What Flavour is your self righteousness?

Most religions of the world…including beliefs that don’t define themselves as “religions”…fall into the thinking that righteousness is something that men offer to God…or if they don’t believe in God…then righteousness is something they offer to themselves and to the society they belong to…

Christianity is the one exception…

The Bible teaches us that men do not seek for truth…and if they did…what exactly are they looking for?

Instead…Truth came looking for them…

Righteousness is not something that man offers up to God…but what God graciously gives to man…as a free gift.

I have heard people who aren’t religious make the comment that religious people are very self righteous…and at times they are right…

We who are religious must take this judgment against us seriously…because we are prone to be self righteous…whenever we take our eyes off of Jesus…and forget that our salvation is not in ourselves…but only in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection…

But the unbeliever must also understand that he is also “self righteous”…he is trying to get through life on his own merits, he is judging the religious person…thinking somehow he is better then him…he is trusting in his own merits…this is why he gets so upset when someone comes along and tells him that his righteousness…his efforts and merits are not good enough…

He gets upset…because he thinks highly of his own righteousness…his self righteousness.

In the end…both religious and non-religious people can be “self righteous”…the only way you can be freed from “self righteousness” is to believe what God tells you about it…

God says that He compares man’s righteousness to used menstrual rags and piles of dog crap…not very flattering is it?

The same men who cling to their own righteousness often are also quick to quote “to err is human…everyone makes mistakes.”

Does everyone make mistakes? God doesn’t.

For man to fellowship with God…he needs to be without sin…he needs to be perfectly faithful in this righteousness…

Only Jesus [God/man] was perfectly righteous…and only His righteousness will be accepted at God’s judgment…