2. Pursue Righteousness
Within the heart of every one of us is a hunger to become something of significance, to reach a level of accomplishment according to some measure, to have a sense of fulfillment and completion concerning our lives. We want to reach a place where we feel right about ourselves and the things we have done. It is God’s desire to bring us to a place of rightness before Himself. God knows that we cannot fulfill anything of righteousness apart from Him, yet He calls us to pursue righteousness. That righteousness must come from Him; it must be given to us. We cannot fulfill it, but God calls us to seek it. In the midst of that seeking, God fills our lives to overflowing:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. (Matthew 5:6)
EXCHANGED RIGHTEOUSNESS
The apostle Paul was surely one of the most sincere and disciplined men this world has ever seen. He was strongly motivated to reach for the highest standards of excellence that both God and the world could lay before him. In the midst of teaching the Philippian Christians about pursuing the righteousness of God, he pictured for them, and for us, two completely different ways to live. He begins by warning them about legalistic teachers who tear at and bring dissension to the church of Jesus Christ and in the process, bring destruction:
Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. For we are the real circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh—(Philippians 3:2-3)
We can either glory in ourselves and put confidence in our own ability to please God, or we can glory in Christ Jesus and place our confidence in what He is able to do through us. The flesh is who we are apart from God; it is what comes from us. We can seek to be our own source of rightness before ourselves and God, our means of attainment and fulfillment, or we can turn to Christ as the source of these. As Paul continues, he lists all the reasons he has for putting confidence in himself and his abilities:
Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness, under the law blameless. (Philippians 3:4-6)
Although Paul became an excellent man by any measure, even the measure of God’s law, his legalistic righteousness did not make him acceptable before God, and it did not give him rest. There is a judgment of God against His people who refuse to rest in Him and instead pursue a performance-based relationship with Him. The prophet Isaiah described this judgment when he talked of the Word of the Lord becoming a burdensome thing, a standard far beyond our resources. We become powerless and overwhelmed when we seek religious performances rather than rest in Him. We are only hurt and imprisoned in the pursuit of legalistic righteousness:
For by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue the LORD will speak to this people, to whom he has said, “This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose”; yet they would not hear. And the word of the LORD will be to them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little, that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken. (Isaiah 28:11-13)
The apostle Paul had become snared in legalistic righteousness. He had performed well by some religious standards, but his heart was still far from God. He had looked good by outward, legal measures, but he was still able to consent to the stoning of Stephen, God’s righteous servant.
But Paul was surely quite a man! His striving for excellence in every area of his life and his hatred of mediocrity in any form drove him to achieve the very highest and the best. By any standard or measurement of the law, he was found blameless! Who of us can say that? By the world’s standards and even by God’s law, he was a righteous man! But the Scripture continues. Paul does not conclude this portion of his letter to the Philippians with a how-to manual for righteous men and women based on his own formula for success. Instead, he describes his responses to all that he had become within himself through his faith in Christ:
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ (Philippians 3:7-8)
Rather than take all of his wonderful accomplishments and gloat about them, or even set himself up as an example for others, Paul takes all that he made himself to be and puts it down. In fact, those things that had contributed so much to his person and his way of life he sees now in a completely different light. Though he once saw them as the most valuable of all of his pursuits, worthy of all his heart and life, to be prized above all of his possessions, he saw them only in that light because he had no basis of comparison, no standard by which they could be measured. Now he can compare all these “valuable” pursuits with the “surpassing greatness” of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord. In the light of who Jesus is, he can look back at these things and see them in a completely new way; now they look vastly different from the way they looked before. All of these life pursuits that Paul diligently gave himself to and fondly developed he now calls rubbish. In the light of knowing Christ as Lord, they have lost all of their value because Paul’s highest priority is to
…be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:9-11)
The desire of Paul’s heart was to know Jesus Christ and for his life to be found in Him. He traded the righteousness that he had achieved by keeping the law for the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. Achieved “righteousness” was now gratefully exchanged for true righteousness given freely by grace.
