Book of Romans, 13:11-14 - God's Governance of Man | The Second Coming of Christ (03/13/2022)

Prayer for Illumination and Welcome to the Guest Pastor

Lord, thank you so much for this time and we ask you to bless it. Lord, keep our hearts and minds in your word. May you speak to us. May your Holy Spirit, the author of this amazing book, teach us today and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.

And you can, we're in Romans chapter 13, verse eight, if you'd like to be turning there. And Michael Bedard is with us today. I wanna welcome you. He's a pastor here in town. His kids are in our school.

Great friend of ours and Paul's and the church and the school and a supporter of all that. And great to have you drop by and visit today. I appreciate you being with us. And if you can, stay for lunch.

We have lunch here every time after church. We'd love to have you. We have plenty for everybody. And so, all right guys, Romans chapter 13, verse eight. Oh no man anything but to love one another for he that loveth another has fulfilled the law.

We've been talking about that verse for several Sundays, talking about how the law of Christ, the law of love is vastly different than the law of Moses. And we've given you 25 different answers to legalists who will come in and tell you, oh, you gotta worship on Saturday.

Oh, you gotta call Jesus Yeshua. Oh, you gotta do this, you gotta do that. And it's okay to call Jesus Yeshua if you want to, and it's okay to worship on Saturday if you want to, but don't let legalism creep in.

We're supposed to be worshiping on the Lord's day. And if you remember, we gave you five or six quotes from early church fathers prior to the year 200 AD saying we're already worshiping on Sunday. So the idea that the Catholics invented that and it's supposed to really be on Saturday is ludicrous.

It's a lie, it's not true. It doesn't follow what we know about church history, nor does it follow scripture because in the book of Acts, they're already worshiping on the Lord's day. So don't let people put you under legalism.

And like the apostle Paul said, if someone comes in the church like that, we won't endear them for an hour and then they'll be out of here. That's how that goes and it's how it should be. It's how he did it.

Because the law killeth and the spirit giveth life. And so we've been talking about the difference between law and grace, just off of that one little verse for a while, but we're gonna go on to the next verse here, believe it or not today.

Romans 13 and the Four Major Themes of God's Governance of Man

And so let's look at Romans 13 and verse 11. Before I do that though, let me say this, because we have a few folks that may not know exactly kind of where we are in this study. In all of Romans chapter 13 to me, the whole idea of the chapter is how God governs the actions of men.

And it's got four basic major points in it. We've covered three of them. So we're gonna start the fourth one today. But the first one was the Christian's relationship to human government, right? The scripture says we're supposed to obey the government.

And the second major point was why are we supposed to obey the government? What happens if we don't? We talked about that out of Romans chapter 13. And then the third one that we just finished is the law of Christ, the law of love, and how Jesus was the fulfillment of the law and how the law is called beggarly compared to grace.

The Bible says it's been set aside and a new testament or covenant has come into play in 25 different reasons. You don't have to listen to someone who tries to bring you back under the law and says, well, we believe in Jesus, but you gotta.

You just, there is no but, you gotta. Like it's the blood of Jesus plus nothing. And we're gonna keep it that way in this local church. And hopefully there are many, many local churches around the world that understand these things.

I know 150 years ago, almost every church understood it, not so much now. But the fourth one that we're gonna start today is it's interesting because of your Sunday school lesson, you hit right in it.

And then Maddie, she stepped out for a second, her song, her song hit right on what the topic is. And we just started it today. So it's the second, how does the second coming of Christ and the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, what effect does that have on the Christians?

And what effect has it always had for the last 2000 years when preachers preach about it? And how does that affect, how does God use that to affect the church, which then in turn affects the whole world?

So that's the topic we're talking about starting right now. And so now we can go to Romans 13, 11, where it starts to introduce this idea in this chapter. So read along with me there, Romans 13, 11. And that knowing the time that now it is high time to awake out of sleep, for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.

That's true, isn't it? The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lust thereof.

That is the basic message of the second coming that's been preached for 2000 years. And almost every great preacher that you'll ever read sermons of old time sermons, they will from time to time, probably more than once a year, preach on the topic of the second coming.

