Good News about God: Jesus our Rightness

I Corinthians 1:30 "...of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us... righteousness and sanctification and redemption..."

We all yearn to be righteous. We're made to be aligned with God's rightness, and when we're not, we fight to prove we are right. The so-called atheist fights by denying there is a God; the reprobate deals with this by justifying and giving himself totally to his sinful lifestyle; the religious person copes with it through trying harder to please God; and the evangelical handles his fight to be right through proving he's correct doctrinally.

The evil one knows of this human yearning to be right, to discern between right and wrong, and in the Garden of Eden he played on this by highlighting the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, therein obscuring the tree of life.

As followers of the Lamb, we never mature out of the place of being tempted to shift our energies and focus from Him (the Tree of Life) to trying to figure out on our own what's right and wrong (Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). The Apostle Paul calls this "self-righteousness" or "righteousness which is of the law".

The drive in us to be right is very strong and causes great and many conflicts in our relationships. God's desire was (and is) that humans would understand right and wrong IN HIM rather than independently of Him, and so He instructed Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of life and forbade them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By partaking of Life, they would have discerned rightly between right and wrong. Jesus said of Himself that He judged nothing on His own but only in alignment with His Father. In other words, His evaluation of people and situations was not based on His own independent ideas and feelings but on how His Father viewed them.

Jesus lived His life wholly dependent on His Father, and our only hope of being aligned with God's rightness is Jesus' righteous life active within us. We don't acquire a righteousness of our own; Christ in us is our righteousness! In our simple daily submission and obedience to His voice and nudges, His life increases in us and our independence decreases. We grow increasingly sensitive to His life within and live by His rightness rather than by our own independent opinions based on our natural life apart from Him.

"He must increase, but I must decrease."

Scriptures for meditation:
Isaiah 11:3-5;I Cor. 1:30; Philippians 3:8,9; John 3:30; 5:30; 7:24; 8:15,16,28,29.