It is God who makes us righteous when we place our faith and trust in Christ. No matter how diligent we are, no matter how good we are in the eyes of the world around us, we can never make ourselves righteous in God’s sight. God is the source of all righteousness; He alone possesses that eternal quality of rightness by His own holy measure. Only those to whom God gives that righteousness can be right before Him. If we hunger to be righteous in our own eyes or in the eyes of those around us, we must come to God for the grace He gives. Like Paul, we must exchange all that we have accomplished for the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. In Christ, God replaces the pressure to “perform” with a hunger to know Him and His righteousness.
JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH
Justification is the process by which God makes us righteous before Himself. Since God alone possesses righteousness, we can never work ourselves into that righteous standing before Him. It must be a gift from Him. The apostle Paul used not only himself but also Abraham as an example:
What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. (Romans 4:1-2)
Just as Paul could boast “in the flesh” before men but not before God about all that he had accomplished, likewise Abraham had no basis for boasting before God. It is God who knows our hearts and their deceitful wickedness. We can choose to show those around us what they would like to see in order to gain their approval, but God can always see what is hidden deep within our hearts. His approval in our lives can only be on the basis of what He gives to us. Paul teaches us how Abraham, the father of all the faithful, came to be righteous even in God’s sight.
For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:3)
Abraham believed God, and he became a righteous man. Abraham was not a good or even a strong man when God came to him. He was weak within himself and came from a family of idol worshipers. But God chose him to be the father of a great nation, the nation from which would come His promised Redeemer. God tells us that Abraham simply believed Him and that belief was accounted to him as righteousness. That for which we hunger in the deepest recesses of our hearts and lives, that right standing before God, comes as we believe in Him; our faith is reckoned as righteousness.
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, (Romans 4:4-5)
The faith in Abraham’s heart was “ccounted as righteousness.” We cannot make ourselves righteous, but we can express faith in God. On the basis of that faith, God declares us righteous. In this world we work toward the approval of God and men. Even Paul tells us here that when we work, there is payment due, remuneration expected. However, we cannot work for the righteousness of God. If we could, we would feel as if we had earned it. God calls us not to work for righteousness but to believe in Him. First believing that we are ungodly, we must then believe that God justifies the ungodly. That faith becomes the contact point with the grace of God in our lives, and He justifies us before Himself because of Christ.
The apostle Paul wants us to see how this great truth of justification by faith filled the revelation of the Word of God, and how God’s chosen men throughout history have taught this same truth:
just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works: “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.” (Romans 4:6-8)
David also taught justification apart from works. This is the good news of the gospel! All the rebellion of our hearts can be forgiven, all the filth of our failures and sins covered. God covers our sins in Jesus’ righteousness, and when we express faith in Him, God will not “take into account” our sin. He sees us in a completely new way, pure and righteous before Him.
Paul continues in this great portion of Scripture to talk about how Abraham was not only the father of a great nation physically, that is, Israel, but he is the father of a great nation spiritually. All who express faith in Christ are His children.
That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, (Romans 4:16)
Abraham had faith that God could perform what He had said, even though Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were far beyond the years of childbearing. It was this faith, seen in the obedience that followed, that God counted as righteousness in his life. Abraham was
fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:21-22)
That kind of righteousness is not for Abraham only but for all of us who express faith in the One who raised Jesus from the dead. That righteousness is credited to us as well!
But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. (Romans 4:23-25)
A COVENANT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS AND POWER
On the last night before Jesus went to the cross, He shared supper with His disciples. After supper, He took bread and broke it for the disciples. Then He picked up the cup and taught them in this visual way about a “new covenant” relationship:
And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” (Luke 22:20)
Through His death and resurrection, Jesus is ushering in, to all who would place their trust in Him, a completely new relationship with the Father. It is a relationship of life, power, freedom, and intimacy that flows out of the righteousness of God.