And it's always been the great hope of the church. The rapture has been the great hope of the church. And it also has always stirred the church to come back to holiness. Because as you pointed out so well in your Sunday school lesson, when you start thinking about the end times, you start thinking about cutting the sin out of your life.

We all think that way, cutting the sin out of our lives because the Lord is coming back and we want to be ready. The church needs to be pure and white and ready when he comes back. And that is the effect that this doctrine has had on the church for 2000 years.

And it's interesting because it's not preached about as much now as it used to be. A lot of people avoid it because there's controversy as far as where does the rapture hit in all of this? And to me, there's no controversy there because the apostle Paul made it so plain.

I don't know why it took me so long to say this because I grew up believing the pre-trib rapture theory and all that, because all my mentors taught it to me and I didn't want to take time to study it.

I didn't, but finally the Lord led me to. But even after that, it was only maybe a year ago or a couple of years ago when it hit me, it's so obvious. Paul said, look, we cannot precede them who have gone on before us.

They're in the grave. They must arise and ascend first. And then we will go up together with them and we will be changed in the air. So the rapture cannot happen until the great resurrection which is at the end of the tribulation period.

It's at the end of the seven years. And that's not news people like to hear. So, and people disagree with me quite often and I would have 20 years ago, I would have disagreed with me if someone had walked up and suggested that to me.

And I would hope that I would have had an open enough mind to sit down and let them share with me why they now believe that. But a lot of people don't and that's okay. So it's a bit divisive. So pastors are kind of staying away from it.

And yet it's the very thing we need to be preaching because as history shows, every time preachers preached it throughout the last 2000 years, it has brought the church back towards revival and holiness, isn't that something?

And that's an amazing thing about this doctrine. Well, in this little passage from verse 11 through 14, I see seven points, all right? So I'm not saying we'll get to all of them today, but we might, we'll see.

So let's just start at the top, verse 11. And that knowing the time that now is high time to wake out of sleep for now is our salvation nearer than when we believe. Now you're thinking, well, I thought I got saved when I believed.

Anybody thinking that? If you're paying attention, you're thinking that. Well, that doesn't make much sense. How can my salvation be nearer than when I believe? Because I thought when I believed I got saved.

Well, that's a little bit, you have to kind of look into this idea and this use of the word salvation. There are very few times when it's used this way, but in this case, it's talking about the salvation of your physical body.

It's not talking about the salvation of your soul. And you have to remember that the word salvation is probably the biggest term we have for what we might call regeneration. We might call it justification.

We might call it sanctification. We might call it glory, being glorified. We might call it propitiation. I mean, the word salvation has all that in it. It's a huge set. And one of the things in that huge set when the Bible talks about salvation is what happens to us at the moment of the rapture when this body is changed.

Or if you pass away, we may, if we get time, we'll talk about this a little bit. But if you pass away before the rapture, you get a temporary body. I don't know if you, most people in this church probably know that, but you might not have thought about that in a long time.

You get a temporary body. And then when the rapture happens, your real body that you live this life in will be put back together and come out of that grave. If you passed away before the rapture, you'll come out of the grave and you will meet it and you will go into that body and the temporary body will be gone.

And so then you live the rest of all eternity, age into age into age in your glorified body that you actually lived in here, but now it's glorified. Now that's sort of the steps that happen. But what's interesting about it is that that moment, whether it, and it will happen at the rapture, it just depends on whether you're still alive.

If you're still alive, you get raptured and you change in the air. Or if you passed away before that, you come out of the grave before those of us, you see where I think I'll be. I'll still be on the earth.

Those of us who are still alive and remain, we cannot proceed you. You have to come out of the grave first. And then we go up with you at the same time, which puts the rapture squarely at the end of the seven year tribulation period.

I've never had anybody be able to answer that one. They like to, they'll try to cheat on it and say, well, there's more than two resurrections, but there aren't. You can study the Bible all the way from Genesis to Revelation.

There are two. One happens at the end of the church age. The other one happens at the end of the thousand year millennial kingdom. And they say, well, what about the one guys that came up out of the grave when Jesus was on the cross?

That was not a resurrection. You know how you know the difference? Because the definition of a resurrection is that when you get resurrected, you are now in a glorified body and you never die again. Those people died again.

