This pastor from Cherokee, North
Carolina, Brother Tim James. He's a good friend. You've known
him for years, as I have. He's no stranger to us. We're
so thankful to have you back. And his wife, Debbie, is with
him. And they'll be leaving after
the services today to drive back. It's been good to have you, Tim.
You come preach to us again. Well, it's been a pleasure to
be here to see all of you again. I always get blubbery when I
tell folks how much they mean to me, so I'll try not to do
that this morning. Turn in your Bibles, please, to 1 Corinthians
chapter What our brother Gary just read
is pretty well convincing stuff that there is not anything in
us, and everything is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul was quoting first off from
Psalm 14, when the Lord looked down from heaven and saw among
the children of men, and saw that there was none good and
none righteous. But everyone knows that if you
are going to stand before God and be accepted, everyone knows
this, whether they are a believer or an unbeliever. Everyone knows
that you must be perfectly, spotlessly righteous in order to stand before
God. The Beatles knew that. They sang, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
7, all good children go to heaven. When I was a boy, there was a
song popular about a girl that had a wreck on Dead Men's Curve
and died. It was called Teen Angel. And the boy said if he's ever
going to see his girl again, because she's in heaven, he's
going to have to be good It's going to have to be good. We hear people say it a lot today,
especially those who are caught in some kind of infraction or
akin to someone who's in jail. They'll say, I'm a good person. I sit by the bedside of many
who are dying and hear them try to find something
good about their lives. regret that which they didn't
do and wish there had been a better this and a better that. Because
everybody knows you must be righteous or God
will not accept you. Everybody knows that. You know
it. And I know it too. The Bible
says some things about our righteousness. We just heard our brother read,
ìThere is none righteous, no, not one.î And there is no way
to get righteousness in the law because the law says youíre guilty.
And thatís all the law will ever say to you is youíre guilty. Isaiah, when he was writing in
Isaiah, said, ìOur righteousnesses are filthy Menstruous rags. And he used that terminology
because a woman when she is in her menses was cast outside the
camp and could not come back into the camp until an atonement
was made for her where she could be accepted because of the blood.
Our Lord said, Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the
scribes and the Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter heaven. That was not a recommendation
of their righteousness. It was a condemnation of their
righteousness as not being enough. Though the best that man can
offer to get a man accepted before God. Believers trust that Christ
is their righteousness. In 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and
verse 30, He says, But of him, of God,
are you in Christ? That's how you got in Christ.
He put you in Christ before the world began. Of God are you in
Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us. Wisdom, righteousness,
and sanctification, and redemption. That sounds to me like it covers
all the bases there as far as salvation is concerned. Your
wisdom is Jesus Christ. What is that wisdom? It is the
only way to understand what the Scriptures teach. For He is the
key of knowledge, and He alone opens up the Scriptures for our
understanding. He is the one that opened up
that seven-sealed book, wasn't He? Because He was worthy to
open the book and declare what was in it. Christ is our sanctification. What does that mean? He is our
holiness. God has made him to be our holiness. So he is our holiness. If you stand before God this
morning in Jesus Christ, you are holy. You'll never be more
holy. You'll never be less holy because
Christ is your holiness. And as holy as you are in Christ
is exactly how holy you will be when you finish this life
and go into the next. It also says that Christ is our
redemption. That means that Christ is the
payment that God required to redeem our souls from hell and
sin. And then it says Christ is our
righteousness. Christ is our righteousness. Today's religion doesn't much
like that language. Religious morality and legal
religion don't much want to run up on someone who believes and
trusts that Christ is his righteousness and claims no other. Today's
religion is about self-help, about personal merit. invisible
evidence of righteousness. But the believer speaks of a
righteousness that is invisible, that cannot be seen, that cannot
be discerned, granted and imputed by God alone without any consideration
of character or conduct. And those whom God has declared
righteous by making Christ to be their righteousness do not
themselves claim any righteousness of themselves or for themselves. And they do not try to show that
they are because they know they can't reveal this righteousness
because it's invisible. It can't be seen. And they can
only account that they are righteous because God has said they are
righteous. But for a believer, that's fine. If God said it,
that's good enough. All His beloved are sinners.
All His elect are sinners saved by grace. They are like Rahab. Rahab is known throughout Scripture
from the Old Testament to the New Testament as a harlot. She is also known as a saint. That is what you are. That is
what I am. We are horse saints. What else
to call you? That is what you are. You are
a horse saint. Nobody will ever see anything
but the whore. They will never see the same. These children of God whom God
has made Christ to be to them righteous, they are blood-bought
wretches. They have nothing to offer God save for praise and
thanksgiving for what God has done. And this truth that Christ
is the righteousness of those whom God has chosen is clearly
set forth here. And the people to whom it is
set forth is declared also. Verse 26 says, For you see your
calling, brethren. And he's talking to the brethren.
