Posts Tagged ‘Righteousness’

We find ourselves squarely in the season of giving right now!  It’s all over the TV, Internet and shops that we are visiting to purchase coffee, gifts or groceries.  I crack up at the Target advertisements with that blonde lady!  Sonya and I love her!   I love this time of year.  The hustle and bustle, the music, the attitudes of “most” people are gracious and giving.  We’re more acutely aware of needs.

Jesus has something to say to us about this season of giving.  We can give in 1 of 2 ways…Which group are you in according to Matthew 6:1-4

1.)  The giving to get group…This is the group is known for giving.  The Word says they give to the needy.  That’s good; they give!  But…they give in order to get. Their motivation and end game is getting approval, attention, and praise from other people.  They audaciously give in order to loudly get praised.  They have to loudly give because this is how they are found right before God – if they are recognized for their giving then it puts a check mark in the “good” column for their relationship with God.  So they are the point of their giving, and they are calculated in how they give to others – Time, Attention, Money, Etc.

2.) The giving spontaneously group…they give spontaneously.  No time for calculation of how they can be made much of.  They’ve no time for that.  They spontaneously and automatically give to the needs of others in such a way that their right hand doesn’t have time to communicate with the left hand what’s going on.  They give with the motivation to exalt Christ, the one who has given everything to them in the form of his life, salvation to those who believe in Him.  Their mindset isn’t themselves, but the Savior.  No time to calculate responses from others, just time to exalt Jesus and let God do the rest.

Which group are you in this season?  You don’t have to earn your righteousness.  Christ has earned your rightness with God through His death, burial and resurrection, and your faith in that.  God has provided rightness with him through faith in his Son.  Are you trying to announce your good works, or are you trusting in Christ’s work?

Let’s put down your trumpet and proclaim Christ!

Dig Deeper,

PC

We’re walking through the Sermon on the Mount right now, and probably will be here for the next 2 years.  No Joke!  We’re learning as a church family how to be followers of Jesus.  What does that look like?  I want to revisit some truths I mentioned on Sunday, and ask all of us to marinate on them.

1. In order to follow Jesus, we need the righteousness of Christ.  Matthew 5:17-20 reminds us that Jesus came for a specific purpose.  God sent Christ for a specific mission.  Christ was the only one who was capable and qualified for the mission.  He is the only unstained person capable of saving us.  He’s God.  He came to fulfill the Law.  Not to set it aside as unimportant, but rather, to lift the perfect standard God demanded in giving the 10 Commandments.  Our ancestors couldn’t keep them.  The Church Fathers couldn’t keep them.  We certainly can’t keep them.  That’s why Christ was sent and obedient to the Father’s command to live on the earth, keep perfectly the commands, die innocently and willingly and obediently on the cross, impute his righteousness to us through faith in Him, and raise victoriously over sin and death and hell.  We need the righteousness of Christ – and it’s available to us through faith in Jesus Christ as the Savior.

2.  In order to follow Jesus, Jesus changes our hearts.  Jesus is after the roots to our sin problem.  The root is bad hearts.  Corrupt hearts.  We need heart surgery.  New hearts is what we all need.  As Jesus imputes his righteousness to us and takes our sin from us, he gives us new hearts.  Matthew 5:21 & 27 detail the fact that the Pharisees only cared about the law itself, not the sin behind the law.  Not the root.  You can be angry, just don’t murder.  You can lust, just don’t let it lead to adultery.  Jesus enters and says, “I’m about the heart of the matter.”  Jesus came to give us new hearts and help us live from those new hearts.  Don’t be angry because that leads to murder.  Don’t lust because that leads to adultery.  He is teaching his followers in the Sermon on the Mount to walk in their new hearts – as he unveils the problems of the old.

Have you a new heart?  Have you the righteousness of Christ?  The way to that is to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ; repent of sin; turn from sin; turn to Christ the glorious Savior to be yours.

I wanna follow up on the Matthew passage we covered last Sunday (8/21/11) on “Blessed are those who hunger & thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”  This has been one of those verses that has captivated me this week.  God has used this in my prayer times with him to help me to take inventory of what I’m craving and desiring earnestly in my life as I seek to be filled up daily.

One of the assumptions I think Jesus has in mind as he says “hunger and thirst for righteousness” is this:  we hunger and thirst for righteousness because we have already hungered and thirsted for salvation.  What I mean by this is that we have no power to hunger and thirst for righteousness in our own strength, and in our own power.  Before we are regenerated and made alive through faith in Christ we are dead.  Dead to desires for God.  Un-alive for a craving for righteousness.  So if we are to hunger and thirst for righteousness we have to understand this important and life-changing truth:

• God’s Work makes possible our hunger and thirst for righteousness, not our will power.  

This week we’re focusing on how we’re made right with God, and what the Bible teaches about being made right with God.  The question is how we’re made right with God…what is it that makes us right with God?  The presupposition is that we’re not right with God if we ask the question, “How can i be made right with God.”  The other presupposition is we must do something to be made right with God if we’re not.  OK, i think we’ve established the question – so what’s the answer?

According to Philippians 3:1-11, Paul gives us 2 groups of people – those attempting to be made right with God through the work of self, and those attempting to be made right with God through the work of our Savior.  The first choice is to rely on our religious works, our good deeds, our family relationships, our networking, our ingenuity and strategies, etc.  in order to earn God’s favor.  What this means is the religious checklist is extremely important to keep.  As long as I’m ahead on the checklist, God loves me and I’m right with him.  The second choice is to rely on what Christ did on the cross to make me right with God – his death, burial and resurrection.  The checklist is a non-entity if we trust Christ for our favor with God.

dump the checklist and dive into our Savior!

Investigate Luke 18:9-14 and answer the following questions:

1. What does the Pharisee think makes him “right” with God?
2. What might the motivation be of the Pharisee in his religious acts of service?
3. What does Jesus say about the Pharisee’s justification (standing) with God?
4. How did the Tax Collector earn the favor of God?  (Through self or God’s mercy in Christ?)
5. According to Phil 3:1-11 which group am i in?  According to Luke 18:9-14, which am i?

Praise God today for his mercy, grace, and kindness to us in counting us righteous not by what we do, but by what Christ did for us!