They weren't resurrected. They just came out of the grave. It was a miracle that God chose to make happen and it's recorded. But then they later died and went back in the grave. And then someday they'll get, they'll be brought up out of the grave at the end of the tribulation period, right?

And then you can, you know, so there are several places in there that say, well, they'll say, you know, the resurrection is a series of steps and there are many, maybe as many as five different steps part to it.

And they use that to try to get around the clear truth of the scripture that no, there's actually only two resurrections spoken of in the Bible. And the rapture happens after the first resurrection. I don't see any way around it.

I don't like that news because it means that we will be here through the tribulation period. I think if I were Satan and I wanted to slaughter a lot of innocent Christian men, women, and children, the greatest lie that I could tell was don't worry about it.

You won't be here. So no one prepares. And that's what I think happened. I think one of the greatest lies of all church history is this pre-tribulation rapture concept. I even know where it was invented now.

I found a great book that a man who is an investigative reporter, whose dad was a preacher and his grandpa was a preacher, set out to find the place where that theory originated because it's a new theory.

It's not an old theory. You don't see that early church fathers talking about it at all. And so it happened in a house in England. And the book tells about where the house was, the address of the house, what the lady's name, it was a female faith healer who came up with the concept.

She spoke in tongues. She was a faith healer. She was a prophetess, which the Bible says, you know, that has ceased. But anyway, she was basically what we would call a charismatic or a Pentecostal of today that believes that those sign gifts are still operative.

And she's the person who invented this theory of the rapture. You go read it. It's part of history now. So a lot of people don't want to think about it, but it's a fact. So if you can't get the chronology right, you won't be ready.

I had a friend challenged me one time back when I believed the pre-Trib theory. He said, David, would you at least do this for me? Would you go back and reread Matthew 24 and let Jesus's chronology be more important to you than the books you've read?

And I said, yeah, that's fair. And that was the beginning of me reexamining or actually examining it on my own for the first time. And I was probably 50 years old and I had just gone with what my mentors told me because I wasn't that interested in the topic, frankly.

I like things to do with God. I like the character of God. I like preach about Jesus. I like to preach about the great doctrines of salvation and all the great doctrines of the Bible. The second coming was not my interest.

So I had never looked at it on my own until I was 50 something. And when that man challenged me with that, I knew what he was getting at because there were certain passages that never made sense to me under that other theory that didn't fit.

So I started studying it for about a year there and then I've studied it ever since. But I think it's a sad thing that Satan has been able to manipulate the chronology of the end times. And now at a time when people need to know it more than ever before, everyone's confused about it.

So that's pretty sad. But one thing that's not confusing is this little passage. So the first thing that it says is, now it's high time to awake out of sleep, our salvation. In other words, the renewing of our physical body, the change in the air, so to speak.

Like when we go from this body that is mortal to an immortal glorified body, that's the salvation this is talking about. That moment is nearer now than it was when we got saved. Now that's kind of obvious because we're moving towards the second coming.

But Paul gives it as a warning to start to get ready. Even in his day, he felt like it might have happened in his day. Every generation of Christians that have ever lived have thought that the rapture and the second coming could happen in their lifetime.

And God wrote it this way on purpose because that was the great hope. He gave everyone hope throughout every generation. But also Jesus gave signs and many of the signs that needed to happen had not happened even when my grandmother was alive who swore she would live until the rapture.

She did not, but she's in heaven now. But some of the things that needed to happen hadn't happened in her lifetime just that long ago, my grandmother's lifetime. And they have now happened some of those things.

And then there are other things that still have not happened such as there has to be a new temple built in Jerusalem. And there are two Islamic mosques in the place where the temple has to be. So those have to go away.

So imagine how that could happen. I often thought while Trump was president, he might be the dude that pushes that button. But somebody somewhere will do something that will eliminate at least one of those two mosques and the Jews will begin to build the temple.

And when they do, you've got probably less than three and a half years to get wherever you're going when the greater part of the great tribulation happens three and a half years later. The Antichrist will offer a pig on the altar in that building.

So that building has to be built, hadn't been built yet. So there's still signs that haven't come to pass but there are many signs that have. Jesus said, look, there's gonna be rumors of wars and there are gonna be earthquakes in diverse places.

