SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/3/2020 10:01 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The Righteousness God Gives”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 5:20
Message of the verse: “20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness
surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom
of heaven” (HCSB).
As we begin this SD I want to quote
two verses from Romans chapter 5, verses 17 and 21. “17 For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one,
much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of
righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. 21 so that, as sin reigned in death, even so
grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ
our Lord.”
John
MacArthur writes “The righteousness God requires, God also gives. It cannot be deserved, earned, or
accomplished, but only accepted. By
offering Himself for sin, Christ ‘condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the
requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us’ (Rom. 8:4-5). God gave the impossible standard and then Himself provided its
fulfillment.” Remember the story
about the judge and his son that I wrote about in an earlier SD.
Paul,
the writer of the book of Romans had a considerable claim to having a self-made
righteousness than the Pharisees that Jesus was speaking to at this time. Paul writes the following in Philippians
3:4-6 “4 although I myself
might have confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else has a mind to
put confidence in the flesh, I
far more: 5 circumcised the
eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of
Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; 6 as
to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the
Law, found blameless.” Paul came to find
out that this would do him no good because when the apostle was confronted by
Christ’s righteousness, he was also confronted by his own sinfulness and knew
his righteousness would do him no good.
Don’t fall under what many people say that they will say to God when
they meet Him in heaven. “My good deeds
have outweighed my bad deeds,” my friend
that will not work because God wants a perfect you that can only come through
Jesus Christ. Paul saw that what he had
done for God was worthless “7 But whatever things were gain to me, those things
I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 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 so that I may gain Christ, 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” (Phil. 3:7-9).
When
a person trusts in Jesus Christ, He has become “to us wisdom from God and
righteousness and sanctification, and redemption” as seen in 1 Cor. 1:30. How does all of this work? Well when God looks at imperfect, sinful
believers, He sees His perfect, sinless Son. We have actually become, as Peter
writes “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4) and we posses in ourselves
the very righteous life of the holy, eternal God. Now one may say that after I became a
believer that I don’t act like on all the time, and that is because we still
have the flesh, which will be redeemed as seen in Romans 8:23 “And not only
this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we
ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as
sons, the redemption of our body.” I
will be glad when all that groaning is over and I will stand perfect in heaven
before my Lord Jesus Christ, but until then my life is a battle that can only
be won by the Spirit of God who lives in me.
John
MacArthur writes: “If even God’s own law
alone cannot make a person righteous, how much less can man-made traditions do
so? Those who insist on coming to God in
their own way and in their own power will never reach Him; they ‘shall not
enter the kingdom of heaven.’ No church,
no ritual, no works, no philosophy, no system can bring a person to God. Those who, through a church, through a cult,
or simply through their own personal standards, try to work their way into God’s
grace know nothing of what His grace is about.”
Just
like the scribes and the Pharisees were there are people today who have the
same kind of self-righteousness that they think will get them into heaven and
this is tragic. People will pay any
price, but will not accept the price that Jesus Christ paid for them. People will do any work for God, but they
will not accept the finished work that Christ has done for them on the
cross. They will accept any gift from
God, like air to breathe, and food to eat, but they will not accept the gift of
His free salvation. These kind of people
are religious but they are not regenerated, and they “shall not enter the
kingdom of heaven.”
MacArthur
concludes this section and this chapter by writing “I am not setting God’s law
aside,’ Jesus said. ‘I will uphold God’s
law, and I will strip it of all the barnacles of man-made tradition with which
it has been encrusted. I will
reestablish its preeminence, its permanence, and its pertinence. I will reaffirm the purpose God had for it
from the beginning: to show that every person is a sinner and is incapable of
fulfilling the law. The one who lowers
the standards to a level he can fulfill will be judged by God’s law and
excluded from God’s grace.’”
8/3/2020 10:37 AM
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