IN or OF June 5, 2011 No 1

Pastor Curt Crist, www.welcometograce.com

In order to be acceptable in the eyes of a perfectly righteous God, in order to be able to dwell with him, man needs to be perfectly righteous. The problem we found up to this point in our studies is that man is not perfectly righteous.

It is easy for us to think we are righteous, especially when we compare ourselves with what we would consider to be the righteousness or lack of righteousness in others. In fact, we have something that helps us to do that very thing. It's called: our pride nature, scripture refers to it as the pride of life! We can look around us, and we can always find someone who is less righteous, relatively speaking, than are we, if we look hard enough and we look far enough. But we don't have to look very far, we don't have to look very hard, do we, to find those folks? That gives our pride nature, the pride of life, a feeling of a bit of superiority. We're a rung up on the ladder, spiritually, in our own minds. Man tends to measure his own goodness in relation to the goodness of others, so we see ourselves as being relatively righteous. Therefore, how could God judge us? It only seems right to our way of thinking that God take our relative righteousness into consideration and give us a few points here and there.

You hear people say, "Well, I'm doing the best I can" as though "the best I can" will work. Well, "the best I can" will not work according to the apostle Paul. Paul has made it abundantly clear that God does not measure our goodness in relation to the goodness of others. In fact, He compares our goodness with His own perfect righteousness; that would be the criteria for dwelling with Him. And when our human righteousness is held up along side the perfect righteousness of God, every member of the human race comes out on the short end of the stick. Paul said it this way in Romans 3:23: "For all have sinned..." (point in time past), and (as most of you know, Paul switches to the present tense for the remainder of his sentence all are continually) "...coming short of the glory of God." It's an on-going thing. In fact, at no time during our life in this earthly tent have we, or will we have a measure of rightness equal to God's.

The prophet Isaiah, when referring to the children of Israel, said it this way in Isaiah 64:6: "But we are ALL..." (speaking of Israel here) "...we are ALL as an unclean thing, and ALL our righteousnesses..." (he's not talking about sins here) "...ALL our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away."

Paul shortened it up considerably when he included us Gentiles in with Israel in his declaration of the entire human race in Romans 3:9-10 where our apostle said: "What then? are we (any) better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not (even) one," and of course, that's not relative righteousness. We know that we are relatively righteous in comparison to others. But none are as righteous as God. We're talking about the measure of God's perfection, not the measure of relative righteousness we all like to use when we think of ourselves

We don't usually like to focus too long on our shortcomings, do we? Well, this is where a proper understanding of the doctrine of justification becomes vitally important to believers! In the text of our previous session, Paul said in Romans 3:21-22: "But now...the righteousness of God (this would be the righteousness God bestows apart from law)...without the law..." (It means apart from law-keeping; apart from adherence to any standard whatsoever; apart from human behavior to whatever degree of goodness a person might attach to his performance. Apart from that) "...the righteousness of God is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith OF Jesus Christ." .Paul is not making mention of "our faith." He's talking about the faith OF Jesus Christ. He's talking about the faith belonging to Christ Himself.

. It's Galatians 2:16. Paul writes here: "Knowing that a man is not justified (or, made righteous-ified as I like to think of it) by the works of the law..." (He's not declared righteous by his performance under any standard of law-keeping) "...but by the faith" (and here's the same construction we just noted in Romans) "...by the faith OF Jesus Christ, even we have believed..." (and here's a different construction) "...even we have believed IN Jesus Christ, that we might be justified" (back to the same construction) "...by the faith OF Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified."
When we compare Galatians 2:16 with Romans 3:22, it becomes obvious that our passage is referring to the faith OF Jesus Christ. It is not talking about our faith IN Jesus Christ,

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• Romans 3:22
• Isaiah 64:6
• Faith of Christ

[GraceAboundedMore]

@jesusislife85 I'm sorry. Most people on youtube can only listen a couple minutes of anything. Plus I like adding notes to each upload and youtube allows the same amount of space whether the upload is 5 minutes or 50 minutes. I'm always looking for a natural break. I will upload the whole hour message too. You just have to be patient with me. All this takes times. If you go to "Playlist", you can hear whole messages or "Romans" has the complete hour messages.Hope this helps.

[jesusislife85]

Okay I love your videos but I hate the fact they cut off when he's in the middle of saying something =)