©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

02/29/04

The True Nature of Righteousness

2/29/04 The True Nature of Righteousness

We have pulled out of our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians for a few weeks

so that I can share with you

some of the most significant surprises I have encountered in my Christian life.

Whether we are aware of it or not,

when we enter the family of God through faith in Christ’s death for our sins,

we all bring with us both expectations and assumptions

about what this new life with God through Christ is like.

We have assumptions about what He expects from us,

and what we can expect from Him.

We have assumptions about the way things will work within the family of God,

and we have expectations about how life with God will alter our lives.

When we first come to the King

none of these assumptions or expectations are based upon personal experience

because at that point in our lives we have none.

All of them have been handed to us by the religious community around us,

and by our culture,

and by our observation of the lives of others whom we believe to be Christians.

I was in my late teens when I met my Lord,

living on campus at a Christian college,

from a family background that included church involvement

for as far back as I could remember.

I certainly brought with me into my relationship with the Lord

a well defined collection of assumptions and expectations.

And now, more than 35 years later,

as I look back on those assumptions,

I can see that most of them were wrong.

What I have been sharing with you in recent weeks

are some of the errors in those assumptions and expectations

that have surprised me the most.

We’ve looked at three of them so far -

God Himself,

the true nature of the church,

and the true nature of spiritual warfare.

This morning I want to talk about the true nature of righteousness.

I am by nature and temperament a legalist.

It has been my observation that,

when it comes to our flesh responses to the moral law of God,

we tend to fall into one or the other of two distinctly different groups,

the legalists and the lawless ones.

When the Apostle Paul talked with us about the condition of the human spirit outside of Christ,

in the 7^th chapter of Romans

he offered an illustration

to help us visualize our condition without our Lord.

In the first few verses of that 7^th chapter

he uses the illustration of a marriage relationship,

telling us that it’s like we enter this world with our spirits married to the law.

The law is the rigid,

demanding,

unbending,

domineering husband,

and our spirits are chained to this horrible union,

forever under the law’s authority,

never able to escape it,

and never able to measure up.

It isn’t that the law is in itself in any way evil, of course.

The evil is within our own spirits,

spirits that are in open warfare with God,

resisting His leadership

and resenting His authority in our lives.

In that situation

the law of God can do only two things for us -

it demands moral obedience from us

and then condemns us when we fall short.

I don’t want to get sidetracked too badly here,

but it is fascinating the way God uses that moral law to drive us to Himself.

We human beings like to pretend we are absolutely free to pick and choose whatever morality we want when we enter this world.

The intellectuals will debate and discuss

and proclaim to us that there really are no absolute moral boundaries,

and the average guy on the street

will tell himself he can do anything he wants any time he wants,

so long as he doesn’t get caught,

but no matter how we act,

or what philosophies we put forth,

the moral law of God is always there within us,

proclaimed in the written Word for those who still have exposure to it,

and imbedded in every human spirit in the form of our moral conscience.

And no matter how much we may fight against it,

we cannot escape its demanding, condemning presence in our lives.

And outside of Christ

it has been my observation

that we tend to deal with this moral law of God in one of two ways.

There are some, like myself, whose flesh is most comfortable hiding from the spirit of the law behind legalism.

Legalism takes countless different forms,

but the fundamental approach is always the same.

The legalist creates for himself

a mental list of moral boundaries that he feels he can keep,

or at least that he can keep better than most of those around him,

and then he hides from his own immorality of spirit

behind the facade of external morality

as defined by that mental list he carries around with him.

The full-blown legalist

who has never faced his own immorality

is frequently a very unpleasant person to be around

because he develops subtle but powerful techniques

for letting others know that he really is morally superior to them.

He may powerfully project an image of being right,

but he never projects an image of being free,

or even of being very happy for that matter.

Legalism is a terrible bondage for the human spirit,

but one that only God can free us from.

But once we are willing to reach out to Him

and allow Him to begin messing around in our lives,

He has an extremely effective solution for legalism.

All He does is to show us ourselves.

Or, more accurately,

all he does is to show us our own sin

or our potential for sin

and from that point on

none of the lists matter.

All that matters

is knowing that His grace is sufficient for me.

When God brought the Old Testament Prophet Isaiah to that point in his life he cried out,

ISA 6:5 "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."

And when the Apostle Paul reached that point he said,

ROM 7:24 Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?

And every Christian who has ever allowed God to lead him through that process of seeing himself honestly apart from his Lord understands exactly what those two men were saying.

