Nielsen’s Nook

View Other Posts in this Series:
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

IV. Christ-the Essential Description of Righteousness

So we are faced with the fact that God has spoken definitively in His Law, in His word. We are ourselves subject to the same self-deception and self-righteousness of the Pharisees. And here is God’s Incarnate Son explaining to his hearers that they do not rightly understand the Law. If we care about discipleship, this should be alarming. If those most zealous for keeping the Law of God can not only go so far off course but also lead countless numbers of people with them, how do we reckon that we will not find the same in our own lives?

“Our Lord has not come to make it easier for us or to make it in any way less stringent in keeping [the Law’s] demands upon us. His purpose in coming was to enable us to keep the Law not to abrogate it.” ~ D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, p. 174-75.

To ask what the role of righteousness is in the believer should be to ask what the role of Christ is in the life of the believer.

If you are one who struggles with self-righteousness (and we all do), the answer is not for me to preach to you that you must stop being self-righteous. No, that is only preaching a different flavor of the same prescriptive parsimony – a variation on the same wretched theme. What Christ is offering is far more abundant! It is a liberal outpouring of nothing less than the totality of God Himself. What the self-righteous need is the gospel in which the impoverished are made rich in Christ. Our appetite for cheap imitation is then swallowed up by a hunger and thirst for the Righteous One. As we abide in Christ we bear the fruits of Christ, which is nothing short of an ongoing miraculous work of God in our lives. We are called to greater things than spiritual forms of Russian roulette.