WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN? Do you have some principles that you hold to with a passion? Principles that define you? That you live by? I reckon you do, whether you’re religious or not. You have a life philosophy. A value system. A political leaning. An idea about what really matters and why. Do you ‘share’ your point of view with others? Again, I reckon you do. Most of us like to trumpet the virtues of our worldview at least once in a while. And why not? We ‘know’ our way of thinking is right. If only those on the other side would open their eyes and see sense. Then they too would be blameless and upright…

I admit that I’m being facetious—but only to a point. Think about it: Don’t we tend to see our own way as the best way, the way everyone should be? We easily favour a definition of ‘righteousness’ that matches the values we are already living out. If I can convince you of the purity of my natural preferences, I will come off looking like a fine practitioner of righteousness. And I probably won’t have to try very hard or make myself uncomfortable in the process. Because, you see, my definition of righteousness fits me perfectly.

ULTIMATE RIGHTEOUSNESS

Buried deep in our consciences, however, are some other principles of righteousness that we may not be aware of. They don’t make the headlines, but they are very real: they live within us, instructing us—if we are listening—on how to behave. Among them are these: ‘Be kind to others.’ ‘Don’t be greedy.’ ‘Protect the vulnerable.’ ‘Be careful to keep your word.’ These and other principles we really do know, at a base level, to be right. We may not know why they are right, but we know they are. None of us can claim to have made them up. They weren’t formed out of anyone’s personality or partiality, nor do they belong to anyone’s ideology. They are right in themselves. Right in every era of history, even the dark ages. Right in every society on earth, even those given to supreme wickedness. Right in every galaxy in the cosmos, even those whose light is yet to reach us.

A clue that these principles are objectively right is that they teach people all over the world—regardless of time, place, language, or culture—how to live together for the benefit of all, not just a few. Yet they are right, too, in a more profound way. As they are not matters of human opinion, they orientate us to reality beyond human opinion. They are pointers, I submit, not merely to a right standard of behaviour but to ultimate righteousness—to purity beyond natural human attainment. When we see someone living out these principles at personal cost and without expectation of personal glory, we know we are seeing something uncommonly good—something, we might say, that is not of this world.

FALLING SHORT

Sadly, though, these universally right principles—these pointers to perfect righteousness—are all too rarely lived out in true self-sacrifice. We treat everyone in our lives with consideration and care, so we think—but what is our attitude toward the slowcoach in the checkout queue when we are in a hurry? We deal with all people in a trustworthy manner, so we claim—but do we ever slacken off at work when the boss isn’t watching? Maybe we give money to a charity that helps people in need—but do we look the other way when such a person crosses our path?

Even if we mostly obey our inner principles of righteousness, in certain conditions we behave as if those principles don’t exist. And what do we say to ourselves about this? Quite possibly, nothing; we might not be watching ourselves, or perhaps we don’t care (enough). When we do experience a twinge of conscience, we have various ways of dispelling our unrest. We give a casual shrug of the shoulders and recite that old truism, ‘Nobody’s perfect’; or we increase our work rate to distract ourselves from our guilt; or we try to offset our bad behaviour with our good behaviour; or we compare ourselves with someone presumably more blameworthy than us; or, somewhat shockingly, we conjure up a new principle to make our shortfall seem righteous. But no matter how hard we struggle to get ourselves off the hook, by doing so we only prove that we know we are on the hook. We are never more in need of a principle on which to hang our behaviour than when our behaviour is unprincipled.

The fact is, a set of enduring ethical principles is embedded in the human psyche—principles that we regularly violate. As such, we continually fall short of the righteousness that our better human nature tells us we’re supposed to live up to (Rom 3:23).

THE SOURCE OF ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS

Our violations against our own principles of righteousness wouldn’t be a huge problem if God didn’t exist, for we would only have our conscience to answer to. But, as most of us suspect deep down, God does exist; moreover, He is keenly interested in how we live. He didn’t put us together in some haphazard fashion; He made us in His own image (Gen 1:26-27; see also Gen 5:1; 9:6), that we might pattern ourselves after His righteous character (Ps 119:137; 145:17; Dan 9:14; Rev 15:4). His likeness within us is the basis of our moral convictions.

Yet our failure to consistently live out those convictions suggests that something is deeply wrong with us. The Bible pinpoints our shared human disorder: we have rejected God—the Source of our righteousness—and gone after a ‘righteousness’ of our own (Gen 2:17; 3:6). And have we found it? Not even close! We have succeeded only in making ourselves unrighteous, and in the process disfigured our humanity. Yet still we trumpet the ‘virtues’ of our own ideas about life! At least some of our most passionately-held opinions are reflections of our own self-righteousness: Everyone else should be more like me. They have little, if anything, to do with God’s absolute standard, which endures forever and is the yardstick by which each of us will be measured. Are you and I good or bad? True or false? Self-giving or self-centred? Wholehearted, lukewarm, or indifferent? Whatever the substance of our character, it is laid bare before the righteous Judge (2 Tim 4:8; see also Ps 7:11; 9:4) who sees all (Ps 139:12). When He comes, will we make the grade?

Now I don’t mean to deny the gospel of grace by which righteousness is imputed to us through Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul puts it this way: ‘God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor 5:21). What an astonishing exchange! We give God our sin, and He gives us His righteousness through Jesus Christ. The key that unlocks this transaction is faith, which God graciously gives us and we humbly receive. ‘Righteousness,’ declared Paul, ‘is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe’ (Rom 3:22). We can be confident, then, that when the Righteous Judge comes, we will indeed make the grade—if, by God’s grace, we are found in Christ.

This righteousness, however, doesn’t mean that we have free rein to give voice to our lopsided philosophies and pet platforms as if they were the word of God. Rather than fill the air with our self-righteous opinions, we ought to be asking: What is God passionate about? What matters to God? These are the things that ought to matter to us.

WORDS OF LIFE

So, let’s throw away our self-serving definitions of righteousness, call out our own ideological prejudices and blind spots, and shun any earthly crowns that we might have imagined we were wearing. Instead, let’s exercise care and restraint when expressing our opinions. God wants us, His people, to express His righteousness (which through Christ is our righteousness too) by means of our speech. As He slowly forms and shapes us with His word, we will find increasingly that we are able to speak words of life, peace, justice, and mercy to others—moderated by wisdom. When we experience the joy of seeing how these words can build others up in Christ, our self-serving opinions will be but a distant memory.