All of a sudden

our little legalistic hiding place conceals nothing.

I learned long ago

that when I bump up against a person in the religious community

who has a critical, judgmental spirit within them,

someone who is highly gifted in their ability

to see the flaws, and sins, and failures in others,

I have bumped up against a person

who has not yet allowed God to show them themselves.

Nothing has the power to free us from the spirit of condemnation over others

like an honest perspective on the evil within our own lives.

But only the Spirit of God can accomplish that within us,

and then only when we will allow Him to do so.

Legalism, then, is the first very common approach to dealing with the moral law of God outside of Christ,

and the second common approach is lawlessness.

The lawless personality doesn’t try to hide behind a facade of righteousness like the legalist,

the lawless person tries to conquer the moral law of God

by throwing it out altogether.

For the lawless person

rules are not a secure hiding place,

they are a cage to be blasted apart.

Their security is in their conviction

that they have both the right and the ability to run their own lives,

without anyone telling them what they can or cannot do.

Any rule,

any law,

any commandment they don’t agree with is discarded.

The lawless personality believes

that true freedom can only be found

in a world in which there are no rules.

The problem, of course,

is that in the name of freedom

the lawless personality creates for himself

the worst possible slavery

because all immorality is highly addictive

and brings the human personality into bondage.

Our Lord said simply,

JOH 8:34 "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.”

And in the most fascinating way,

whether we try to cope with the authority of the Moral Law of God in our lives

through legalism

or through lawlessness,

with all of us the Law of God does what it was designed to do -

it amplifies our desperate need for Christ.

Writing to the Galatians,

Paul put it like this:

GAL 3:23 ¶ But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed.

GAL 3:24 Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, that we may be justified by faith.

But I got into all of this today

because my own pilgrimage in my growing understanding of righteousness

began as a legalist.

My own personality was most comfortable

in hiding from my sin

behind a great external image.

As a child I was always one of the “good kids” in school,

one of the ones the teachers never had to worry about,

one of the ones who could be trusted to do what was right.

I found this “good image” approach to life to be so useful

that I kept it up right on into my early adult years.

Then, in my late teens my Lord barged in,

asked for my life,

and, after some considerable discussion between the two of us, I agreed.

Not long after His entrance

His Spirit then skillfully confronted me

with my own sinfulness.

He gave me eyes to see myself

and my own potential for evil

as only He can do.

And from that point on,

Larry the Legalist ceased to exist.

No longer could I hid behind my little lists,

and my nice facade,

comparing myself to those around me,

telling myself I was really doing just fine.

Either the grace of God was sufficient for me

or there was no hope.

But even though my days as a legalist were over,

it’s not surprising that,

as I began to grow in my walk with the Lord,

I just naturally approached my understanding of righteousness from a list point of view.

I no longer drew my sense of security with God

from my ability to keep the list,

but still, I just naturally assumed that righteousness was, at it’s deepest level,

a process by which I kept the rules given to us by our God.

And I need to back up just a little here

to keep this all in order.

And maybe the easiest way for me to do this

is simply to return to Paul’s marriage illustration in Romans 7

that I referred to earlier.

In those first few verses of Romans 7

Paul tells us that before we come to Christ

our spirit is married to the law,

imposed on us both externally through the written Word,

and internally through our conscience.

We hate it,

we fight against it,

but we cannot escape it’s authority over us,

and it drives us to become either legalists or lawless ones in our attitude toward it.

But then, when we come to Christ a remarkable thing happens.

In Paul’s words,

ROM 7:4 Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, that we might bear fruit for God.

ROM 7:5 For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death.

ROM 7:6 But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.

He tells us that when we come to Christ

it’s just as if our old Law Husband has died

and we are remarried to Christ Himself.

But our new husband is nothing like our old one.

Whereas the law could do only two things in our lives -

demand moral perfection from us

and then condemn us when we fell short,

our new partner, Christ Jesus,

builds His relationship with us

by pouring out on us His grace,

and His compassion,

and His forgiveness,

and His kindness,

and His love in an ever-flowing river.

And the result within us

is to create within our spirits

a longing to please Him,

and to honor Him,

and to follow His lead.

This is just a little bit off track,

but it’s no wonder that Satan so skillfully uses the voice of religion

to attempt to bring us back under a law-based relationship with our Lord.

If he can once again convince us

that our union with Christ rests upon our ability to perform to a certain standard,

and that God accepts us when we meet that standard,

and rejects us when we fall short,

it becomes impossible for us to hear and respond to His love for us.

