You: righteous!

Psalm 32:11
Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, you righteous; and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!

Sounds like a direct order to me. What about you? There are a lot of Christians and churches today that still believe that living by the letter of the law is what makes you a good person in the eyes of God. It’s not enough, their teaching implies, that Jesus Christ went to the cross for you and took your punishment; you must also live into the law that He came to fulfill. It’s a theological conundrum: we’re saved by grace, but works give us status with God.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. No, I’m going to appeal to the church, to the Christian who enjoys being given rules and regulations to try and live into. I’m going to appeal to the Christian who desires to prove his or her worth to God through their own ability to “live right”. Today I want to appeal to the Christian who has been saved by grace but still wants to be justified by works.

Here in Psalm 32 you have been given a direct order by God: be glad in the LORD and rejoice. So I’ll ask the question, are you doing that? Most likely no, because in order to fulfill the commandment you must possess a certain quality that you, the ones justified through working out your salvation, can’t possess: righteousness. It’s out there now, I said it: if you are choosing to be saved by grace but attempt to be justified by your works, you do not have the righteousness of Christ. (Galatians 5:4 “You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.”) You are not righteous!

This may be tough to swallow, but if you’re a doer of the word, that is, a law-fulfiller, you cannot fulfill this commandment. The Bible tells us straight up, our righteous works are but filthy rags before a holy God (Isaiah 64:6). That being the case, how can you, the doer of laws, be righteous? The short answer is you can’t.

In order to be able to live into this command, you must first be willing to submit to the fact that you can’t. It’s not really that confusing; it’s quite simple. You have to go back to grace and stop right there. Christ gave us His righteousness and took our sin (2 Corinthians 5:21). In so doing, we became instantly righteous. That means no works, deeds, sins, or shortcomings can change the fact that we are righteous. The moment we submitted to the authority of Jesus’ words on the cross, “It is finished!” we became righteous. The moment we accepted His sacrifice for our sins we became upright in heart by the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Belief that we are seen by God as He sees Jesus is crucial to understanding the grace that He has given. (1 John 4:17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world.) We are righteous, as the Bible says, in this world because Jesus is righteous at the right hand of the Father!

With that said, now it is easy to rejoice, knowing that you are righteous. No matter what you have done, Christ has made you righteous. No matter what you do, or will do, Christ has already made you righteous. Knowing that: shout for joy! You are redeemed, forgiven, sanctified, justified, clean, healed, blessed, loved, highly favored, a child of the King, heir to the throne; you are saved! The One who made you righteous is with you and loves you. Let your heart overflow with joy and happiness!