How to Become Righteous
Romans 4:1-5; 13-15
Americans are more in debt than ever before. It’s worse than you think…
Last week we talked about the debt we owe God; how we all start out in life in a hole, so to speak, with God.
God declares us unrighteous because of sin – Romans 3:10. This starts at birth – Rom. 5.
Think of it as your spiritual bank account. Your spiritual bank account contains your amount, your level, of righteousness. You start out with your spiritual bank account empty, and there is a note due. You have no righteousness in your account, according to God. Your sin wipes it out.
This creates a problem – in order to gain approval from God, have eternal life, live forever with God, etc., you must have a balance in your spiritual bank account. You have to have enough in your account to cover your debt of sin when you meet God, or you enter eternal bankruptcy.
The question is, how do you obtain, accrue, get righteousness? How can you fill up your account to cover the debt you owe? How can you go from having no righteousness to being declared full of righteousness? How can you stand before God approved?
That is the question our text answers for us today. Paul is covering this same subject, the same question. When he gets to chapter 4, notice what he says as I read Romans 4:1. He says, “Let’s see what Abraham discovered about this matter”. Paul appeals to an expert, a giant, to speak to the matter. “This matter” is this whole subject of how does one obtain righteousness to satisfy God?
Ah, Abraham. Talk about a spiritual giant. In the New Testament book of James, it says Abraham was called the Friend of God. The story of his life occupies several chapters of the book of Genesis. Three of the world’s major religions revere him – Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. If anyone should know something about this subject, it should be Abraham.
Paul calls Abraham “our forefather,” and truly he was – the patriarch of the entire Jewish nation. He was, in fact, the first Jew. Father Abraham was a true example for the Jewish people of someone who followed the Law, who obeyed God, who lived a righteous life.
And that brings us to one of the main ways to go about accruing righteousness in your spiritual bank account. There are two primary ways to fill your account up with righteousness, and one of them, perhaps the one we are most familiar with, is living a righteous life. Overcoming the unrighteousness in your life with ample amounts of righteousness: obeying God, following his commands, doing right, etc. – that is living a righteous life. And Abraham is often held up as the epitome of such a life. Back in the book of Genesis we are told some pretty amazing stuff about Abraham. Consider:
• He obeyed God and left his homeland, his relatives, his life when God asked him to, even though God did not tell him where he would end up.
• When God promised him he would be the Father of a great nation and inherit the land of Canaan one day, he acted on it and bought land there for the future.
• When God gave him a son in his old age, the son of the promise. Abraham obeyed God when he asked him to sacrifice that son – he would have done it if God hadn’t stopped him at the last instant.
If anyone has what it takes to make some righteousness deposits in his account, Abraham is the one. I mean, this guy is an example! Now let’s see what the text says about this as I read Romans 4:2-3.
Paul turns our thinking upside down. If Abraham was justified – that means declared righteous, his bank account brimming with righteousness – by works – that means by his efforts, his accomplishments, by what he did – that would be something to boast about. But not with God. God just doesn’t see it that way.
Well, then what made Abraham such an example? How did he get to be called the friend of God? What got him in good with God? His faith. Paul quotes Genesis 15:6, which says that Abraham believed God. He believed what God told him. He had faith in God. And his faith was credited to him as righteousness. When Abraham believed, God credited righteousness to his account. It’s like the moment Abraham had faith, there was a giant “Ka-Ching” and his spiritual bank account, which was empty, became full. Abraham was considered righteous, his debt of sin overcome.
What Abraham discovered, what he found out, was that approval with God doesn’t come from works. It isn’t gotten by what you do, how much you accomplish, etc. If anyone would be approved by God, if anyone could accrue righteousness by how he lived, it would be Abraham. But the Scripture says that was not the case. It was not his work, it was his faith that earned him God’s approval, and got him declared righteous. Abraham found approval with God by his faith, not his works. Paul says this again in Romans 4:13
And you know what? It’s a good thing God justified Abraham by his faith and not by his works. Because Abraham’s works weren’t perfect. Sure he did a lot of amazing things, as we mentioned before. But what we sometimes forget is that Abraham, like you and me, wasn’t perfect:
After God’s promise that he and his wife would have a child wasn’t fulfilled for many years, Abraham took matters into his own hands. One day he says to Sarah, his wife, “Hey, it’s been a lot of years and there’s still no kid. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you send in the housekeeper and I’ll get her pregnant and we’ll have a child that way.” And so Abraham had a son, Ishmael, but not with Sarah.
On two different occasions, as Abraham and Sarah traveled, Abraham gave his wife away - once to a Pharaoh and once to a king. He was afraid these guys would kill him and take Sarah from him when they saw how beautiful she was, so instead he had Sarah tell everyone she was his sister. Well, they didn’t kill Abraham, but they both took Sarah anyway. Apparently this was fine with Abraham. Both times God had to intervene and get her back. Now listen, any one of us could accidentally give our wives away once. But twice? That’s a character flaw…
As great as Abraham was, he is not a model of good works, but of faith. Despite his failures, he had faith in God’s promise to him and God credited that to him as righteousness in his spiritual bank account.
You and I need to discover this too. We often think we can earn God’s approval, we can earn righteousness. But we can’t.