But as long as we never loose sight of the truth that it is (ROM 5:2) ... this grace in which we stand...,

we will find within ourselves

a hunger and a thirst for righteousness

that becomes a major motivational force in our lives.

Before we come to Christ we think we should be good,

after we come to Christ we wish we could be good.

The first is an imposed sense of duty driven by guilt,

the second is a hunger deep within our spirits

driven by our love for our Lord.

And with me,

given my natural bent toward legalism,

that hunger and thirst for righteousness created within me by my Lord

found it’s first expression within me

by my entering into a search for the perfect list.

During the early years of my Christian life

there was even a point where I went through every verse of every book in the New Testament

and literally wrote down on a sheet of paper

every moral command I found there.

Even though I now realize that my pursuit of the perfect list was misguided,

I have no regrets over that process within me

because through it I learned a tremendous amount

about the true nature of righteous living.

But in recent years

I have come to see

that at its heart

true righteousness has never been about lists.

From the very beginning

it has always been about relationships -

about building truly healthy relationships with our God,

with ourselves,

and with other people.

And now,

having taken so much time talking about where I started,

I have almost no time left to tell you where I’ve ended up.

So what I’m going to do

is to share with you 10 statements that, taken together,

explain where I’ve ended up in this whole thing.

With most of them I’ll offer very little explanation,

but taken together I think they will say what I want to say.

1. Developing true righteousness is not a point we reach,

it is a process we enter into with Christ,

a process that never ends as long as we are on this earth.

2. Righteousness is not a list of things we do, it is a way we choose to relate to our God, to ourselves, and to others.

3. Righteousness is not the goal, it is only a means through which we discover the true nature of the love of God for us.

Growth in righteousness is not something He demands from us,

it is something He shares with us

so that through the process we can discover aspects of His love

that we could never have known any other way.

4. Righteousness is not an action, it is an attitude.

If God has been able to create a righteous attitude within us

the actions that flow from that attitude will be righteous.

If, however, our motivational attitude is not righteous,

even apparently “moral” choices can become sin

because the attitude motivating them is not right.

5. Righteousness is the only life framework through which true love can ever be communicated to another person.

If we claim to love another person

and yet act toward them in an immoral way

we are lying to ourselves and damaging the relationship.

Love and righteousness are two words for exactly the same thing.

6. Righteousness is the only life framework in which the human spirit can truly be free.

7. Righteousness is not something we must bring to God so that He will accept us,

it is something He seeks to bring to us because He has already accepted us,

and because He loves us with a perfect love,

a love that could never allow Him to remain uninvolved when bondage still remains in our lives.

8. True righteousness is not reaching the point where we say, “I will not do that because it is wrong.”,

true righteousness is reaching the point where we say, “I will not do that because it is not who I am.”

9. Through Christ, God has given to each of us

not a list we must fulfill,

but rather the freedom to enter into a growth process

designed to ultimately create within us a heart attitude of righteousness.

The best illustration I could ever offer you

for what I’m trying to say here

is the parable of the prodigal son.

When that boy left home

he was an arrogant,

greedy,

flesh-driven kid

who knew nothing of the true nature of his father’s love for him

and who honestly believed that the life style his father required of him at home

was one that walled him off from all those things

that would really make his life fun, and fulfilling, and enjoyable.

When that boy finally returned home

he understood the true nature of his father’s love for him,

he saw clearly the destructive power of sin in his life,

and he would gladly have worked as a servant in his father’s house

just to be allowed to live in that environment once again.

There was no way for that boy to transition into that heart of righteousness

except by his going through all that he went through.

With each of us

there are areas in our own lives

that require the same kind of pilgrimage,

times when, in the name of “freedom”,

we must volunteer for bondage

before we can understand the true freedom

that only righteousness can bring.

Through the grace poured out on us through Christ

our God has made it possible

for Him to lead us through the pilgrimage

at those times when there is no other way

for us to get from where we are

to where we need to be

in order to know the freedom that only righteousness can bring.

10. And then just one last thing -

whenever and where ever true righteousness has been created within us,

we will know it is the real thing

because it produces within us a spirit that overflows with gratitude to our God

knowing that He alone has accomplished this great work within us,

brought to us by Him as a gift,

and that all we have ever been able to offer Him in return

is a heart that cries out to Him for His healing,

and a willingness to allow Him to do

whatever He needs to do

in order to bring about that healing in our lives.