Monday, January 13

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I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws.

—Psalm 119:7

The word righteousness hasn’t gotten much press in our world for the several decades. The Righteous Brothers had their heyday in the 1960s, and in the 1980s, teenagers used the word “Righteous!” to exclaim over how cool something was. But since then, the word rarely even shows up in our vocabulary. Maybe you’d hear a person described as good or brave, but righteous? It just doesn’t have much context for us today. Even those of us who were around to remember those cultural references to righteous may not be able to pinpoint the actual meaning.

According to the dictionary, righteousness is defined as being “morally upright; without guilt or sin.”

Wow. That doesn’t leave much wiggle room, does it?

The Bible’s use of the word doesn’t offer any more cushion. Just after Moses gave the Ten Commandments to the people, he told them: “If we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness” (Deuteronomy 6:25).

These definitions don’t leave room for human error. If we take an honest assessment of ourselves, we know that no matter how hard we try, we will never measure up to such a standard. The New Testament affirms this fact: “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10).

This is tragic news for anyone who desires to come close to a perfect, righteous God. How could we ever bridge such a huge gap?

We can’t.

But that’s where the good news comes in: what we couldn’t do for ourselves, Christ has done on our behalf. “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” (Romans 3:21-22).

We can’t be righteous on our own. But through Christ, we are declared righteous in God’s eyes.

And where do we go from there? Do we go on wallowing in our sin? No, once we’re in relationship with a righteous God, we respond by choosing what is right—not to earn his favor and love, but because God has put his own goodness in us.

Author and speaker Jerry Bridges explains that our motives for doing right are even more important than our actions themselves: “The same Christian activity can be either an expression of our own righteousness that we think earns favor with God, or it can be an expression of love and gratitude because we already have His favor through the righteousness of Christ.”

The Bible paints a picture of righteousness as a road leading straight to life. With each decision we make, we have the choice to do what is right and remain on the way of life, or to veer off the road down the slippery path toward death.

I don’t know what choosing the way of life will look like for you today. Maybe it will mean turning the lunchtime conversation away from gossip and toward something life giving. Maybe it will mean taking your eyes off what’s happening in your own world to care for a child without a home or an older person who is lonely. Maybe it will mean being generous where your natural instinct would be to act stingy.

The way of life, the way of righteousness, doesn’t come to us in the form of one monumental decision. Rather, it’s formed through the culmination of all those little decisions we make each day.

If this were the ’80s, I’d tell you, “Be righteous today, dude.”

What decisions can you make today that will allow you to walk the road of righteousness?

—Stephanie Rische