Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 116
Transcript
Did you know that you are the righteousness of God in Christ right now? Why is the idea of us being righteous so hard for us to accept? That is the topic of today’s podcast. Come along as we look at our righteousness.
I’m Lee Whitman with Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you into this Hope Healing and Freedom podcast. Today’s verse is 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He (God) made Him (Christ) who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” If you have not listened to last week’s podcast, I encourage you to do so because this week’s podcast builds on the foundation we laid last week.
Cindi and I had the privilege of ministering RTF ministry to an NFL football player. If I said his name many of you would recognize it. He was very successful in college football and went on to play in the NFL. He had it all, fame, fortune, and popularity. He came to us for ministry 15 years after retiring from the NFL because he was having an identity crisis that was affecting his life and marriage. Without having his performance in football, he did not know who he was. His ability to perform as a football player had given him an identity. Now that he could no longer perform as he once had, he had lost his identity. The good news is that we were able to teach him some of what I am sharing with you, and it changed his life.
Let’s start this week’s podcast by looking back at a bit of last week’s podcast. Who you are as a child of God never was based on your performance. Whereas your value and identity use to come from your performance in the old system, now your value and identity comes from being a dearly loved child of God, with the very life of Christ living in you! As Col. 3:4 says, “Christ is now your life.” Is that awesome or what? I personally went from being a complete and utter failure who couldn’t do anything right, to a dearly loved child of God and a co-heir with Jesus Christ.
And if that is not amazing enough, here is another mindblower. God took sinners, that’s what you and I were before we accepted Christ, who were deserving of an eternity in Hell, and made them righteous in Christ. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “He (God) made Him (Christ) who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (Christ).” Your identity changed the moment you entered into Christ from being a sinner deserving of Hell, totally cut off from God, in fact an enemy of God, to becoming the righteousness of God in Christ! You are righteous right now if you are in Christ. Your righteousness is not because of anything you have done or could ever do. You have become the righteousness of God because you are in Christ. To be righteous means to be in right standing with God. And your being in right standing with God is based completely on your accepting what Jesus Christ did for you.
This truth of our being righteous in Christ is hard for us to comprehend on a human level because, frankly, we can’t verify it with our five senses. You certainly can’t verify it by your feelings because my guess is you probably don’t feel righteous all the time. And you more than likely can’t verify it by your behavior, because my guess again is that you probably don’t always act righteously. And you might not be able to go to your pastor and ask him about being righteous, because in most of our churches, you were no doubt mistakenly taught that you really aren’t righteous and won’t be until you get to Heaven.
I believe there is a lot of bad teaching in the Christian world regarding our righteousness. Maybe you have heard some of the bad teaching. Teachings like, “righteousness comes through the confession of sins.” The idea is that if you are up to date on your repentance and confession of sin, then you are righteous. But what happens if you sin and get killed in a freak snowplow accident and don’t have a chance to confess that sin? Are you righteous then or not?
Or maybe you were taught the teaching that says, “because of Jesus’ death on the Cross, God looks at you as if you were righteous.” If God is only looking at you “as if” you were righteous, then that must mean God is pretending. According to this line of teaching we are not really righteous, but because of Jesus’ death on the cross, God pretends we are.
Here’s the teaching that I was raised with; “God looks at you through the filter of Jesus.” That sounds great and teaches great because I taught people that for years, but the problem is that it’s not Biblical. There is not a verse anywhere that says that God looks at us through Jesus. Jesus is our access to the Father. Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Me.” The only way we can come to God is by receiving Him as our savior. But once we have accepted Christ as savior, we are changed into children of God that are in complete right standing (righteous) with God because of who we are.
All of these teachings sound like they sort of make sense on a human level, but when you compare them to what the Bible actually says about our righteousness, none of them are true. You are the righteousness of God in Christ right now because of your birth in Christ.
So now that you are a righteous new creation in Christ, what about your behavior? Since righteousness is given to you by your birth in Christ, doesn’t that make good behavior less important? The answer is NO! Your behavior is very important, but not in the way that it use to be so important under the old performance system. You no longer have to perform to become valuable, or to secure your identity like you did under the old system. Your value and your new “righteous” identity are freely given to you in Christ.
