40 Days of Prayer - Righteousness

10as it is written: "None is righteous, no, not one;
Romans 3:10

I suppose that is not the most encouraging way to start out, but it is important to remember when we are discussing righteousness. I’m often reminded of the lack of righteousness in myself, because I happen to be the father of little children. As sweet and cute as those little children are, they will still bring out some bad aspects of my personality such as a complete lack of patience. And since I’m a father of little children, I am also reminded that they don’t exactly come out of the womb as little angels. There is one time when you look at them and you think to yourself that they could do no wrong and that is when they are sleeping! Those of you who are parents know exactly what I am talking about and the rest of you probably think that I’m really mean.

What is righteousness anyway? In a simple definition it means being right before God or in His eyes. It is being blameless in our lives and innocent in the face of accusation. There are times, such as the Psalm that we studied last Sunday, where righteousness was claimed for a particular accusation. There are also times that it’s used to describe a person who demonstrates a general life of righteousness and has a good reputation in the community. However, neither one of those examples mean anything if you don’t have complete righteousness before God. So how does one go about getting that? There are two basic ways to achieve righteousness before God.

The first is really quite simple: never sin. From the time that you are born you need to lead a perfect life. We don’t really want to think this way. We would much rather compare ourselves to other people to see how good of a life that we’re living. It is like the murderer in Virginia this week; we can all say with great confidence that we’re doing better than that. The problem is that when we think that way, we are not thinking about righteousness, but self-righteousness. What we’re doing is looking at ourselves and drawing our own conclusions that we are better than everyone else. We all do it. It might be at work, or school, or even in our marriages. We think about how we’re doing in those situations and draw the conclusion that we’re pretty stinking good! The problem is that we’re all pretty biased when it comes to judging our own actions and behavior and that when we see it from God’s perspective then it’s not stinking good but stinking bad. The good news is that God knows that and so he offered a second option.

The second is quite a bit more attractive: follow Jesus. Consider the words of Paul in Philippians 3:8-9:
8Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith

It is true that no matter how hard we try we will never achieve righteousness, but we don’t need to because we can have it in Christ. It is Christ that does two things: the first in giving us righteousness before God that He might find us blameless in the day of judgment; and second that we might have the strength to rest in that righteousness and actually live righteously.

Why does all of this matter? Because we can rejoice in being made right before God and we can also be a wonderful witness by our behavior to this great city of Albuquerque. As we move forward with these forty days of prayer, let us pray that God would reveal the righteousness that He has given in order that we might live righteously.