One of the main distractions to faith is being considered unworthy of anything God has offered us through the cross of Christ even after we are saved.
Continuously being required to state self-unworthiness is detrimental to faith.
It’s true that we did not deserve His grace, nor His salvation, nor were we worthy of an escape from the wages of sin, which is death, but it is not about us, it is about what Jesus has done for us at the cross.
It is about who He is and what He offers regardless of what we have done or who we are. It is Christ who makes us righteous through His substitutionary death on the cross which paid the price for our sin.
The fact is that we are either made righteous by the blood of Christ or we are not. Do we believe Him or not? Has He paid for our sin? Has God forgiven us?
Our only recourse is to examine scripture to see what Jesus has won for us at Calvary.
The righteousness of God
The point of the cross was to redeem us from sin, and it is sin that causes people to be unworthy of being made righteous.
However, once the sin problem is dealt with there is only one place we can go, and that is into right standing with God.
Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.
Romans 3:19-26
But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe.
For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
A long passage, yes, but it explains exactly what I’m talking about here. Before we knew Christ we were sinners. All had sinned. No one was righteous. But God, through the blood of Christ, forgave all who would believe in Him.
The Mosaic Law could not save us, not because it was in itself impoverished, but because the nature of sin in people could not adhere to its requirements.
So God introduced the righteousness that came apart from the law, that is, the the righteousness that is of faith. Through faith in the cross God redeemed us from the curse of the Law which is death, meaning eternal separation from God, the wages of sin.
Redeemed
To redeem is to purchase back. We were being ransomed by Satan, the god of this world, who had fooled us into rejecting God’s will and denying God Himself as a result.
That old serpent helped us cross over from right standing to separation from God. We became, many unwittingly, rebels, the disobedient, lost to any helpful contact with God through our own obstinance.
Yet God, through Jesus, made the way for us to come back to Him through faith in Jesus and in the work of the cross, which was the price paid to redeem us from the devil and from sin. It was the ransom paid for with the blood of the innocent Jesus.
So He tells us clearly by the Holy Spirit through Paul’s epistle to the Romans, that the righteousness of God is revealed to all and upon all who believe.
Therefore, if we are made righteousness through God’s grace, His revealed message, the faith He gives us, and by the very blood sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, why should we ever declare ourselves anything before God but His righteousness in Christ Jesus?
For “whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.”
Romans 10:13
When we are saved we are made righteous. In other words, we are no longer unworthy. He has made us worthy. To be righteous is to be worthy. Righteousness is worthiness.
For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
2 Corinthians 5:21
Who knew no sin? Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Jesus never sinned.
Who became the righteousness of God in Him? All who now believe on Him, who confess Jesus as Lord and Saviour, who are redeemed through His blood, who have accepted the free gift of salvation by grace through faith.
Why, now, should we be made to confess that we remain unworthy sinners?His blood has cleansed us. “But what if I sin again?”
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1:11
The goal, though, should be to avoid sin altogether by following the precepts outlined in the Word of God, especially in the New Testament who is essentially the Testament to the Church. We need the whole counsel of God, including the Old Testament, but we live in the New.
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
Romas 6:1-4
Paul goes on to tell us that we should count ourselves dead to sin but alive to righteousness (Rom 6:11), alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Our eternal goal, then, is to walk in the righteousness of God that was won for us by Jesus at Calvary, by His death and by His resurrection.
It is more worthy to count ourselves as the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus according to the Word of God than to confess anything else but the justification that comes through faith in Him.
