God's Righteousness vs. My Righteousness

This is the Sunday after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the President of the United States.

So, it's two days after his supporters celebrated his victory and it's the day after many of his opponents gathered in the nation's capital and in other cities to demonstrate or protest and some even to riot in the wake of Trump's election.

This election has provoked unusual passion in people on both sides of the political fence and driven many to action.

On both days, but yesterday in particular, many people traveled great distances and many thousands of people performed acts of civil disobedience which threatened their safety and even their liberty.

Those people did so convinced that they were doing the right thing...

...that they were doing the right-eous thing...

...that they were performing an act, or acts of righteousness, no matter what the personal cost.

This is a moment in which, I think, it is important to note that Jesus came preaching the importance of righteous living and that He went to great lengths to define and describe true righteousness or, as He called it in Matthew 6, God's righteousness.

Our passion can move us to behave sacrificially, courageously, even heroically. Indeed, Jesus Himself lived sacrificially and courageously and heroically.

But, the message of Jesus is that only sacrificial, courageous, heroic acts according to God's will count as righteousness in God's eyes.

The biblical era in which everyone did what was right, or righteous, in his own eyes was an evil age.

Doing the right thing as it is defined by our own passion is sin. Doing the right thing as it aligns with the will of God is righteousness.

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So, it's Sunday.

Today, in the name of Jesus, gazillions of people who think of themselves as disciples of Jesus will, to use grossly un-Jesus-like language, "go to church."

They will do so to do what they think of as worship, even though Jesus never led a so-called worship service and He didn't disciple His disciples in participating in or leading worship services.

And, they will think of what they do in going to church as an act of righteousness even though, in His very vivid teachings about righteousness, Jesus never got close to describing what will take place today in worship services of any variety today.

At the beginning of Romans 12, Paul of Tarsus, in language that shares the spirit of the life Jesus lived and of what Jesus commanded and taught, said that true and proper worship is to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.

True and proper worship has nothing to do with church services or singing hymns and spiritual songs. It has nothing to do with preaching or listening to preaching. It doesn't, it cannot take place in a so-called sanctuary.

True and proper worship is living a life of righteousness. It is denying self and following the example of Jesus.

As the Western church declines, it seems to me, that the people of the church define righteousness more and more in terms of church and less in terms of what Jesus and His early disciples taught and did.

The decline is becoming decay.

We need to live God's righteousness. We need to turn to Jesus to rediscover what right living is. We need to seek and do the will of God.

To do that, we must repent.