What Does it Mean to Be Righteous? | The Whole Counsel

Yeah, and I think that that really becomes apparent when we look at what he describes as a righteous person. When we think of righteousness, especially as evangelicals, we tend to immediately go to justification.

The righteousness that is provided, Paul says in Philippians 3, the righteousness that comes from another that's not accomplished through your law keeping, but through someone else's law keeping, your mediator, and freely given and freely received through faith.

But that's not all the scripture says about a righteous man, and I think that Frelinghuysen really kind of reminds us that we need to make sure we keep a full picture of what a righteous person is, not just justification, though that certainly is the foundation.

Justification, Sanctification, and the Righteous Person

He mentions a couple of other things, two other things in particular. One is that a righteous person is one who, by the grace of God, by that undeserved favor that you know, that energy that has altered us, we live under the rule of a new king.

And if we do not, then we do not live a righteous life. And then second, he says, there is the demonstration of this new life to your own conscience and to the world. By the way you live differently. So while you might justify your claim to be a Christian, you justify your statement that I am a believer by these good works, by a different lifestyle.

You don't justify yourself before the Lord, Christ is your justification. But we do demonstrate the validity of our profession by a changed life. And so all of those really ought to be kept together.

Yeah, so justifying it to our own conscience. If we say that we're a Christian, but there are no accompanying good works, if there's no evidence of that in a conflict against sin, then our conscience should cry out if we are a believer, right?

So it's important to keep a good conscience, and one way we do that is by living consistent with what we say we believe, or by giving these proofs of a changed nature that God himself has accomplished.

We're working out our salvation with fear and trembling, though it is God who is at work in us.

The Relationship Between Justification and Sanctification

Yeah, and I think it's always good to remember. It's a very simple kind of rule that I keep in my mind. The relationship between a justified person, God has made me righteous by placing me or placing me in, uniting me to Christ, who is my righteousness, because he kept the law.

That's wonderfully true, but how does that relate to sanctification? That is me, with all that I am, responding to God, to God's beauty, to God's rule, to God's precepts, to God's promises, so that we run instead of just kind of plod along on this race.

So I think that a couple of things are helpful. One is, never let these two be isolated. So a man who's been made right with God will want to live right with God, which is what you just mentioned. So justification and sanctification can never be separated.

If we separate them, then we don't have Christianity anymore. But they cannot be gotten in a different order. Justification cannot flow from sanctification, and really, that's the Roman Catholic system, that as God helps me, I become a better and better and better person through the sacraments of the Catholic Church and their means of grace, and one day I will reach a place where perhaps I'm so much better, I'm right with God.

So justification comes as the reward of a life of good works. And also, they're not intermixed. They are wonderfully connected, never separated, but they don't mix into each other. So it's not that the work of Christ on the cross plus some of John Snyder's good intentions together will satisfy the law of God.

It's Christ alone for my righteous standing before a holy God. And then flowing out of that, always connected to that, an alteration of life.

Another way of saying, I think, the same thing might be in terms of positional holiness and progressive holiness. Positionally, if we are in Christ, we've been made holy. We can be called saints, holy ones, and it is a truth.

At the same time, we're told to pursue holiness, without which no one will see the Lord. And that is not telling us to pursue positional holiness, if we're in Christ. That's true. But we are to pursue this progressive holiness, in which we are seeking to live righteous lives.

Living Out a New Nature in Christ

Yeah, yeah. And really, while theologians can get themselves kind of tongue-tied on this situation, I mean, really isn't it natural to every believer now, with a new nature, a new creation within, and with eyes open to see the beauty of the Savior?

In a sense, it's as if God wakes us up and gives us to His Son, and then says to us, do what you would really want to do. And what I want to do, deep down, I want to love and live for the King. So, I want to know what that would look like, and so I go to His Word.