3 posts tagged “righteousness”

This last Friday, I went to the hospital after having coughed for 3 weeks.  My side was killing me, and my dear friend gave me a ride.  You see, I had been kinda toughing out the pain, hoping it would just go away, and hoping that the cough would just get better because I was taking vitamin C and watching my coffee intake.  I was trying to do it myself.
We got to the hospital and I got x-rays on my chest.  Turns out, instead of just some cartilage damage that I thought was causing me the pain, I had cracked a rib.  I couldn't just tough this out.  I needed some Vicodin and some cough suppressants.
I was talking to my mom earlier this week, and she said something that will always stick with me.  "Sometimes, we are sick for so long, we forget what well feels like."

Sometimes we try to do it ourselves.  We fail.  Every time.  Sometimes we try to tough it out, but with every cough, our side screams out like mine was doing.  We are getting worse and fooling no one.  Sometimes we just don't know what well feels like.  For this, Jesus proclaims, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." (Mark 2:17)  He said this to the pharisees, so clearly, it wasn't that he was saying that they were righteous or spiritually healthy, because on numerous other occasions he reproaches them for their hypocrisy and pride.  He is saying instead that you have to realize that you are sick.  A doctor can do nothing for a man that is convinced that he is well.  Similarly, Jesus can do nothing for the man who through his self-righteousness thinks that he is justified in God's eyes.  I dealt with this earlier: deny yourself and your righteousness and justifications.  And fall at the feet of Jesus.  Because at the feet of Him, the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, we will be made righteous.

There is a happy ending to my story.  By God's providence, I am better and my rib is healing quicker than I expected.  But first I had to accept that I was broken.  And that I needed help beyond myself.  For healthcare, I went to the hospital.  For care and rest of your Spirit, Jesus beckons you, saying, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)

Recently on this blog, I received my first comment, which frankly, Therese, made me estatic.  I was happy that anyone would read the disconnected writings of some obscure bearded guy.

In it, I came across a phrase the deserved blogging: the revolt against the idea "once saved, always righteous."  I wanted to say a few things on this, because this is a deep pit, and all kinds of ridiculous heresies come out of a misunderstanding of righteousness and sin.  Hopefully my writings are not one of these heresies; if this becomes one, I will quickly remove it, and expunge it.

I received the comment on the entry of mine called, "On Being a Criminal," in which I argued that in order to be a christian, we must continually embrace our criminality, for Jesus saves us from ourselves.  I firmly believe that one must understand his sin before he is able to turn to Christ; otherwise, there is no need nor necessity for Christ at all.

However, once we come to Christ, a wonderful thing happens.  This justice of God, which stood in our just condemnation, since we were sinners, instead affirms us.  A.W. Tozer, one of the great twentieth century theologians, puts it this way:

“[The Christian doctrine of redemption] is that, through the work of Christ in atonement, justice is not violated but satisfied when God spares a sinner…When infinite equity encountered our chronic and willful in-equity, there was violent war between the two, a war which God won and must always win.  But when the penitent sinner casts himself upon Christ for salvation, the moral situation is reversed.  Justice confronts the changed situation and pronounces the believing man just."

The key is that, for all intents and purposes, a Christian is justified by Christ.  We fall to our knees in front of Him, and we cry, "You are my Lord," and his righteousness is imputed, or credited, to us.  And so once we are saved, we are legally righteous, because we are remade in Christ.  Therefore, we are no longer sinners - our character and nature is not sin.

However, this does not mean, sadly, that we stop sinning.  Paul, one of the most influential men in the early church, said this: "For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing." (Romans 7:19)  Clearly, he sinned.  And when we sin, we must repent.  And God will pour out his grace on us.  For God's grace is by necessity infinite.

Let us not think of ourselves more highly than we ought. (Romans 12)  Because we are made righteous by Christ, let us not boast as if we are righteous through our own works.  Instead of standing on top of the world looking down, and thus sinning, confirming our sinfulness, let us boast in our weaknesses.  For if we boast of our goodness, we fall into the Corinthian error of not remembering the past.  Whenever Paul goes through a vice list, he usually finishes it with, "and so were some of you, once," as if to remind us that we were once steeped in sin.

I believe that once we become Christians, we are always righteous, because I believe in the perseverance of the saints, like any good Calvinist.  However, I also belive that some who call themselves Christian or follow for some time and fall away, were never truly Chrstian in the first place.  We are always righteous when we dwell in Jesus; but it is not because of our goodness, but instead because of Christ's righteousness, that we are righteous.  We continue to sin, but because of Christ's words, "I am making all things new," we are continuing to be remade in Christ's likeness, and therefore continually being righteous.

Let us embrace Jesus, let us fix our eyes on Him, that we might not grow weary.

And thank you once again Therese, for providing in two sentences enough material for about two pages of blog.

I can rest assured in the fact that when God chooses people, he usually chooses jacked up ones.  Jacob ripped off his brother twice and then God decided to make him the head of Israel.  Rahab was a whore, and a descendant of Jesus.

I have been pondering, or even more to the quick, meditating on the meaning of Jesus' charge to take up our cross and follow him.  It has always confused me, and there are a lot of layers to it.  But this fall, I finally got to a place where I have a handle on the passage.  He says, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." (Mark 8:34)

A couple meditations on this passage:
First, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself."  In order for anyone to follow Christ, we must deny a few things about ourselves that we, in our sinful nature, hold self-evident.  We must deny our importance in the world, as compared to God.  We must abdicate our throne, and step down to bow to God.  We must deny our "birthright" to running our own lives.  This American obsession with rights is absurd.  We have no rights, we have no choice, except that come from God.  Using them apart from God means they dissolve in our hands.  God gave Adam and Eve an entire garden to enjoy God in, but they used their rights and choices apart from God, and so lost everything.  We must also deny our righteousness.  We have this idea that we will be good enough.  In polls, people in general subscribe to some concept of heaven, and also think they are going there.  We think we will be good enough for God-which is absurd.  In mathematical terms, (this is me being nerdy), our goodness is a point of zero width as compared with God.  How can we ever be good enough, if not through Christ, our mediator.  The beginning of the journey is abdicating our rule over our lives.  The next step is to deny our own self-saving power.

Second, "take up his cross and follow me."  To take up a cross is not to sacrifice oneself - it is to declare yourself a criminal.  Not just a criminal, but the worst of criminals.  Crucifixion was reserved for the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes.  And what crime is more heinous than denying God what is rightfully his?  Than claiming to not need God, to be better than God?  With the Apostle, we must declare that we are the "worst of sinners." (1 Tim 1:16)  We then follow Christ.  I had thought for so long that this meant that we follow Jesus in the traditional sense, of then following his teaching.  But we must take the cross somewhere.  And so we follow Christ to Golgotha, the place of the skull, for he was killed with sinners.  And so we follow him, to die, that we might be buried and then be remade.

Let us abdicate.  Deny our own righteousness.  Embrace our criminality.  For in our weakness, God is glorified.  And we must live for God's glory, because through glorifying God, we receive life.  Let us die, that a new man might rise.  Kyrie Elieson.