Every person has inherited a vacuum of righteousness because of Adam’s sin. That lack of rightness before God is expressed in a sense of inadequacy in the face of our responsibilities before Him and before one another. As the apostle Paul described his ministry to the Corinthian Christians, he expressed the feelings of his heart in light of the ministry God had set before him:
But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? (2 Corinthians 2:14-16)
The great apostle saw his own inadequacy for ministry! But as he continued to teach his brothers and sisters in Corinth, he expressed his confidence as well:
Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:4-6)
Even in his own inadequacy, Paul was filled with confidence. He tells us here that even though we are inadequate within ourselves, the new relationship we share with God through His Son causes us to be competent for all that He desires us to be and for all of the ministry He sets before us. Paul says that the reason we can be confident men and women is that the resources for our lives and ministries no longer come from us but from God. Under the old covenant of the law, before we came to know Christ, the resources for our lives came from ourselves; we had chosen that way of life in our rebellion and sin. But in the new-covenant relationship with Christ, the power and the resources for our lives come from Him. The reason is that this new covenant is a relationship of righteousness:
For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in glory. (2 Corinthians 3:9)
In Christ we are taken from emptiness to fullness, from weakness to strength, from inadequacy to confidence. This is the result of the life of Christ within us. Throughout all history we have sought to be accepted, to be affirmed in our own eyes, in the eyes of our peers, and in the eyes of God. We have expended every resource for the sake of that affirmation and approval. In the light of all of the requirements of God and the standards of men, we even fall far short of our own expectations. We are trapped in our weaknesses; we have stood hopeless under God’s condemnation. Yet God has brought righteousness and hope to us. Through His Son, we can at last be what God has called us to be and what we did not even dare to hope we could be. Paul called this a “mystery revealed,” as he wrote to the Christians at Colossae:
[This is] the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:26-27)
Now we can be right, confident, and affirmed before God and before ourselves as we express faith in Christ Jesus, who is the source of God’s righteousness in our lives:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)
NEW COVENANT RIGHTEOUSNESS IS A GIFT
In Romans 4:3 the apostle Paul quotes from Genesis 15:6, stating that “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” What was it that Abraham believed? God had promised him that his descendants would be as the stars of the heavens:
And [God] brought [Abram] outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:5-6)
The promise of God was not only for a myriad of descendants but for the possession of the land as well. Abraham, in the honesty of his heart, asked the Lord for assurance in the midst of his faith and God said to him,
And he said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” (Genesis 15:7-8)
To assure Abraham of the faithfulness with which He always fulfills His commitments, God instructed Abraham to bring some animals to Him, and Abraham prepared them according to the custom for sealing an agreement:
He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. (Genesis 15:9-10)
Here is a typical picture of sealing a covenant in the society in which Abraham lived. In that culture, when two parties came to an agreement or a treaty, it was customary for them to cut animals in half and to walk between the pieces arm in arm together. Notice, however, the description of the sealing of this covenant:
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. (Genesis 15:12)
As Abraham slept, God reviewed for him the history of the descendants that would come from him. They would live in a land that was not theirs, enslaved and oppressed; they would be delivered with many possessions and then return to the land that God had promised. Then we see a most amazing scene:
When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. (Genesis 15:17)
While Abraham was sleeping on the sidelines, God Himself passed through the pieces of the animals laid on the ground. This is a one-sided covenant seal! Even in the great weakness of this man whom He had called, God would fulfill all of the promises of His covenant. God, then, finalized His covenant promise to the heir He had chosen:
On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,” (Genesis 15:18)
The promise of the descendants and the land were a gift to Abraham from the hand of God. When Abraham believed God and expressed faith in what He had said, he received all that God had promised. So it is with us. It was God who walked through the sacrifice laid out for a seal of the covenant with Abraham; it was Christ who walked with obedience through the sacrifice to which God had called Him. The righteousness that flows from that new-covenant sacrifice is ours as a gift when we believe what God has promised.
This is a bedrock Scripture to which we must return again and again. In times of doubting, in our fears, when we are overwhelmed with a sense of inadequacy, when our relationships and our ministry responsibilities go far beyond our resources, we must remember that God will fulfill the covenant He has made with us. Through the power of the Holy Spirit and the life of His Son within us, God will give us all the resources we need to walk before Him in confidence, freedom, fruitfulness, and holiness.
