Bible Study-Self Righteousness vs. Grace-Luke 18:9-14

dga said:

Bible Study-Self Righteousness vs. Grace-Luke 18:9-14

If we think that we can be righteous enough, by the way we live before God, we cut ourselves from the grace of God in Christ Jesus.

Of course, we have to aim to live righteously before God, but that should not be our focus, about our standing with God, because it is all about the righteousness of God in us through Christ Jesus, that God is looking at.

One of the men in Luke 18:9-14, thought that he can be righteous before God, and therefore accepted by God, just by the moral life he lived and the things he was doing for God. He thought ‘I can be righteous enough for God, so that God will accept me, because of the things I do for God’. So the grace of God, did not have place in his life, because he thought that he does not need it. The tax collector, was the poor in spirit man.

The other man, was repentant, and was looking for the mercy and the forgiveness of God for himself. He thought ‘Hey, I need the mercy and the grace of God for me, because I have done so many things wrong’. He just could not see himself able to be right with God, by the way he lived.

In Matthew 5:3, Jesus said that poor in spirit, have the Kingdom of heaven.
I believe to be poor in spirit, means that we do not think, that we can live righteously enough before God, ever, therefore, we need his grace in our lives.

We can never be rich enough in our spiritual walk with God, so that we can fulfill the requirements of the Law, or keep God’s commands always, because it says in the Epistle of James, that if we brake one of the commands of God, we have broken all of them.

And we know, that it is not possible for us, to keep all the commands of God, all the time. The moment we realize that, we become poor in spirit, and we need the grace of God, and his gift of righteousness in Christ, in order to be accepted by God as righteous.

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Obedience to God has never been about trying to be good enough or to become righteous, and that has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose. In Romans 9:30-10:4, the Israelites had a zeal for God, but it was not based on knowledge because they did not understand that the righteousness of God only comes through faith in Messiah. So they failed to obtain righteousness because they pursued the Law as through righteousness were by works in an effort to establish their own instead of pursuing the Law as through righteousness for by faith, for Christ is the goal of the Law for righteousness for everyone who has faith. In Romans 10:5-10, Paul quoted Deuteronomy 30:11-14, in regard to this faith saying that God's Law is not too difficult for us, but that His Word is near us, in our heart and in our mouth so that we can obey it, and this is what it means to confess and to submit to Jesus as Lord. So for someone to say that we can't obey God's Law is to call God a liar and to deny what our faith says.

In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that faith is on of the weightier matters of the Law and obedience to God's instructions has always been about having faith in Him to guide us in how to rightly live. Living by faith is always associated with having a willingness to obey God's instructions, such as with every example of saving faith listed in Hebrews 11, whereas disobedience to God's instructions is referred to as breaking faith (Deuteronomy 32:51). In 1 John 5:3, to love God is to obey His commands, so obedience to God has always been about growing in a relationship with Christ based on faith and love. In Philippians 3:8, Paul had been keeping the Law, but without having a focus on growing in his relationship with Christ, so he had been missing the whole point and counted it all as rubbish.

According to Psalms 119:29, David wanted God to be gracious to him by teaching him to obey His Law. According to Titus 2:11-14, our salvation is described as being trained by grace to do things that perfectly describe what God's Law was given to do. According to Romans 1:5, we have received grace in order to bring about the obedience that faith requires. According to 2 Peter 3:17-18, growing in grace is contrasted with falling into the error of Lawlessness. According to John 1:16-17, grace was added upon grace, so the grace of Christ was added upon the grace of the Law. According to Jude 1:4, the ungodly pervert God's grace into license for immorality. According to Strong's, "grace" is defined as "the divine influence upon the heart and its reflection in the life" and when God's will is reflected in our lives, it takes the form of obedience to His commands, so grace is the power of God to overcome Lawlessness in our lives and it is by grace that God teaches us to walk in His ways in accordance with His Law.