How do you relate?

When you relate to God are you looking at your performance or at your identity? Is it what you do (“I try to be the best person I can be”) or your position in Him where you find your security?

I’m not judging you, but we do need to judge ourselves.  Most of us desiring to please God and walk in His ways wouldn’t consider ourselves to be self-righteous.  After all, we’ve recognized our need for Christ’s sacrifice for our sins.  Yet, after their initial submission to God by receiving salvation, many Christians find themselves trying to live up to their own criteria or some other imposed standard to find their acceptance.

If we live our lives excusing or accusing ourselves, however stringent our expectations, it is self-righteousness.  And we’ll never experience the security that comes through Christ.

So how do we KNOW God’s standards of judgement so that we can live justified before Him?  This is the wrong question.  Yes we should seek God’s truth and His standards; we do this by His Word.  His Word is absolute truth and we should sanctify ourselves by it (John 17:17).  But we will never be right enough, good enough, or accepted by trying to obey it. We’d never meet God’s standard.  God does not grade on a curve, or care about our intent to do right (our own self effort). His standard is perfection, which we could never meet.  This is why Jesus had to come in our place.  It is what our salvation is all about!  Believing in what Jesus has accomplished for us.  He is our righteousness, by faith! (See Romans 3:22, 2 Cor. 5:21, Phil. 3:9)

Some people who were following Jesus once asked Him, “’What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?’ Jesus replied, the work of God is this: to believe in the One He has sent” (see John 6:28-29). They wanted to please God, and do what He required.  But they thought they had to do something in themselves.  Jesus basically said that what God wants and what He requires to please Him and be acceptable in His eyes is to have faith.  We might not see that as being enough if we don’t understand what having faith truly means.  But it is the only ‘work’ that gave us our righteousness (right standing) with God and the only work that will keep us.

In Colossians 2:5, the Apostle Paul is speaking to the Church of Colosse about their faith, and the amplified bible says this “….and the steadfastness of your faith [that leaning of the entire human personality on Him in absolute trust and confidence in His power, wisdom, and goodness]! As you have therefore received Christ [even] Jesus the Lord, [so] walk (regulate your lives and conduct yourselves) in union with and conformity to Him.  Have your roots [of your being] firmly and deeply planted [in Him, fixed and founded in Him, becoming increasingly more confirmed and established in the faith, just as you were taught, and abounding and overflowing in it with thanksgiving.   (Colossians 2:5-7)

Faith in Jesus isn’t a one-time event. It is a lifestyle.  It is the avenue to which we can be led by God to DO what pleases Him.  Our works outside of faith don’t please God (see Hebrews 11:6).  Security in life and before God is having faith in who Jesus is and what He has done for us.  Praise God!