Verse of the Day 7/30

 

Romans 4:5 But to the one who does not work, but believes on Him who declares the ungodly to be righteous,his faith is credited for righteousness.  Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)

 

There is probably no one in the New Testament that writes, that talks about "righteousness", that being in right standing before God, more than the Apostle Paul.  But that does not mean that the Bible is not full of examples of those who are "righteous".  You can go all the way back to Enoch who walked with God, Noah, Abraham and on through the Old and New Testaments.  As today's verse mention, it comes by faith, by trusting God in and through all of life's "circumstances", or better - situations.

 

I read the following quote yesterday which brought me to this verse:

 

"Justification by faith is an answer to the greatest personal question ever asked by a human soul: 'How shall I be right with God? How do I stand in God's sight? With what favor does he look upon me?' There are those, I admit, who never raise that question. There are those who are concerned with the question of their standing before men but never with the question of their standing before God. There are those who are interested in what 'people say' but not in the question of what God says. Such men, however, are not those who move the world. They are apt to go with the current. They are apt to do as others do. They are not the heroes who change the destinies of the race. The beginning of true nobility comes when a man ceases to be interested in the judgment of men and becomes interested in the judgment of God."    J. Gresham Machen, in God Transcendent (Edinburgh, 1982), pages 89-90.

 

What stands out in that statement to me is that the world tends to "go with the current" or go with the flow in today's vernacular. When you look back at those same characters through the Bible that God considered "righteous" it was those who went against the flow, against the wind, the tide of society.  Society is interested in the "judgments of men" which plays out in "political correctness" and anything else that tries to usurp God's authority.

 

It is a good question to ask ourselves, do I go with the flow or will I be among those in Hebrews 11, that great "Hall of Faith", those "heroes who change the destinies of the race", who walk with God against the flow in faith?

 

In Christ,
Mike

 

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Eph 1:7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace  NIV

 

Romans 4:4-9The Message (MSG)

^4-5 If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.

^6-9 David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:

Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off,
    whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.
Fortunate the person against
    whom the Lord does not keep score.

Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don't we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?