You no longer have to perform to receive Gods acceptance. Since you are in Christ, you are totally and completely accepted by God because you are His child. God only has one standard for acceptance: do you accept His Son Jesus Christ into your life? The moment you accepted Christ, you have fully met God’s standard for acceptance. What you do now – your behavior – cannot make you any more acceptable or any less acceptable to God than you already are.
Our job now as children of God is to do what Romans 12:2 says and offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice and let Christ live His life through us. God wants to use our human bodies for Christ to live His life through to the world around us. We are “housings” (temples – 1 Corinthians 6:16) of the living God. We have the privilege of using what God has given us to bring Him glory. 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” When you mow the grass, mow it to the glory of God. When you go to the grocery store, do that to the glory of God. When you are at work, work your butt off, not for your employer’s sake, but to the glory of God. Whatever you do – not just those things we think of as “Christian things” like witnessing or going to church – do everything to the glory of God.
I experienced this firsthand at a time that I was between ministry jobs. God had told my wife and I that we were to leave the ministries we had been with for many years and start our own ministry. To make ends meet, I took the only job I could find that gave me the flexibility to continue to be in ministry at the same time. It was a job working in a convenience store/gas station. As a clerk in the convenience store, my main job was to sell beer and cigarettes. After a short while in this job, I began complaining to God about my job. Here I was called by God to help people find their answers in Jesus, and I am selling beer and cigarettes.
One day I was whining to God about my job, and He reminded me of 1 Corinthians 10:31. He asked me, would you be willing to do your job to my glory? I was caught off guard. How can I sell beer and cigarettes to the glory of God? My religious background was screaming NO! But God helped me to see that selling beer and cigarettes was not a sin. He said do everything to His glory, and that includes my job of selling beer and cigarettes!
Something changed in me that day. I realized that instead of whining and complaining about my job, I could actually start glorifying God by the way I worked. I made it my purpose to be the best employee that convenience had, and if that meant selling beer and cigarettes to the glory of God, I was going to do it. I worked there for one year, and when I left, I know there was a big hole created in that store. I had more wonderful ministry encounters in the convenience store in that year with pre-believers and marginal believers, than I had in many years prior to that.
You Are Not What You Do
As a righteous new creation in Christ, a child of God, a co-heir with Christ, who is immeasurably valuable, unconditionally loved and totally accepted by God, think about these amazing truths. As you read them, personalize them. They are already true of you!
- I am no longer what I do.
- I am a child of God by birth and not by my behavior.
- I am a new creation (a new person) in Christ.
- I am chosen and unconditionally loved by God, and He gives me the right to call
- Him Abba (Daddy) Father.
- I am totally accepted by God.
- I am the righteousness of God in Christ.
- I am a son of God and a co-heir (equal heir) with Jesus Christ.
- I am a saint.
- My life is hidden with Christ in God.
- Christ is my life.
- I am a partaker in the divine nature (I share in Christ’s life).
- I can do all things through Christ who lives in me and gives me His strength.
You are not what you do! You are who you are, a righteous, dearly loved child of God, by your birth in Christ!
Prayer
Father God, I thank you that our value is no longer based on what we can do. You have totally changed that by adopting us into your family and making us into your children. Our identity and value come from being your dearly loved children. Father, would you reveal anything that is keeping us from knowing you as our Father God and keeping us from knowing and accepting our identity as your children. Amen
Many of us have believed lies about ourselves for most of our life. We have believed the shame-based lies we have learned from this world. Messages like I am stupid, I am less than, I am defective, I am ugly and many other lies that hinder you from experiencing God’s truth. If you recognize that you are believing lies about your identity, please contact one of our RTF ministers by going to restoringthefoundations.org and clicking on the Get Ministry tab at the top of the page. The RTF ministers can help you identity the lies and then help you break the lie so you can receive God’s truth about you.
