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‘The righteousness which is of faith.’
Rom_9:30
I. St. Paul uses the expression, ‘Being justified by faith we have peace with God’—this is ‘the righteousness which is of faith’ as a relationship. Responding to the call of Jesus; believing in Jesus; surrendering ourselves to Jesus; embracing and appropriating as our very own the representative work of Jesus, we thus obtain a new standing before God. We become, in the fullest sense, sharers of the new humanity of the Incarnation. We pass out of the sphere of the penal liabilities of our kinsmanship with the first Adam, who was ‘of the earth earthy,’ and we enter into the sphere of the privileges of our kinsmanship with the second Adam, ‘which is the Lord from Heaven.’ In other words, instead of being in the category of the condemned, we are, by virtue of our faith, in the category of the justified. We have done what our Lord calls ‘the work of God,’ which is, ‘to believe in Him Whom God hath sent.’ And because we have done this work of God, therefore we are not as we formerly were to God, we are not ‘dead to God.’ We are ‘alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ This is the righteousness which is of faith as regards its bearing upon our standing before God.
II. Now a word on the subject of ‘the righteousness which is of faith’ being so much life and grace.—There are some Christians who have been satisfied with regarding ‘the righteousness which is of faith’ as being a matter of relationship or standing before God only. And the result has often been a low attainment of personal holiness. But ‘the righteousness which is of faith’ is something more than a justified and accepted state before God. It is something beyond forgiveness. It is also sanctification. It is a continual growth in Christ-likeness. It is a living oneness with Him out of Whom our righteousness comes. For we are not only told that the Christian is to believe in Christ; we are also told that the Christian is to feed on Christ. And to feed on Christ, whether in the Divine Sacrament of His flesh and blood—whether in the exercise of prayer to Him—or whether in the assimilation of Him through the medium of His written word, necessarily means to become like Christ in our measure and in proportion to the reality of our communion with Him. And let us remember this, that it is the result of our feeding upon Christ our Righteousness, which the world sees, and which impresses the world most. The world is not much impressed by the justification side of our righteousness. That is a matter it is often disposed to be incredulous about. But when it sees the sanctification side of our righteousness, when it discovers that the righteousness which is of faith makes us more honest, more pure, more self-denying, more spiritual, more jealous for truth, more charitable, more patient, more kind, then the world is impressed and acknowledges there is something in Christianity after all.
Rev. Canon Henry Lewis.
Illustration‘Let us make no mistake as to what righteousness in the New Testament sense really is. I say this because one result of our modern culture has been the creation of striking but defective ideas of what constitutes righteousness. Thus, e.g., it has been said with all the grace of language and force of expression which characterise the modern apostles of ‘morality touched with religion’ that “righteousness is right performance on all men’s great lines of endeavour”; that “righteousness is to reverently obey the eternal power moving us to fulfil the true law of our being”; that “righteousness is to so live as to be worthy of that high and true ideal of man and of man’s life, which shall be at last victorious.” There is a nobility of feeling, there is a grandeur of ideal in all these definitions of righteousness, which have great charm for many earnest and thoughtful minds—but minds which insist on putting themselves outside the circle of the Christian creeds. It was my lot to meet a representative of this class the other day in the person of one of our South London manufacturers. In the course of our conversation I found that the righteousness which he was pursuing was that of “right performance on all men’s great lines of endeavour.” And as far as earnestness—reverence for good—and a life shaped on convictions were concerned, he was all that one could wish. But he had abandoned all the great foundations of the Christian faith. Christ to him was an eminently good and wise man, but nothing further. The Bible was a book with no more authority than other great religious books. And sin was a balance on the wrong side, to be made up by persistent efforts to accumulate credit on the right side. Over his writing-table was a beautiful picture of the Madonna and the Divine Child, and the sight of the sweet Babe, he said, was a constant reminder to him of the duty of cultivating the child spirit—the child character—the child openness to good.’