Our self-righteous nature finds a thousand ways to kick against God's free grace and even despise it. On the whole, we really do have high opinions of ourselves! Accepting the free grace of God found in Jesus is difficult precisely because it means we have to go against everything of this world: we have to go against the idea that everything must be earned. We have to go against the idea that we ought to seek for glory, that we ought to become something. From what I can see in the scriptures, it’s not that we ought to become something, but rather that God is making us into His own.
This is part 4 of my experimental podcast reading from my book “Holy Sin” - a book about coming back down to earth on the question of living a holy life as a Christian.
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In so many quarters, the very life of Christianity has been traded for another religion that claims to have all the answers but offers no power to actually do any of the things it tasks us to do--regardless of talk about the Spirit being able to overcome, if we would submit, and so on. We have to get to the heart of the problem, which is that Jesus must have our heart. Completely. We are to be always “obsessed with Jesus”, as Tyrone Daniel frequently puts it. Or, to put a small edit on A.W. Tozer, we are “called to an everlasting pre-occupation with God’s Son.”
“Ever since man became a sinner he has been self-righteous,” says Charles Spurgeon. In fact, often our rebelliousness against God is because of our self-righteousness: we feel that we “deserve better” from life and that God himself isn’t being “fair” about things. This is when we live in unbelief and we decide that we somehow know better, or that we’re entitled to something because “it’s not fair”, and so forth. Often we play the victim - that we sin like we do because we are so ‘unworthy’, or ‘just stupid’, or under the power of sin or the devil. But believing that the sinful nature is the cause of your sin, or your own foolishness, are all just self-righteous excuses that keep you away from actually accepting responsibility for what you do. Self-righteousness means we do not accept that we are truly at fault, but rather that someone else or something else is the real cause and is what’s truly at fault.
Jesus was emphatic with the Pharisees that self-righteousness is worth nothing (Luke 18:9-14) but a true spiritual relationship with Him is paramount before we can speak of doing any of his commandments. We don’t have a relationship with Jesus until we come to terms with what prevents us from doing so: our self-righteousness. When we are ‘in Christ’, as the scriptures put it, we do what Christ does, for the sake of love and God’s mission and not for the sake of our own righteousness. The Bible is emphatic that the old man of self-righteousness must die first. Only God can do all this. I've spent many years of my life trying to kick sins and I've read all the best-sellers (and the obscure-sellers) on it. None of them helped. They all offered the same old techniques: stop doing this; start doing that; read your Bible; pray more; etc. You can see the Aristotelian influence in this. But it doesn’t work. I couldn't last more than a week or so before the old habits came back. After many years of suffering I started asking: is this Christianity? Isn't there supposed to be some kind of power in it? A power beyond just the goosebumps I experience in worship? A power that actually deals with my desires head-on? A power that goes beyond the vague idea that if I shout loud enough about injustice then I’m a good person?
To summarize, Christianity’s goal today is to become sanitized but not sanctified. We long to look and feel great and have the right image of success and victory in our own eyes and in the eyes of God and others. But you can’t take the Old Man and polish him up a bit and expect there to be any power in that. Rather, the Old Man must die. A sanitized Christianity is nothing more than another religion with its own pathway dedicated to our own glory to form us into gods who decide on good and evil. There’s nothing in this that’s good news and full of power.
Exchanging worldviews
Righteousness is not a thing that we can emulate. It is a person, Jesus, who powerfully acts upon and through his people, us, by His Holy Spirit. He does this firstly by declaring us righteous because of his own work and authority - we are “justified by the faithfulness of Christ” as Galatians 2:16 says (NET version), which creates us into new people. We are made into new creatures as the Old Man is crucified with Jesus - the Old Man that seeks to be righteous on its own. Then the Righteous One acts through us by his Spirit and we participate in his acting and work.
This participation is rather mysterious. Often we think of this as working side-by-side with Jesus, copying what he does. But this is not at all the way the scriptures put it. Rather, it is about being in Him, not about being next to Him. This is when words fail and an experience of Jesus is necessary. This is all done through Jesus alone and not through us. This is the wonder of the gospel: that it is a powerful gift freely given.
This is not just a Protestant idea, might I add. Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox accept that salvation is a free gift and that grace is unmerited and only a reality because of Jesus and his work. But Protestants do add that we are saved through simple faith alone. We are saved from the penalty of sin and from sin itself! But not only so, we are saved from Law - from the drive and burden of needing to measure up and become righteous!
If we continue to live in self-righteousness we’ll never be able to live freely in our justification, and, as a result, never live freely in sanctification. As the late theologian Gerhard Forde says:
"Sanctification is thus simply the art of getting used to justification. It is not something added to justification. It is not the final defense against a justification too liberally granted. It is the justified life.
"It is true, you see, that as old beings we simply cannot understand or cope with the unconditional promise of justification pronounced in the name of Jesus. What we don’t see is that what the unconditional promise is calling forth is a new being. The justification of God promised in Jesus is not an “offer” made to us as old beings; it is our end, our death. We are, quite literally, through as old beings.
"To use the vernacular, we have “had it.” All the questions and protests that we raise are really just the death rattle of the old Adam and Eve who sense that their kingdom is under radical and final attack. No doubt that is why the defense is so desperate, and why it even quite innocently takes such pious and well-meaning forms.”1
Indeed, our self-righteousness does take “pious” and “well-meaning forms”! In a most insightful essay on the Lutheran church, Gerhard Forde (a Lutheran) hit on what has become the predominant form of religion in the western world today - what he called “decadent pietism”.
“The old pietism thought it vital first of all ‘to get right with God’ through the experience of grace in conversion. But now, since God is, in general, love and no longer wrathful with anyone, God more or less drops out of the picture as a serious factor with which to be contended. In decadent pietism, since God is ‘affirming’ in general, the task is to ‘get right with oneself’… Decadent pietism seems to hold that the way of the Christian is to become ‘affirming’ of others in their chosen lifestyles. Along with this there is very often a rather sanctimonious ‘third use of the law’ piety centred mostly around current social causes and problems. No longer concerned with one’s own sins, and certainly not the sins of those one is supposed to affirm, one shifts attention to the sins of those other entities (more or less anonymous) which inhibit the realization of our affirmed and affirming human potential. Generally, these are summed up under the rubric of ‘the establishment’ or perhaps personified by those who happen to be in power."2
Faith in Jesus because of Jesus’ faithfulness
Faith is not willpower or right thinking or belief in the right doctrines, it's simple trust – it's something any person can do, from the least to the greatest. And trust in God is something any born again person can do, from the least to the greatest. You have been fully justified and fully cleaned because of Jesus and what He did. We have faith in Jesus’ faithfulness, not our own. “The life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20.) We have faith in His work, not our own. He purchased holiness for us: “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified.” (John 17:19.) Holiness is about being Jesus-focused. As soon as we start focusing on our progress, we’re done for, because it becomes about us.
Excerpted from Gerhard Forde’s essay in Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification, IVP Academic, ISBN 978-0830812783. See www.mbird.com/2012/11/the-art-of-getting-used-to-justification/
Excerpt from Gerhard Forde, Theological Identity: Radical Lutheranism. See www.lutheranquarterly.com/uploads/7/4/0/1/7401289/radical_lutheranism.pdf
Let the Old Man die