Astounding Righteousness

When the mask of self-righteousness has been torn from us and we stand stripped of all our accustomed defenses, we are candidates for God’s generous grace.
Erwin W. Lutzer (1941- )

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
~ from Romans 8

For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee….Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.  For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.
~ from 2 Corinthians 5

Oh beloved, it is true.  There is this part of us that is still dying.  In our bodies are the dying embers of the charred and defeated flesh which He slew along along with Himself on that day at Calvary.  This corpse we inhabit is most surely to be made new, perfect, eternal – even gorgeous and godlike One Day; this we are promised.  And yet we do groan in the tents we inhabit.  Oh, to be fully like Him right now!

But G_d.

There is an even more deep and true Truth than the fact that we still inhabit bodies of flesh that fail and will die due to the sin that infected them at birth.  We are now Alive in Him.  And this new Life is not a major improvement of the old life – it is a total tear down and rebuild of who we are.

And at the core of who we are now, is Him.  

And the Him who is in us, also has us fully wrapped up in Himself.  We are both swimming in, and super-saturated by, the One who is The Way, The Truth and The Life.  We have been overwhelmed by the very righteousness of the One who is Righteousness Itself.  And this same One has told us that He is making us like Himself.

Can we see it?  We are, to put it bluntly beloved, now astoundingly righteous in Him.  The now ever-growing core of who we are, is in union with Him.  We have died with Him.  We now Live in Him.  We are being made like the only One who is truly good.

So, if we grab hold of Truth like this, we can quickly see that it changes just about everything about how we live.  Circumstance and pain and lust and fear and doubt and impatience get jettisoned in the flow of this kind of revelation, when we simply yield to the work He is doing within us, and begin to reckon it true.  And in engaging Truth like this – we stop wanting what we used to want – and begin to simply live and move and be people who do the next right thing He presents before us in our walk with Him.

So again, we can see that the righteousness He imputes to us through His perfection is not merely symbolic.  Nor is it only some sort of theological truth, or legal finding in the Highest Court in the universe.  No beloved, the righteousness He alone imparts and imputes to us, through belief in Him, is astonishingly real.  We (read you and i) become the workers of the very works of G_d on the earth.

We touch people and they are healed.

We teach people and they grow.

We champion people and they are freed.

We feed people and they thrive.

We support people and they succeed.

We share Him with people and they Live.

We Love people and they grow in Him.

We (read again you and i) have become the very righteousness of G_d.  We are becoming the foundation of His throne and are being made part of a movement that will never be quenched by even the fiercest of evil.  For darkness can simply never swallow the inapproachable Light that now shines through His ambassadors.

This is very good news.

Shine beloved.  Shine.