Of Filthy Rags And Transformed Hearts
My Hope is Built on Nothing Less than Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness
SUMMARY: Relax about trying to be righteous and morally perfect! Jesus did it for you. God accepts Christ’s efforts on your behalf as good enough, so you don’t have to be good enough. All you have to do is accept it, believe it, and conform your life to it!
God Speaks—I Obey // Romans 10:9-10
If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.
Your good works cannot save you. Period!
No matter how hard you try, your “good” is not good enough for the perfectly holy and completely righteous God. Nor can you be saved through an alternative, less stringent means, for only through God is eternal salvation possible.
Moreover, you cannot be saved by your moral perfection—no matter how moral you are or how close to moral you get. As the Old Testament prophet Isaiah pointed out, your righteousness is about as good as a “snot rag”. (Isaiah 64:6). I have actually cleaned that up a bit, because the Hebrew words for filthy rags, ukabeged ehdim, literally mean, “like as rags of menstruation.”
Sorry if that disgusts you. It’s Scripture—so blame Isaiah. The point is that both our acts of righteousness and the quality of righteousness we hope they produce are disgusting to God. So, if you are disgusted by Isaiah’s language, think of how God is repulsed by your efforts to get him to save you.
Then what hope is there for our salvation? Well, no hope resides within us. None whatsoever. Ephesians 2:1 says, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.” All a dead person can do is lie there and be dead, let alone try to be righteous before God.
“All a dead person can do is lie there and be dead, let alone try to be righteous before God. No, our righteousness comes from Christ alone.”
Dr. Ray Noah
No, our righteousness—and let’s be clear, we do have to be righteous to be acceptable to God—comes from Christ alone. You see, God sent his Son to die on the cross—he literally became our sin—in order to pay the just punishment for sin that we deserved. That is our only hope: that Jesus became sin—our sin—and in so doing, he likewise became our righteousness. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says it well,
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
How dishonoring to God’s grace and Christ’s atonement when we therefore try to save ourselves by our acts of righteousness and our efforts at moral perfection! The sooner we realize that, the sooner we will discover salvation by grace alone through faith, as Paul spoke about in Philippians 3:8-9,
“I consider everything a loss compared with the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them [our best efforts] rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him—not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ—the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”
It is only through the power of Christ’s resurrection and our death to self (Philippians 3:10-11) that our heart—the core of who we are; that which represents every fiber of our existence—will get transformed. And it is only out of a God-enabled transformed heart that our tongue can truly confess Jesus is Lord.
Then, and only then, are we saved.
So relax about trying to be righteous and morally perfect! Jesus did it for you. God accepts Christ’s efforts on your behalf as good enough, so you don’t have to be good enough. All you have to do is accept it, believe it, and conform your life to it!
Choose You This Day: This week, meditate on Romans 10:1-21. Rehearse Romans 10:9-10 each day this week: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by confessing with your mouth that you are saved.”
“When the will of God crosses the will of man, somebody has to die.”
Addison Leitch