AFFIRMED RIGHTEOUSNESS
It is critically important for us to see ourselves as righteous when we have received this gift of righteousness from the Lord. What was given at such great price can never be taken from us. However, because Satan seeks to rob us of this most precious possession, he attacks us continually before God and before ourselves. Of course, God is aware of what He has done with our sin and sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. Satan’s accusations of us to Him have absolutely no effect:
Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. (Romans 8:33-34)
Satan’s accusations come not only before the Lord but before our own hearts. He seeks to steal away our freedom and confidence before the Lord. What a turning point it is in our lives when we learn to see ourselves through God’s eyes rather than in terms of our past, our feelings, or our failures. It is our trust in the sacrifice of the blood of Christ that enables us to overcome Satan and his manipulations within our thoughts and our consciences:
And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. (Revelation 12:10-11)
We see a picture of this great truth in God’s prophecy spoken through Zechariah. The accusation here is directed to Joshua, the high priest. Although the high priest was the only man in all Israel who was permitted to come into the presence of the Lord, even he was not protected from Satan’s attack. Zechariah says
Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the LORD said to Satan, “The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” (Zechariah 3:1-2)
God immediately rebuked Satan! Joshua was one of His chosen ones, under the protection of His love and His righteousness. It is clear, however, that Joshua had no righteousness of his own:
Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments. (Zechariah 3:3)
What follows in this amazing Scripture passage is a picture of what God has done for each one of us through His Son. He has taken our filthy garments away and removed all the impurity of our lives. He has clothed us in “rich garments.” God’s grace is the only explanation for our lives and for our holy standing before Him:
And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.” And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the LORD was standing by. (Zechariah 3:4-5)
God not only cleansed Joshua’s life, He also called him to a walk of obedience and a ministry of authority and power:
And the angel of the LORD solemnly assured Joshua, “Thus says the LORD of hosts: If you will walk in my ways and keep my charge, then you shall rule my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you the right of access among those who are standing here.” (Zechariah 3:6-7)
We, too, are called to walk in the righteousness God has given us in His Son. When our hearts are filled with a desire to please the Lord and to be obedient in every way, He gives us authority in His Kingdom. With this authority comes power in prayer. God talked to Joshua about “a place among those standing here,” which refers to access into the heavenlies. We do hunger for authority in ministry and power in prayer. These are the results of the righteousness of God and our walk of obedience in that righteousness.
GOD REDEEMS OUR CHOICES
We must see how clearly and fully this righteousness comes from God. In chapter 1 we talked about how the choices that we make become the fabric of our lives. Lot is one of the few men the Scriptures specifically call “righteous,” and yet we see that some of the most important choices of his life led him in the direction of sin and depravity. Lot was the nephew of Abraham who had journeyed with him from Egypt to the Negev, all the way to Bethel. Lot was also a very wealthy man with many flocks and herds, and the land in which he and Abraham were residing was not sufficient to sustain them both. When there was strife between their herdsmen, Abraham suggested that they separate, for a land of abundance was surrounding them. He graciously allowed Lot the first choice of the land:
Then Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsmen, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left.” (Genesis 13:8-9)
The choice that Abraham gave Lot was to go either to the right or to the left. But Lot saw something that in his eyes was far better: a well-watered valley:
And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar. (This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So Lot chose for himself all the Jordan Valley, and Lot journeyed east. Thus they separated from each other. (Genesis 13:10-11)
Lot “chose for himself” the valley that was appealing to his eyes, and there he settled. Surely he was aware of the depth of filth and sin that characterized the lives of those who lived in Sodom, yet he made the choice to live there:
Abram settled in the land of Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the valley and moved his tent as far as Sodom. Now the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the LORD. (Genesis 13:12-13)
Genesis 18 and 19 show us more fully the depravity of Sodom and the environment in which Lot had placed himself and his family. Only by God’s grace were he and his family not corrupted; only by God’s mercy were they delivered:
…if [God] rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, (2 Peter 2:7-9)
Not many people in the Scriptures are personally called righteous by God, but Lot is one of them. We read the verses above and then look back at the Genesis account and say, “What Lot is this?” Where did God see righteousness in Lot’s life? We read the record of the Scriptures in Genesis, and we know that Lot pitched his tents near Sodom because there was something about the city and the people that attracted him. He desired to be close to Sodom, and he settled there. How can a person make choices like this and still be called righteous? God declares him so!
