It Starts Small

There are three prerequisites to pursuing godliness. This morning we are going to talk about the first and that is we can not live godly lives without receiving salvation through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

By our standards, non-Christians do good deeds. It is impossible, however, to meet God’s standard of righteousness without professing faith in Christ. Our scripture today says:

We are all impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags.

Isaiah 64:6 NLT

Trusting in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ is the only way to wash our filthy rags clean.

Our scripture today points out that our human righteousness is bad compared to what is truly good. God makes this judgement and He is making His comparison against His own righteousness. Measured like this, all we think is righteous is filthy.

We tend to compare ourselves with other humans, which is less than God, and by such means we come out smelling like a rose. We tend to isolate one aspect of another’s personality and character to conclude in comparison we are better. The same applies to godliness. The idea is to compare ourselves with labels of degrees to sin. IT is a lie to believe one sin is less sinful than another. There are sin that God hates, but he hates all sin because it is what separates us from Him because He is a righteous God.

However, there is a problem with this line of thinking. God does not find the comparison of human vs. human acceptable. Human nature desires we consider ourselves good. When we judge ourselves by human standards, it is not too hard to believe we are good. That is not too hard to do because, as judged by human standards, the overwhelming majority of humankind—those ordinary people who are not out murdering their neighbor, robbing the local food mart, or dealing drugs—is reasonably good. Human nature tends to judge itself against such, so the standards are not exceedingly high.

Jesus spoke directly to this sort of thinking:

 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Matthew 7:11

Notice that Jesus, God in the flesh, judges these people to be evil! Nothing in the context indicates that they were anything but run-of-the-mill citizens of the area. They were not Al Capone and his mafia mob!

This is in perfect alignment with Isaiah 64:6 and Matthew 19:17, where Jesus says, “No one is good but One, that is, God.” He judges them to be evil, even though what they were doing was essentially a good work, giving good gifts to their children. We can see that some element must be missing from the acts of human nature apart from God that He finds unacceptable.

We are self-righteous, but we need to become God-righteous. This is why none of our works can earn justification. All of our acts before receiving Christ as our Savior are tainted by the fact that they are constantly under the influence of Satan and this world, even though some of them are even “good.”

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