And then he said, there will be pestilences. Isn't that interesting? Because that's what COVID was in years. And he put a plural on that. So COVID won't be the last one. And he said, but don't despair, the end is not yet.

He said, these things must needs come to pass first and then the gospel will be preached in every nation and the end will come, right? So, it is interesting that one of the things in that little passage Jesus talked about was he said that mother will rise up against daughter and daughter against mother and you will be arrested and many will be killed.

And do you know that after January 6th of last year that over, I think it was 200 ,000 tips went to the FBI from adult children, turning their parents in who they saw on TV at the Capitol building. They turned them in to the FBI to be arrested.

To me, that's somewhat fulfilled prophecy. Now they didn't kill them. So we're still got to move on down the history line to get to the place where the persecution gets to be that bad. But we're moving at a rapid pace.

We're accelerating towards that time. And so what the Lord is telling us here in verse 11 is it's time for us to wake out of sleep. We can't just go on as the American church has been going in our lifetime.

And we're all part of it. We know what that means. We know that all of us have probably been in a dead church before and wanted to escape that. All of us have been in churches where false doctrine maybe was taught.

We wanted to get away from that. We've all wished we could have 5 ,000 people here at Park Meadows to fellowship with and all that. And you don't have, listen, I personally don't see as many people come to the Lord as we did in the 80s when this church started.

I just don't see as many, but I lately have seen several. It's really interesting, but it's been through business. Marion, you got saved here recently. And there are a couple of other people right now that the Lord put in our path.

It's really interesting to see God working in their lives. And so you still seeing people say, but it's not like it was. So I don't know if that's just my own small circle here or if worldwide, it's just more like apostasy is starting to hit.

Like Jesus said, we had to have a great falling away from the truth before the antichrist would arise and the Lord would come back and all that. So I just think we're moving towards it. And I think this is a great warning for our church here today is to awaken.

We can't just be the little church we've always been and just come together and love on each other and have a meal and go home. And we have to be taking it a little bit farther than that now. We've got to be a little bit more in prayer than we have been.

I mean, individually, when we get home, we gotta be in the word more than we have been at home. Individual quiet times with the Lord. We've got to be praying for each other more. We've got to do everything we can to get the true gospel out because the gospel has been falsified so much in the last 10 years in America.

I mean, this little gospel where, dear Jesus, come to my heart and say me amen and come down to the altar and pray that prayer and you're just fine. I mean, that never has been the gospel. It's never been the way it works.

And so we've got to continue to be salt light, tell the truth, and we've got to guard our own lives. We've got to awaken from the sleep and not get lazy and just say, well, okay, I slipped into a sin there and I'm sorry, Lord.

And then slip into another one. We've got to wake up. We've got to be stronger than that now. We've got to say no to some things that we're not supposed to be doing. We got to say yes to some things that we're supposed to be doing because now the salvation of this body, the rapture, the change of this body is closer than it was when we got saved.

The Nearness of the Rapture and the Call to Wake Up

That's verse 11. Look at verse 12. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Wow, he continues the theme, doesn't he? Like this church age is far spent. The Lord said, I will make a quick work on the earth.

The history of the world is not going to last long. It's not going to be millions of years. It's about 8 ,000 years or six to eight. We don't know exactly, somewhere in that ballpark. And that's about what it's going to be.

It's not going to be much longer. This age is not going to last much longer. It is far spent. The day is at hand. What day is that? Well, whatever day that is, I think it's talking about the return of Jesus Christ like the lightning from the East to the West.

And that day is soon coming. And the Bible says, forsake not the assembly of ourselves together and so much the more as we see what? The day approaching, same day. So what does that tell me? At a time when COVID's got us kind of avoiding church and the churches have all dwindled.

Every church that I know of has dwindled. We should be more together than ever before because we need the strength of one another to go through what we're about to go through. And you can sit here and say, well, it's theory.

It's not really going to affect me for a while. And yet I'll tell you any moment, if he were to push a button in 15 minutes, any city in this country could be gone. And it doesn't matter to think, well, yeah, but we can probably destroy all their cities in the next 15 minutes.

But what would it look like to you today if Chicago was totally gone? Well, maybe I should pick a different city. LA, well, maybe I should pick a different city. How about Dallas, right? What if it was just gone 15 minutes from now?