Perhaps, as we have seen in Lot’s life, you have made some choices that have led you close to sin and failure. Some of those choices may even have had devastating consequences, even as Lot and his family were caught up in Sodom and threatened by the depravity there. As God delivered Lot from his own choice, He has delivered you and me again and again. As we walk with God, this hope gives us freedom when we look at our pasts. God, in His grace, redeems the choices of His people.
GOD’S VIEW OF A LIFE
As we saw in the incident of Joshua the high priest, Satan would have us look at all of our lives in terms of our sins. He will take every failure of our lives, every weakness of our hearts, every wrong choice we have made, every difficulty in a relationship and every time we have disappointed God, and he will use it to manipulate our hearts. He will hold all of these things in front of us as if before a mirror and tell us that this is who we are, we are the same as we always were, and we will never be any different. All we will ever do is reproduce the past in the future.
Although Satan would have us evaluate our lives from our weakest point, our greatest failures, and our deepest sins, God looks backward over our lives from our most responsive place! This is what we see in Lot’s life. God evaluated all of Lot’s life in terms of what He saw in his heart as he responded to the wickedness and the filth in Sodom and how he turned to the Lord in the process. That is the way it is with you and me. God looks at all of our lives from our place of greatest responsiveness to Him, as we continue to walk before Him with hearts of obedience. We must learn to see ourselves through the eyes of God, or Satan will steal away our hope, our freedom, and our confidence as righteous men and women of God.
GOD IS SOVEREIGN EVEN OVER OUR SIN
I grew up in what would now be called a “dysfunctional family.” There was very little peace or harmony in our home because my parents fought continually. There was also great pressure on my sisters and me as we picked up the same attitudes and responses in our own relationships and began to reproduce the pain we were receiving.
My father was raised in an environment in which there was no religious training whatsoever. My mother grew up in a Jewish home, but she rejected everything of her background, religion, and culture. My father, a very fleshly man, was often unfaithful to my mother, and his lusts controlled his life. Because he did everything possible to encourage me in the lifestyle he had chosen, that influence has built into me vulnerabilities and weaknesses that remain strong to this day. I can never remember my father doing anything to build a real relationship with me. I grew up fearing him and hating him. In fact, it was many years after he died before I was able to forgive him and to thank God for giving me the father He did. I could not understand why God would allow me to have a father like mine if He was preparing me for ministry.
But in the beautiful way that God works out His will, He sovereignly broke into the pattern of sin and destruction that Satan had developed in my family and began a process of redemption that will endure for generations. My parents had lived in an apartment on the north side of Chicago. They purchased some land in the southern suburbs and built a house. Not too long afterward a fire almost destroyed the house. During the rebuilding, they called an electrician, Stanley DeYoung, to do the electrical work. He was a Christian. When he saw that my parents had four small children, his first question was, “Do these children go to Sunday school?”
Although my parents didn’t even know what Sunday school was, they graciously consented to have this man pick us up for Sunday school. From the time I was five years old, I attended not only Sunday school but church services, catechism classes, and eventually a Christian school. God used Stan and Jo DeYoung to begin His process of redemption in my family.
Even though I was gaining a tremendous amount of knowledge and understanding of the Scriptures in this process, I had not personally received Christ. In the midst of the pain in my family, I was a lost, unmotivated, and hurting kid. My grades were poor, and I had no hope or confidence for the future. Then when I was seventeen, God once again broke into my life with His heart of compassion and His process of redemption.
Even though I was rebellious toward the Lord, I had continued to attend Sunday school as well as the church youth group. Many of my friends were there. My Sunday school teacher, Dr. Allen Hammond, had made a commitment to the Lord to personally talk with each of his students about their relationship with Christ. The summer before my senior year of high school, through the ministry of that faithful man I repented of my sin and received Jesus as my Savior and Lord.
