06-23-13 The Righteousness Of Faith Pt. 3

Phil. 3:8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ,

Phil. 3:9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith,

If you’ve been here the past few weeks

you know that Paul uses Philippians 3:8-11

to describe for us

what it means for a person to “gain Christ”.

He has told us that

when placed next to all he could ever hope to possess or achieve

within the world’s system,

“gaining Christ” is of infinitely greater value.

Then, to help us better understand

what that means

he takes the concept

and breaks it down into 7 elements.

We looked at the first one, “that I may be found in Him”, three weeks ago,

and now we are looking at the second:

...not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith,...

This one verse summarizes

what is the most important

and profound

and significant single concept

concerning the changing of human behavior

found within human thought.

Every other approach to attempting to improve human morality

or integrity

rests ultimately upon

establishing a moral code of behavior -

A LAW,

and then attempting to motivate people to abide by that code

through some sort of external reward

or punishment.

“If you keep the rules good things will happen to you

and people will like you and give you awards,

and maybe you’ll get to go to heaven when you die.”

If you break the rules

bad things will happen to you

and society will scowl at you

and you’re going to be in bad shape on judgement day.”

But in this ninth verse of Philippians 3

Paul talks to us about a righteousness

that can enter our life

not through our efforts to attempt to adhere to the moral law of God,

but rather a righteousness that enters our life through faith in Christ.

Then we began to walk through

a five-point outline

to help us better understand

what that means.

#1. We started by looking at the importance Paul places on this concept

in his 7 point explanation

of what it means to share in this righteousness that comes through faith in Christ.

We saw that he took nearly half the passage

to explain this one single concept.

#2. Then we talked about the two-fold aspect of this righteousness Paul is talking about.

We saw that it was both an “imputed” righteousness

and also a practical change in our human behavior.

That is,

certainly it is a righteous standing before God that we are given by God

as a result of our faith in the death of Christ as payment for our sins.

I shared with you last week

an incident in which Sandee and I went out for lunch

and when I tried to pay the bill

the waiter told me the bill had already been paid in full by another customer.

That’s us when we stand before our Creator.

When He looks at the account of all of our moral offenses against Him

He will say, “My child, your debt has already been paid in full by my Son.

Nothing more is owed.

Welcome home.”

That’s all part of that imputed righteousness.

The righteousness of Christ

is credited to our account,

and our account is closed.

But we saw, too, that Paul is talking here in Philippians

about more than imputed righteousness.

He’s also talking about practical righteousness -

about bringing about practical changes in our behavior as human beings.

He is telling us that both imputed

and practical righteousness

can become a part of our life

through faith in Christ.

#3. And then last week,

we looked at the difference between

the righteousness that comes through the Law,

and the practical righteousness that comes through faith in Christ.

When Paul talked about himself as...not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith...

he was making a distinction between

two radically different approaches to achieving true changed behavior,

a distinction we must understand

if the power of Paul’s words

is ever to grip our lives

in a way that brings about

the changes we long for.

You see,

Paul is telling us that our union with Christ did not simply “empower” us

to then be able to keep the law.

It was not simply a process by which

God clarified exactly where the lines were

and then supercharged His people

with greater determination

and will-power

so that they could then stay within the limits He had established.

Rather, Paul is telling us

that the righteousness Christ brings into our lives

is “that which is through faith in Christ”,

and then, just to make sure we heard correctly what he had just said,

he repeats it once again, “the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.”

He is talking about

practical, street-level changes in our lives

that take place at certain points because

we are choosing to trust Christ -

not just trust what He SAYS,

but trust HIM.

OK, I know that this is the place where all of this begins to get a little...or a lot confusing.

But the truth is that you already know more about this changing process through faith in Christ

than you think you do.

Some of you are so focused on the areas in your life where you have not changed

that you are failing to see

what has already taken place.

This obedience of faith,

the righteousness of faith

is not complicated -

it is changes in our life,

choices in our life that result from our growing friendship with our King

and our willingness to trust Him and what He’s saying to us.

Some of you have been hearing His voice

but haven’t yet realized it’s Him.

