Okay never mind then I guess. Personally righteous sounded like righteousness from self ie self-righteousness. Although 'the only one who can make you personally righteous is God' is what Sidon has been saying.
No the
only point I’ve made, repeatedly, is that God gives man actual, personal righteousness at justification, fulfilling the new covenant prophecy of Jer 31: “I will put My law in their minds and write it on their hearts”, whereas Sidon has maintained that a born again person is
imputed to be righteous at justification, that God
sees him as righteous or holy without regard to the person’s continued sin.
In my position righteousness is a gift that we must express and act on daily, overcoming sin, doing good, and it will grow, or we can refuse at any time. We’ll be judged on what we did with the gift, how we cooperated with God the Spirit in His work in us, with love as the goal, the very definition of the righteousness that only He can realize in us. Love is both a gift- and the criteria upon which we’ll be judged.
In the other position, personal, rather than imputed, righteousness or holiness
should still result from being born again, without stating the reason or purpose since they maintain that such righteousness is not
required in order to be saved but is more of a side effect of being born again. This is why some think salvation cant be lost, because in this case salvation is not connected to actual righteousness or sanctity in man as a result of justification. IOW, there’s no personal righteousness to compromise and lose since there’s none given to begin with. Man, with this position, isn’t justified by being
made actually just or righteous, but rather by justice or righteousness being imputed to him. He’s not considered to be righteous by God because he
is righteous, but only because God sees him as righteous. And this doesn’t really make sense though. If man cannot possibly be righteous anyway, then why would God even care if he “looks” righteous in His eyes?
In any case, historic Christianity teaches that, while God isn’t expecting total instant perfection in us, that
is the ultimate goal, and the journey towards which He
sets us upon now, as being His new creations. Again, He’s interested in who we
are, who we’ve become as a result of entering His family, not in who we’re merely imputed to be. His purpose is to
produce something, to realize the worth in us that we’ve been created to have, and even though He’s the source of it all, that worth is intrinsically coupled to how we
willingly cooperate with Him in its realization. For example, a person who helps the “the least of these” as per Matt 25, without even
knowing they were serving the Lord, ‘doing for Him’, demonstrates that very worth and the reason that they’re designated a sheep and not a goat.