And you're on your TV watching total silence there. No sirens this time, no first responders because they're all dead. Nothing, just dust in the air that keeps the crops from growing and makes the animals that you kill, if you ate them, they would kill you because of the nuclear fallout that's in their bodies.

It's interesting to watch Chernobyl. Have you watched that little TV series about that? If you have not, look it up and watch it. I can't say it right. Chernobyl, am I saying it right? You know, in Russia where they had the nuclear disaster.

You know what's interesting is it was like a ghost town but you had little foxes running around and you had squirrels and you had rabbits. It didn't kill the animals. God's made it where they can survive that.

Humans would be dead from the radioactive material. But if you were to eat the meat of those, it would kill the human, see? So like, it's just gonna be, everything will change when that button gets pushed.

My son-in-law, Dave, he's quite the scholar nowadays, Bible scholar nowadays, I guess you've noticed. I noticed he's coming out with stuff and teaching me stuff I have not seen yet. And it started out, I was supposed to be teaching him.

Now he's teaching me stuff that I haven't seen yet. And he was showing me one in the Old Testament where it literally, I don't remember where it was. I'll have to look it up when he gets back. But it pictured this, it pictured Gog and Magog, which every scholar I'm aware of knows that that's Russia or believes that it's Russia, Moscow.

And this is like written 2 ,800, 900 years ago. Gog and Magog. And then it said, those who dwell in the aisles carelessly. Who do you think that is? Well, from the Bible viewpoint, when it was written, Europe and Asia is about all they knew the world was.

And you had England, which was an aisle. England was an island nation. And the offspring of England, which is the United States, if it is mentioned in the Bible anywhere, it is mentioned as the aisles.

And so picture this, in this passage of scripture that Dave read to me, just while we were reading that, I don't know, we're starting to do a positive stock market meeting with positive stuff going on.

He's reading me that stuff. And it says that fire will engulf Gog and Magog and those who carelessly dwell in the aisles. And I pictured nukes passing each other in the air and hitting those two nations and just boom, city's gone.

Nuclear winter hitting, your crops won't grow in 15 minutes of time. So you can't tell me this passage of scripture isn't right on for us sitting here today. The time is far spent. The day is at hand.

Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. The works of darkness, call it the sins of your youth, call it satanic things that may have affected families. Whatever these things are, we need to lay those aside and put on the armor.

The Armor of Light, Spiritual Warfare, and Holy Living

Let's talk about that armor just a little bit this morning. In Ephesians chapter six, if you'd like to turn there, verse 10, for Michael, it's a familiar passage. Any pastor has preached through the spiritual warfare passages.

And this is the greatest of all of them in the whole Bible. Finally, my brethren be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places and against the rulers of the darkness of this world. Wherefore taken to you the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day.

Now, what day is that? Now, I've used it my whole life to just mean a day of great sorrow that could hit our family, right? We all go through that, don't we? We have risk, do we not? But I think the specific interpretation of this evil day, the, with the word the in front of it, the evil day is this last period of time on the earth, the great tribulation period of three and a half years and everything that happens, the battle of Armageddon, this is the evil day.

And it tells us that we need to have on the whole armor of God that we might be able to stand in that evil day. All right, now, verse 14 says, stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth. Now, what's really interesting, I'm gonna jump over to a passage in 1 Thessalonians for a second.

I'm gonna come back to this. Look at 1 Thessalonians chapter five, be looking that up for a second. I'm gonna read a little bit more of this and then I'm gonna talk to you about something that gives us a little bit of light on some parts of Ephesians six.

So we're supposed to have our loins girt about with truth. And the truth, of course, we know is the word of God. We need the breastplate of righteousness, which is the positional righteousness that we have because we're in Christ, but it's beyond that.

It's also the experiential righteousness that we will have as the tribulation gets greater and the normal things of life go away. And the things that tempt us are not even as much around us anymore. And even if they were, it wouldn't affect us as much because we're so fearful for the lives of our wives and kids and families because of the tribulation that we are really close to the Lord.

And a lot of the sin habits are just gone all of a sudden without us even thinking about it. We're not even tempted by it anymore. And all of a sudden the church is made white. She makes herself white is how the word of God phrases it.

