Our Right. Can't

Our Righteousness Can't Do It

This is the issue every Christian must face: Our righteousness can't do it.

What do I mean by this? Let me explain.

The Body of Christ in the United States has had access to more teaching and preaching than any church in history. Technology has made an overabundance of Christian tapes, books and TV available to us. All of these are the blessing of God. But, for many of us, our knowledge has outstripped our ability. If we are honest, most of us must admit that we're not applying all that we've learned. We're not living up to God's expectations. We're striving too much. Our righteousness is falling short of the mark.

This book [Celebration of Grace] on grace applies to every Christian, but many of you are in an especially good place to receive it: Perhaps you yourself have gradually realized that the majority of your attempts at righteousness are falling short of the mark, and perhaps you are feeling quite confused and condemned about it. Perhaps you came to this realization many years ago and your zeal for the Lord gradually cooled, and you became a more or less nominal Christian, because you lost hope that you could learn to live the victorious Christian life. Perhaps you gave up completely. You may think God gave up on you.

But something good is about to happen to you even if you don't expect it: You have finally come to a place where the Lord Himself can intervene powerfully in your life.

While the Lord has not caused you to fail, He has allowed you to fail in order to reveal to you that your righteousness can't do it. He usually accomplishes this through a process (familiar to every generation of God's people) where He allows you to struggle for years and years trying to be spiritual, trying to be holy, reading everybody's exhortations and formulas, and zealously applying new keys to true spirituality, or learning new principles which apply to the deeper life, or to healing, or to prosperity; and then, after all those years of striving, you discover that many of the standard formulas don't seem to work and, worse yet, your righteousness still has blemishes all over it. Or, on the other hand, perhaps you are the sort of person who usually succeeds at your own righteousness. Then the Lord reveals your own spiritual inadequacy in quite another fashion, in that, even though you usually do manage to sustain your spiritual performance, nevertheless there remains a deep hunger for more holiness and power in your soul. And there is a recognition that, with all your success, the true spirituality and the abiding peace and the lasting satisfaction which you expected haven't been realized. Where are they? I thought Christians were supposed to have them!

You have them sometimes, maybe in worship or praise, but they are all too fleeting. You have tried to obey the biblical injunction to be holy as your Heavenly Father is holy and you have usually tried to respond zealously to preaching which exhorted you to aim at perfection. But you are becoming discouraged, and exhausted!

Face it: Your righteousness and spiritual activity can't do it. God wants you to be totally convinced of this biblical and practical reality. Totally convinced. Why? Because the requirement of God is nothing less than His righteousness and His holiness! Always. The Lord expects and accepts nothing less than His Own righteousness and His Own holiness. The peace which you seek cannot be found in your own righteousness. The only sort of peace which can ever satisfy your soul is peace with God.

The standard in the Gospel is always God's righteousness. But HOW DO WE GET THIS? The Bible tells us how:

But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; Romans 3:21-24

See, God's standard is always God's righteousness, and that is where you must find your peace, through faith in Jesus Christ and HIS righteousness:

Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5:1

Perhaps you are a new Christian, or perhaps, up until now, you have not hit the brick wall which I have described in this article. Thank God, because, if you will learn grace now, you can avoid a lot of the pain and confusion which the rest of us have suffered. Begin now to allow the Lord to show you how to live in His righteousness rather than your own.

Finally, perhaps you have been plagued by some kind of addiction, or maybe you have done some other horribly unacceptable or sinful things. READ ON, READ ON, for it is those who are most desperate who most need this book.