Christianity is primarily not a moral religion – something that we need to come to terms with if we want to live in the Holy Spirit, as the Bible instructs us to do (Romans 8 and many other places). We can’t water-down Jesus’ teachings to moralism. Jesus was pointing to things that are far more profound. God’s righteousness goes beyond morals. His salvation is about moving us toward his perfecting love.
Instead of seeing sin or the Biblical word of “flesh” as obvious acts and thoughts of immorality, it’s a startling to discover, as we go deeper into the scriptures, that our real problem is more our human morality than our immorality. Our real problem is actually our righteousness. Our real problem is the belief that we have to climb some sort of ladder of virtue; that we have to make ourselves into holy people; that we can be like God and be moral and righteous and good. This is the work of the flesh: we are full of ourselves. We believe that we can be like God (or sometimes, even better than Him) – knowing good and evil – and be able to choose to be good.
We’ll even go so far as to enlist the help of God to fulfil our own self-righteous plan to be like God. As Aristotle taught that if you do the right thing repeatedly it would become a habit – by “doing just things we become just”, and that the path of virtue requires commitment and exertion, and the path of virtue is the path to happiness, so we really often say the same thing, with the added idea that God has given his Spirit to “help” us in our endeavour and that all of our virtue acts as some kind of merit before God. We say things like, “Justification is his part, but sanctification is yours,” or, “feed the Spirit, starve the flesh,” and so on.
But we seldom question the endeavour itself. We seldom make the link between the New Testament’s warnings against using Law to become righteous (the book of Galatians, specifically) and our attempts at being righteous by following certain rules or codes or doing certain works of righteousness. We mostly try and attend to our outward behaviour in the vain hope that these will adjust our desires. But we never think about the desire to be righteous in the first place, which is a desire that can very easily lead us back to what the scriptures call “Law”. And Law sparks off our other sins. “But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment [of the Law], produced in me all kinds of covetousness.” (Romans 7:8.)
Until we question our common agenda to become righteous we’re always going to be scratching our heads about sin. When the Church forgets Jesus’ clear message against self-righteousness it loses its identity.
“Every Dark Age in church history was due to the creeping influence of the human-centered gospel of ‘pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.’ Whenever God is seen as the sole author and finisher of salvation, there is health and vitality. To the degree that human beings are seen as agents of their own salvation, the church loses its power, since the Gospel is ‘the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.’” – Michael Horton
Holiness is not about human righteousness, but about God’s righteousness. So the question is: how much are you about pulling up your bootstraps? Or about others pulling up theirs? Is that what holiness is all about? Or, rather, is it about something far more deeper and powerful?
Instead of seeing sin or the Biblical word of “flesh” as obvious acts and thoughts of immorality, it’s a startling to discover, as we go deeper into the scriptures, that our real problem is more our human morality than our immorality. Our real problem is actually our righteousness. Our real problem is the belief that we have to climb some sort of ladder of virtue; that we have to make ourselves into holy people; that we can be like God and be moral and righteous and good. This is the work of the flesh: we are full of ourselves. We believe that we can be like God (or sometimes, even better than Him) – knowing good and evil – and be able to choose to be good.
We’ll even go so far as to enlist the help of God to fulfil our own self-righteous plan to be like God. As Aristotle taught that if you do the right thing repeatedly it would become a habit – by “doing just things we become just”, and that the path of virtue requires commitment and exertion, and the path of virtue is the path to happiness, so we really often say the same thing, with the added idea that God has given his Spirit to “help” us in our endeavour and that all of our virtue acts as some kind of merit before God. We say things like, “Justification is his part, but sanctification is yours,” or, “feed the Spirit, starve the flesh,” and so on.
But we seldom question the endeavour itself. We seldom make the link between the New Testament’s warnings against using Law to become righteous (the book of Galatians, specifically) and our attempts at being righteous by following certain rules or codes or doing certain works of righteousness. We mostly try and attend to our outward behaviour in the vain hope that these will adjust our desires. But we never think about the desire to be righteous in the first place, which is a desire that can very easily lead us back to what the scriptures call “Law”. And Law sparks off our other sins. “But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment [of the Law], produced in me all kinds of covetousness.” (Romans 7:8.)
Until we question our common agenda to become righteous we’re always going to be scratching our heads about sin. When the Church forgets Jesus’ clear message against self-righteousness it loses its identity.
“Every Dark Age in church history was due to the creeping influence of the human-centered gospel of ‘pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.’ Whenever God is seen as the sole author and finisher of salvation, there is health and vitality. To the degree that human beings are seen as agents of their own salvation, the church loses its power, since the Gospel is ‘the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.’” – Michael Horton
Holiness is not about human righteousness, but about God’s righteousness. So the question is: how much are you about pulling up your bootstraps? Or about others pulling up theirs? Is that what holiness is all about? Or, rather, is it about something far more deeper and powerful?