So it's not positional. It's you doing stuff. It's experiential. It's us making a decision to live right, to be strong, to not give in to sin, to walk with the Lord, to pray more, to serve him more. And all of these things are gonna come to pass as these days come to pass.

And so what it's talking about here is that we stand with our loins and we're gonna look at that in Thessalonians. It'll show you exactly what this is, a picture of your loins or down here like where you would have armor down around your waist if you were fighting in a sword fight, hand-to-hand combat in the old days when this was written.

So have your loins girded about with truth, having on the breastplate of righteousness that can't be just positional. It also is experiential because this is something it tells you to put on. Well, the positional got put on you by the Holy Spirit.

Like one of the things the Holy Spirit did for you the moment he saved you when you were regenerated is he gave you the righteousness of Christ. So that's past tense. It doesn't happen every day. It's just one time only and you got it.

God the Father sees you as perfect all the time forever because of that. But this is telling you to do something and me to do something, put on this. So this has to be experiential righteousness. This is talking about holy living.

This is talking about ongoing sanctification. And I know we can't do any of it without the Holy Spirit and the Bible. You got to have the water and the spirit, right? Same thing that saved us. Same two things have to be there to cause us to be holy and to walk right.

So we have to have the Bible. We have to have the Holy Spirit, but we have to try. We have to have us trying also and working at it. And that's what this is talking about when it says put on the breastplate of righteousness.

Then you need to have your feet shot with preparation of gospel peace. What does that mean? We need to be witnessing more, not less. We don't need to say, well, there was a time when we knocked on every door in Mahea and every door in Corsicana, pretty much almost every door.

But when's the last time we did that, right? It's been a long, long time ago. And we, but I don't even consider that the best method anymore. I was in my youth when we did that and we did do that. We knocked on just about every door in Mahea four times and just about every door here once.

It's not the best method. You know what the best method is? Live a godly life in front of people and every new friend that you meet, because it's a stranger, but it's a new friend, throw out a little spiritual something and see what they do with it.

If they change the subject, just forget about it and talk about baseball with them. But if they say, yeah, you know, I've been thinking about that too, then go a little deeper. And you share the gospel.

How did Jesus do it with the woman at the well? Was it a long and bald process that you'd have to learn in an evangelistic class here at church? Like, here's the five steps I need you to do. Or did he just say, look, look, if you had the water that I can give you, you'll live forever.

And that's all he said. That's basically it. She said, Lord, I want that water. And he said, well, go get your husband. She said, I don't have one. He said, that's right. You've got five men you're living with.

And she said, whoa, how do you know that? And somewhere in the next few moments, she was born again. She might've been born again when she said, give me that water. And probably even before she said, give me that water, when in her heart, she wanted that water.

Are we getting there? We're getting closer to the true gospel because Romans 10, 13 is not real great in English. It's really great in Greek because in Greek it's whosoever desires to call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Once that desire hits your heart, you're already regenerated because there is no unregenerate that has that desire. That's easy to prove with scripture and with my own life and probably with yours. Five seconds before you got saved, you did not want to get saved most likely.

Unless you're thinking that when you prayed up here, because five seconds before that, you were back there. And when that desire hits where you got saved. So five seconds before that happened, you didn't want it.

I didn't want it. God was my enemy. So it's why we were yet in our sins. He quickened us, brought us to life. Regeneration is fully a work of God. Man has no part in it other than to receive it as a free gift.

And that gospel is gone now. Even the Baptist churches I grew up in have now added some effects of salvation and they're pretending they're part of the cause. Oh, well, you gotta, yeah, I mean, you gotta believe, but you gotta repent.

You gotta come down to the altar and confess with your mouth. And I know there's scriptures that make people think that, but those are effects of the salvation. They're not the cause of it. The cause is the Holy Spirit regenerating us.

And so when that happens to a person, boom, they're born again. And then God, the Holy Spirit gives us about 33 different gifts all at once, as you've heard me say so many times. But one of those gifts is positional righteousness.

Once we have it, we got it forever. So how can this tell us to put on righteousness? So that's a different kind of righteousness. That means experiential. And that's where you have to make a decision to be a better person today, to walk with the Lord and hold his hand.