It was in the middle of my senior year of high school that God brought into my life the woman I would marry. Karen came from a beautiful family, was an excellent student, and planned on attending college. She was also the student aide for the senior class principal. He knew me well, and of course, he was appalled that she would consider throwing her life away by becoming involved with me! However, God was continuing His process of redemption through Karen, who brought to me stability, spiritual encouragement, and strength. Her family became an environment of healing for me. The warmth and acceptance of her mother was a gift I began to treasure, and my view of a father was rebuilt through the man who became my father-in-law.
God, in His grace, has continued to transform me and develop me as He has brought men and women into my life according to His sovereign will and timing. Dr. Ken Knappen was my first strong model of a teacher of the Scriptures, and he gave me a hunger to share the Word of God in a life-giving way. Through our pastor of many years, William Johnson, God exposed me more fully to His own gracious, compassionate heart. Surely, God has also broken into your life again and again to redeem you and transform you into the image of His righteous Son.
I know that in those years of rebellion, I “pitched my tents very close to Sodom.” It was not only my father’s sins that have affected me. I know, too, that I had “settled in” in places of this world that have continued to affect me many years later. But God was sovereign over this process in my life and in the lives of my parents, weaving it all together into a pattern of redemption that would glorify Him. God is never late! He always does what pleases Him in the fullness of time. In my life, and in yours, God has always been right on time.
Perhaps you, too, have pitched your tents toward Sodom in your life experience. It could be that you have settled in with this system in places that have affected your attitudes toward people, your sexual relationships, your longing for things, or your heart before the Lord. God is sovereign in your life and over His process of redemption. He is sovereign even over your sin, as He has been in my life. He will redeem your choices as you come to Him with a responsive heart, and He will beautify your life in His mercy and His grace.
We began our study by contrasting David’s life experience with that of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband. We look at these two men, and our hearts cry out, “Why David?” Why did David become a man after God’s own heart? We may very well look at ourselves and our life experiences and cry out, “Why me?” In the deep mysteries of the mercies of God, we, too, are becoming men and women after His own heart. He is all of the reason; His grace is the only explanation. When we see His mercy and His grace, we worship Him, and His love moves us to pursue Him more and more.
Satan would have us look at all of our life from our weakest point, our greatest failure, our deepest sin. God evaluates our life from our most responsive place, as we continue to walk before Him with a heart that desires Him and His righteousness.
GROUP STUDY GUIDE AND PERSONAL APPLICATION
1. How do you respond to the apostle Paul’s pursuit of God’s approval by means of his own performances? Where have you struggled with the same thing in your own life?
2. Put in your own words how Paul described exchanging his own performances for the work of Christ on the cross.
3. Does this express the experience of your own heart as well? If so, how has God brought you to that place?
4. Where do you struggle in your life and ministry with a sense of inadequacy? Have you seen God replace that with a confidence in Him alone? If so, how did God do that within your heart?
5. Have you experienced the kind of accusations that Satan brought against Joshua the high priest? Have you received God’s affirmation in the midst of Satan’s accusations?
6. Where in your life have you made wrong choices, as Lot did? How have you seen God redeem your choices?
7. Do you think you look at your life through the eyes of Satan or through the eyes of God? What needs to take place in your heart for you to see yourself as God sees you?
8. Do you see within yourself a tendency to react to God with a sense of anger or loss because of what He has allowed you to experience, as I did with my father? What would change in your attitudes if you saw God’s sovereignty in every relationship and circumstance of your life?
REFLECTIONS, COMMITMENTS, AND PRAYER
Spend some time worshiping God for His sovereignty over every detail and relationship in your life. Thank Him for the way He has redeemed your choices. Ask Him to give you the grace to see your life through His eyes and to protect you from looking at your life in light of your feelings, your failures, and your sin, as Satan would have you do. As you pray, also ask God to fill you with a love for Him that will give you a new level of desire to be His servant because of the way He has loved you and redeemed you.
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence,
2 Peter 1:3