're sinners; we're guilty. But through faith in Jesus Christ, we're accepted by God. And that's what opens up the door to this life of righteousness. As I read the Bible, it's the fact that on the basis of being already accepted in Christ, I now can live righteously before God. I can serve God not trying to get acceptance, but in love because I'm accepted, because I delight in him and I love his ways and I want to please him because of all that he's done for me by grace.
Joel: Absolutely. So when a person gets saved—when they trust in the Lord Jesus—and they experience that conversion, they don't forsake good works. They forsake good works as a means, as a method of making themselves right with God. They continue; they have a renewed and refreshed zeal to do those good works, but for an entirely different motivation—not out of fear of punishment, but out of love, knowing they can never lose that love.
And this is how any love relationship works. If you love your wife, you'll seek to do the things that please her. You know what standards she has, and if there are things that annoy her or things that would hurt her, you avoid those things and you seek to live a life that—we would never, sounds like an odd thing to call it a command—but in a sense that's what it is. You love her and appreciate her and you want her to know that. So you do the things that she appreciates.
That's how a Christian now lives their life. They're not afraid of God. He's their Father. He's forgiven them in Christ Jesus. But because they love him, they want to be closer to him and to enjoy that love which they can never lose. They live a life of righteousness.
Stephen: And so the whole thing is of God. God provides as a gift righteousness, but he also gives us the power to live a righteous life. The central thing is this promise that those who trust in Christ receive the Holy Spirit. And so there's new life in us. The Bible says in Ephesians chapter 5, the fruit of the Spirit is in all righteousness and goodness and truth.
So the work of God is in us, and he's changing our hearts from the inside out so that we are truly righteous people. And we therefore begin to fulfill the ultimate purpose of life, which is to represent God—to glorify God in this world.