The reason is that when we work for God’s approval, all we get what we deserve. When we rely on our efforts, on the way we live to fill our spiritual bank account with righteousness, all we get is what we earn. Notice how Paul puts this as I read Romans 4:4-5. Paul is saying that when you got to work, when you put in your hours, do your job, fulfill your contract and get paid for it, that’s not a gift. It’s an obligation. You get what you earn, what you deserve. When we try to earn what we get, we get what we earn, or deserve. And the implication is, don’t try this with God! If you and I try to earn our righteousness, that is, do enough good, spiritual things, follow God’s commands, etc., all we will get is what we earn. The reality is that you and I cannot ever do enough to earn righteousness. It’s amazing to me how many people want to think that if their good deeds outweigh their bad deeds, they’ll be cool with God. But it doesn’t work that way with God. His standard isn’t one more good thing than bad. His standard is holiness, perfection. One bad deed, one sin, wipes out your entire account. Your attempt to make things right with God by following his commands, his laws won’t cut it. Paul says this in Romans 4:14-15 (NLT). Let’s read it in the New Living Translation:
14So if you claim that God’s promise is for those who obey God’s law and think they are “good enough” in God’s sight, then you are saying that faith is useless. And in that case, the promise is also meaningless. 15But the law brings punishment on those who try to obey it. (The only way to avoid breaking the law is to have no law to break!)
The way God works things is this: He knows you can’t be righteous on your own. He knows you can’t keep his laws. So he’s made a better way. Instead of knocking yourself out trying to be good enough to overcome the debt of sin you owe God, he accepts your faith in Jesus Christ, who did live a perfect life, who died for you to pay your debt, and rose again from the dead to prove his victory over sin and death. When you have faith in that act of Christ, he credits your faith as deposits righteousness into your spiritual bank account. When you believe in Jesus Christ, there is a big “Ka-Ching” in your spiritual bank account.
Like Abraham, we inherit the promise of life through the righteousness that comes not by our efforts but by faith. Trying to follow the rules, the law, only brings punishment, because you can’t keep it.
Instead of trying to earn approval with God, we should have faith that Christ get us approval before God.
If you have never heard this before, or if it just never made sense before, then I invite you to turn from working your way into God’s favor and accept his gift of credit in your life. I invite you today to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When you do, God fills your account with righteousness.
Many of us have heard this before, and we’ve believed it and accepted it. But the incredible thing is that knowing we find approval with God by faith and not by our works, we just go right on working. We go right on trying to earn God’s approval, thinking that what we do counts in this regard.
Think about it for a minute. How often are the examples held up to us examples of work, not of faith? I can’t tell you how many Bible Studies and sermons I’ve heard on Abraham that emphasize his good works, how he obeyed God, and always did what was right, and so God called him his friend. There’s a theological term for that: Baloney. Abraham wasn’t called the friend of God because of what he did, but because of his faith.
I go to church or pastor’s conferences and invariably they are led by people who have accomplished a lot. And they are held up as models because of what they have done: this guy has grown a church from 5 to 5000. This person has built this giant facility, raised all this money, etc. The implication is always that they should be revered because of what they have done. I’m waiting to go to a conference led by some guy who says, “I haven’t done a doggone thing. I don’t have the foggiest idea how this happened, but look what God did…” Now, I’d pay to hear that.
Even in our own churches we sometimes get the impression that those who have done, accomplished, achieved things for God are the examples we should follow, and if we’re not carefully we fall into the thinking that doing things for God is what gets you approval with God, because it certainly gets you approval at church. Even our faith itself can become a work. Does that make sense? We honor or admire those who have “great” faith or “strong” faith or “super” faith.
Listen, it’s possible to think “Okay, I’m supposed to have this great faith, like Abraham.” Granted, his faith would score pretty high on the “faith –o – meter.” When he left his homeland, when he put his son Isaac on that altar and drew the knife, that was faith. But I think we’ve demonstrated he wasn’t perfect even in his faith.
What I’m trying to say is that faith itself isn’t what matters nearly as much as the object of your faith. Faith isn’t some kind of magic that makes things happen. It’s the object of your faith that matters. You don’t have to have super faith; you just need to have faith in something super. Stuart Briscoe said it this way: “The object of faith is what really matters, more than anything else. Some people who had strong faith in thin ice never lived to tell the tale but died by faith. Others who had weak faith in thick ice were as safe as if they stood on concrete.” Your faith is effective not because it is so strong, but because God is so good. Your faith is credited to you as righteousness not because of the quality of your faith, but because of the quality of your God. Because of what he did, through Christ.
One time Jesus said to his disciples “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
All you need is mustard seed faith. But it must be faith. Trust. Reliance on Jesus as the only way for you to get to heaven.
Okay, how’s your faith? How do you know if you have genuine faith or if you have slipped into a works mentality? When we rely on works, on our efforts, accomplishment, obedience, the focus is on us. It’s about what we have done. But when we have faith, our focus is all on what God has done. It’s about what God has done. It effects everything we do. For instance:
When you come here on a Sunday for worship, do you do it out of a sense of duty, obligation, because you have to? That’s works. That means you are coming because you think you will please someone, meet someone’s standard if you come. You think you will earn brownie points with God if you come. That’s relying on your own efforts. But if you come here not out of duty, but out of desire, that’s a sign of faith. If you come here because you want to, because you are so grateful to God and so in love with him that you are dying to worship him, that’s a response of faith. Duty versus desire.
What about when you serve or participate in ministry? Do you do it with a sense of guilt? Or with a sense of joy? Do you hope someone notices, or are you thrilled to do what you can in response to what God has done for you?
How about the way you look at others? Do you look at them judgmentally – because they haven’t met the standard, they don’t do what they should – or do you look at them with love, because of what God feels for them?
Whenever we emphasize appearance over substance, that’s a sign that we are caught up in a works mentality, not recognizing that it is God who makes us righteous.
Are you constantly anxious about your relationship with God? That a sign of works – worrying that my performance, my behavior, my works might not measure up. Leaning on faith brings peace – you know there is nothing you can do to make yourself righteous, but you know God declares you righteous because of your faith.
So, the choice is yours. You have a debt that you owe God. Only righteousness will cover it. How will you be declared righteous? By your works? Or by your faith?
