“And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified (made righteous) by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Our three “L”s form a nucleus of Spiritual identity. They speak to the essential Life of Jesus Christ, God’s Love shared in us and the Holy Spirit’s Light to guide our glorification in Jesus producing His fruit.
God is! He is the “I AM” and has bought us into His eternal family. This is our new family name and we need training. What He has begun He will continue to perform.
Righteousness and sanctification and redemption sum up the wisdom God gives because we are in His Son, Christ Jesus. This is declared for us in 1Cor. 1:30, above … and He is in us!
Our job, yours and mine, is to understand this fellowship. We are in boot camp here on planet earth. Ours is a divine-human relationship with our risen Lord. Jesus defeated death, redeemed us, giving us the product of that death, His righteous resurrection Life. Ours is a spiritual/Spiritual training camp teaching us to walk Spiritually while dwelling in the carnality from which He has redeemed us!
BodyLife is about loving each other. God so loved us to give us, not only the breath of life, but His living Life as well. Now we are joined in a faith journey discovering who we are in Christ. We are learning and living together in God’s grace by faith. Christ is our Head and the Holy Spirit is working in us according to the will of our Father God. It is all in love and within this loving process is righteousness training.
We have been bought by the blood on the cross becoming Spiritual children. Just as parents protect and guide their young, God makes us cry now and then as we don’t fully understand who we are intended to be. We are shaped and pruned while at the same time given access to the High Priest and the King. We are tutored by His Spirit, given mercy and grace, so that, we can grow into His image glorifying the Father God in the process. A fairy tale? No, God’s plan for us!
Growing in God’s righteousness is what scripture refers to as sanctification, the subject of our next Grace Notes. Sanctification is applying God’s righteousness into our experience. It is one thing to be righteous, it is quite another to walk in righteousness. Paul put it to the Galatians this way, If you live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. How we absorb God’s righteousness into our soul is our emphasis here. Once we understand righteousness in Christ Jesus, then we are able to make deliberate righteous choices.
It is a question of Spiritual discernment. Being spiritually/Spiritually connected with a private, direct line into heaven itself, we have open communication to the Father and the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. This new skill set we are schooled in through two-way usage. The “natural” person does not have this Spiritual discernment.
Jesus was making this same point to the disciples after leaving the Upper Room. He may have been at the temple where a large golden vine was cast on the beautifully large bronze temple gates. He paused and taught about the vine. He told them He personally was the Vine and they were branches but, the branches, He emphasized, cannot bear fruit by themselves. The branches must abide in the vine to receive the organic nurturing required to produce much fruit. Fruit is what our life is about! Jesus is our Vine and we produce His Fruit! Fruit is another word for righteousness. Abiding is the Spiritual skill or gift that comes with our participation in communion with the Father through our Lord and Savior. Righteousness at the fruit level requires abiding, it requires spiritual/Spiritual fellowship in Christ.
While in the Upper Room, Jesus washes the disciples feet when Peter objects, and Jesus explained, “The one who hath bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean. And you are clean ..”. While still in the Upper Room, Jesus later explained, unless we abide in Christ we cannot bear fruit. So while on the one hand we are in the vine and have His life, we must abide in the vine to bear fruit. We get dirty walking in the world even while bearing fruit. But the point is clearly stated here, we have been bathed or made clean, we have been made righteous.
Pruning, as used in this passage, also conveys the meaning of cleaning the branch so that it is free from dirt, spiders and infection affecting fruit production. This formal tending of the branches is the love of our Father including discipline so that we glorify the Father and Son with righteous fruit.
We should perhaps reiterate here, the Greek word used for branch, in this passage, is a tender new growth. That’s us, tender new Spiritual growth. This tender new growth includes 1Cor. 1:30 because we are born again not of the will of man but born of God in Christ Jesus. It includes a righteous life needing to be trained in the abiding word of God rooted in Christ Jesus.
Our natural habit of thinking and living is based on our self orientation. We have been taught that we have to look out for number one, ourselves. Because, if we don’t, nobody else will. Our life is polluted with this self construct defining life in terms of how we regard self. This worldly orientation is our mindset and our heart has constructed values in our soul around a moral value of self. This normal value of self is in contradiction to the righteousness of God and our new birth identity in Christ.