There are some of you sitting here this morning

who, honestly,

can’t quite believe you’re here.

I mean, if five years ago someone would have told you that the time would come

when you would be sitting with a group of Christians

on Sunday morning

and that you weren’t just there,

but that you liked being there,

and were even really interested in what the guy up front was saying,

you would have told him he’d had a few too many

of whatever he was drinking.

And now here you are.

And there are things going on inside you

that you couldn’t even begin to explain.

You’re seeing the hollowness

and emptiness

and pain

and destructiveness of your old way of life as you’ve never seen it before.

What once seemed like such fun

now makes you feel sick when you think about it.

You want so much more,

and right now you don’t even know exactly what it is,

but somehow you know it’s tied up with this GOD thing,

and you can’t walk away from it.

Now, why is that happening to you?

It’s happening because God is at work in you,

calling you to Himself,

changing you from the inside out,

and you’ll never be the same ever again.

That is a part of what Paul is talking about in this passage,

not you trying to change yourself for God,

but rather it’s literally God Himself reshaping you from the inside out.

And there are others here this morning

who are coming from a very different direction.

Church has been a part of your life

for as long as you can remember,

but it wasn’t a good part -

it was all filled with fear

and guilt

and obligation

and an endless, aching sense of failure.

Some time ago you hit a point

where you just couldn’t handle it any more -

the guilt and condemnation became more than you could bear,

and you walked away from it all.

At that point in your life

it was all just a big religious game,

and game you didn’t want to play any more.

And yet...

and yet, even after you threw it all out,

somewhere deep inside there was still a part of you

that continued to hold onto the hope

that apart from all of the systems

and rules

and forms

and endless obligations

there had to be something more -

something real,

something alive and healing and good.

And now here you are this morning,

not even quite sure how you got here,

or what gave you the courage

to darken the church door one more time.

And even though you’re still not sure

where the solid places are,

or where religion stops and truth begins,

still there is a hope reborn within you.

That’s the working of God in your spirit,

not allowing that hunger within you to die,

giving you the hope

that the God you long for

really does exist,

the God who can heal

and forgive

and transform your life into something truly worth living.

And if any of what I have described

fits with what you are experiencing in your life right now

you are farther along in your own personal discovery

of this righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith than you realize.

You have already changed significantly

because at some level you have reached out in faith to your God.

Now, there are two more steps I want us to take

before we leave Paul’s comments in these verses.

I want us to see why it was necessary

for God to break the performance base

in our relationship with Him

before practical righteousness

could become a growing reality

in our lives.

And then, I want us to look at the practical tools our Lord uses

to enable the peaceful fruit of righteousness to become

a growing reality in our lives.

And we’ll start first of all

with the tremendous positive power of failure

in God’s rebuilding program in our lives.

I have said before in this study,

and in fact have said countless times in the past 30 years

that the only adequate motivation

for rebuilding our lives

is our discovery of and response to the love of our God for us.

But here is the remarkable thing -

so often the only pathway that can ever lead us into the discovery of God’s love

is the one that leads us through failure.

And let me tell you the pattern

many Christians go through in this learning process.

#1. We enter the family of God assuming our union with Christ is conditional in nature.

We feel as though we are on some sort of extended probation,

with full membership,

and eternal security with God

dependent upon our achieving

a certain level or plateau of performance.

In other words,

we see ourselves brought into the family of God by grace,

and permitted to REMAIN in the family of God by performance.

As Paul puts it in Gal. 3:3 Having begun by the Spirit we see ourselves now being perfected by the flesh...

#2. Eventually, however, two things begin to eat away at us.

First, we know we can never maintain the level of performance necessary

to achieve full membership in the family.

And second, we also know in our spirit

that conditional love

is not the kind of love

that has the power to change our lives.

A God who stands before us

with His arms folded,

and just a hint of a scowl on His face,

calling us to try a little harder

and do a little better

may be righteous,

and absolutely just in His demands,

but He is NOT a God we want to be close to.

The third step in our pilgrimage is often reaching a point of failure.

It may come after a few months

or a few years

or a few decades,

but somewhere we hit a point

where we are forced to recognize

that we cannot pull it off.

We can’t do it.

We can’t be good enough

long enough to hold this thing together.

This failure takes as many different forms

as there are Christians,

but the bottom line characteristic is always the same:

the undeniable, horrible, aching realization that we have failed to do

or to be what we were called to do or to be.

Again, Paul says it so well when he cries out in Rom. 7:24

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

If our pilgrimage goes as God intends,

it is at this point that we first begin to discover the true nature of God’s grace,

because it is at this point

for the first time in our life

that we can hear our God say,

Eph. 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast.

We can hear it, and understand it as never before.

5. And it is at this point, too,

that we can hear our God say to us, I have loved you with an everlasting love,

and actually hear what He is saying

in a way that allows us to respond to that love,

not out of a sense of duty,

but out of a tremendous sense of gratitude.

That kind of work within us,

that work at the heart level,

is among the greatest works God ever accomplishes in our lives.

It is also relatively rare

because it cannot happen in our life

without a vulnerability,

and an honesty,

and the need for a desperate trust in God

that just simply scares us to death.

I have been involved in a lot of different lives during the past 30 or 40 years.

And I will tell you honestly

that there is nothing that thrills me more

than when I am allowed to get near those

who have allowed their God

to break the power of that performance base in their life.

You’ll know them because their life is driven

not by duty,

but rather by love -

first of all, most of all by their love for their Lord

and their delight in Him

because He loved them and drew them to Himself

in midst of the worst failures in their life,

and second, you’ll know them

because they are free to love others.

They don’t walk into their relationship with you

bringing their own personal moral measuring stick

to see if you meet their standard.

They just love you,

and their love draws you both to them and to their God.

And I know it may seem like I’m getting a little bit off track here

from our study of the righteousness that comes through faith,

but the truth is what we’re talking about right now

is the ultimate test of all true righteousness

and the ultimate proof of that rebuilding process in our lives.

Because, you see, the ultimate goal of all true righteousness

is to equip us with the ability to love.

And right here is where I have been wanting to take us

since we started 20 minutes ago.

The ultimate goal of all true righteousness

is to equip us with the ability to love.

The true test of the real thing

is whether or not it gives us the ability

to truly love the people in our life.

Now, I’ll let us see this clearly stated in Scripture in just a minute,

but I don’t want us to loose the staggering implications of what we’ve just seen.

You see, if that’s true, and it is,

that means that legalism - living by a list of rules,

is not righteousness

and can never bring a person into truly righteous living.

It can bring a person tremendous social success in their preferred religious setting,

but it cannot make them righteous.

You know why people are drawn to legalism, don’t you?

It’s because it provides them with the perfect place

in which to hide from the unresolved moral sewage in their own life

that they refuse to face.

There simply is no more powerful way to make certain

that no one looks at your own moral failures

than to point out to others where they are falling short.

As long as you keep the attention focused on others

no one will look at you.

And it also means that truly righteous people,

the ones who, in their own personal lives are living by the highest moral standards,

the ones who are the most obedient to their God

and submissive to His leadership in their lives

are also the ones who are the most free

to openly love and accept and reach out to those around them,

without bringing any moral measuring stick into the relationship

because they know that no list of rules can ever change a life

and the only thing that has the power to bring true change

is a person’s submission to the Spirit of God within.

Truly righteous people

never compromise their own moral integrity for the sake of the relationship

and never compromise the relationship

because of the other person’s lack of moral integrity.

We just love them where they are, as they are,

and then pray for and work for their response to Jesus Christ.

And of course the ultimate example of what I just said

is Christ Himself.

He was absolute, perfect moral purity,

and yet He loved with an absolute freedom

that drew the Jewish world to Him when He was here in the flesh

and has drawn the whole world to Him ever since.

And having said all that,

I cannot close without sharing with us

the clarity with which Paul tells us

that the ultimate test of all true righteousness

is measured by the ability with which a person can truly love those around them.

In Romans 13:8-10 Paul says,

...for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, "You shall not commit adultry, youu shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet,”" and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

OK, we need one more week on this,

so we’ll come back to it next Sunday.