Righteousness is the character of God and who we are in Christ. When we are born of God, in Christ, we are made righteous by virtue of our union with God as explained in the Upper Room discourse. In order for us to be who we are, we need a clear understanding of our identity. Jesus put it very simply, “..you in me, and I in you.” This is our reality, our essence has become Spiritually born again. We are born into God’s Spiritual nature by the joining of our spirit to His Spirit and He dwells with us forever. God is a Spirit and we have become joined to Him and His deity.
This spiritual/Spiritual orientation is now our “self” identity because we have been born Spiritually. Our soul is exposed to our spirit but it itself is still part of the flesh. We have now a Spiritual consciousness but our soul has to learn to adopt this new way of thinking and being. We have to instruct our heart and mind in the righteousness of God which is declared for us in His written word. Truth trumps feelings!
Learning to abide means spiritual/Spiritual communion at many levels. Our Lord will shape and mold us in different ways. Some of us will learn about spiritual communion through physical activities while others will be active praying, writing or giving. We are intended to be holy but some are more visible than others.
We wash each other’s feet by loving one another. We focus on issues seen with physical eyes but our understanding comes from what the Father sees. God is the caretaker and prepares His tender new growth to produce fruit from the inside and at the same time guiding us on the outside.
The word “prune” used in John 15:2 means much more than cutting off spurious new grow from the branch. It is the Greek word that gives us catharsis, meaning to purify. This is what is meant here. The branch is prepared and cared for so that it will bring forth much fruit. It is pruned of unnecessary growth but it is also cleaned and nurtured so that the condition exists to be fruitful while we are washing each other’s feet.
We learned, previously, redemption frees us from the dominion of temporal boundaries and makes us the personal possession of Jesus Himself. We are given access to eternity through our life in Christ. Paul tells us we have the “mind of Christ” and challenges us to a let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus. The Greek here presents this as a command. This is perfectly consistent with being made righteous in Christ having been born again of God. We are instructed to have the mind of Christ.
Mainline evangelical teaching is we are declared righteous as being distinct from being made righteous. The idea is that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us and we are clothed in His righteousness while we ourselves continue to have a sinful nature. This sin nature idea for the believer is clearly refuted in Romans 8.
I was raised with this understanding and attended 4 years of theology under this teaching. Later in life, when I began to understand for myself (much later in life) relying on God Himself for my affirmation, I could not accept this interpretation. At first I felt alone and wondered how I could be the only one in the world not accepting this understanding. I remember how excited I was to find a note in a John MacArthur study Bible in Romans 6 stipulating we do not have two natures. I yelled, “Amen,” several times and loudly. It was a good thing I was alone!
One of the first things questioning this teaching was the Upper Room discourse. How could I not be righteous if I am literally in the Lord Jesus just as He is in His Father God? Or, how can I be joined to the Lord becoming one Spirit with Him and not have literally His righteousness? This is not to argue being declared righteous in Jesus by faith. There is no question justification is the gospel and a necessary truth but there is “so much more” as Paul tells us in Romans 5. We will cover this detail in our next discussion on sanctification but we need to make clear the scripture does teach both, we are justified and called to perform righteous deeds with much fruit.
This is our calling! To be holy and display God’s holy righteousness. We are to be lights in darkness. God is able to bring light into darkness where there was no light. This is who our Father is and He has chosen us in Him before we were even created. Now we have the marvelous privilege to produce His fruit in His orchard for His people. We are called to be His Light in this dark world.
We have been freed to pursue God’s grace using faith to cultivate our spiritual/Spiritual life in God’s resurrection power. The tomb is empty. He has created in us resurrection life with resurrection power. This means we are to be overcomers walking in light because we are in Him and have His resurrection Life in us.
What more do we need to prove grace than what we have already received in Christ Jesus our Lord. Yet, this is only a taste of the glory to be ours because we are “in” Jesus.
We now only see through a glass darkly. The time is approaching when we shall see face to face. We need to be about our Father’s business who has given us this grace, to be righteous and bare His fruit while it is still daytime.