Because everything he says about next is about the brethren. How
that not many wise men are called. Not many wise men after the flesh.
What does that mean? You ain't near as smart as you
think you are. Not many mighty. You're not near as strong as
you thought you were. Not many noble or called. But God has
chosen the foolish things, stupid things, us. And He did it to confound those
who think they know something. So when the world looks at a
believer and sees what kind of person he is, they say, no way
that could be a child of God. Are they going to be surprised? You don't think you put forth
some kind of aura, do you? God has chosen the weak things,
the things that can't do anything for themselves, the things that
freely claim weakness and frailty. And he doesn't have to confound
the things that are mighty. The mighty believe that if you're
going to be a child of God, you have strength and power. You
must push forth and pull yourself up by the bootstraps and muddle
through and chin up and keep going. But that's not the child
of God. He's a puddle of weakness. And the mighty Christians look
at the one who trusts Christ alone for righteousness and says,
there ain't nothing to that fellow. There ain't nothing to that fellow. And the base things. Base. It means common. I think it was
Abraham Lincoln said, God loved the common folk because he made
so many of them. Try to call someone common sometimes
and see how they react. But that's what you are. You're
just common. Not special. Like everybody else. Just common. He chose things that are despised
and hated. God has chose things that are
not. What's that? Nothings. Spurgeon said, add
a man up to zero and you've gone too high. Nothing. When a believer says,
I am nothing, he means it. And he knows it to be true. It's
not some braggy, braggamony service where he's getting up and telling
everybody how rotten he is. He knows what he's saying is true.
And He does all this to bring to nothing things that exist
or that are. And the reason for that is that
no flesh should ever glory in His presence. No flesh should
ever glory in His presence. You need to look at these verses
and say, Do I fit? B.B. Caldwell used to say, If
you can't find yourself in this book, it ain't your book. And
that's the truth. Do you fit this description? Do you know it to be so? then
how in the world can you say, I am righteous before a holy
God, and believe it, and believe it? This verse is at once one
of the kindest and most gracious words that any sinner could hear.
And at the same time, it is the bane, the proverbial thorn in
the flesh to any who embrace the possibility or the pipe dream
or the hallucination of human righteousness The context in
which this truth appears concerns the doctrine of glorying in Christ
alone for salvation. He that glorieth, let him glory
in the Lord. And clearly this glorying is
according to the purpose of God because He removes man from the
equation altogether except as a passive recipient. God has
glorified Christ, you see, in His substitution and has fixed
it so that those who have been redeemed have neither right nor
warrant nor ground to glory in anyone or anything but the Lord
Jesus Christ. Thus, this glorious sound, this
dogmatic and profound fact becomes the most practical and useful
instrument in the life of every believer. The knowledge of this
fact, that God has made Him to be our righteousness, is the
finest of things, and it informs our entire existence. When God gives faith, the recipient
of that blessed gift, the believer, approaches Bible doctrine in
the sense of reckoning these things to be so. When he reads
the Scripture, he doesn't say, Well, I'll have an opinion on
that. He doesn't opine. The first definition from the
Greek word opine is, or heretic, is opine, to opine. He doesn't
opine. You see, the law has been written
in His heart. The words have been written in His heart. That
comes with regeneration. You mean it's all there? It's
all there. This whole book, everything God has for you is written on
your heart. You say, well, I can't even remember a Bible verse.
Oh, I know. People are stupid. I've already
said that. But you know what you do when
the preacher gets up here and says something crazy like God
chose whom He would save before the foundation of the world.
You say, that's right. Now that's right. Why? Because it's already in your
heart. You're just responding to what God's already put in
your heart. These things are so. The Lord has spoken it and
that settles it. As a pen of a ready writer, And only God-given faith can
embrace this truth because believers cannot look at themselves or
their lives to substantiate righteousness. There is no evidence. We can't
give credence to it. We can look at something we do
and say that's righteous. I guarantee you, anything you
do as a child of God can be duplicated by an infidel. Any visible thing
you do. Any prayer you pray. church you
attend to, any amount of giving you give can be duplicated. But there is one thing that cannot
be duplicated. True faith. And that alone is
the evidence of things hoped for and the substance of things
not seen. God gives faith. And that faith
latches on to this truth that Jesus Christ is our righteousness.
Problems arise when the believer looks anywhere else. And we do. I wouldn't want to sit down and
write out a timeline of how often I think of Christ during the
day and how often I think of other things. I'm sure my Lord
would come up woefully short in the equation. Problems arise when we look elsewhere.
When you look to other than God, what He has declared to be so.
When reckoning give way to reasoning, the fact that Christ is our righteousness
becomes clouded with the knowledge of our sinfulness and the presumption
of our personal righteousness. Neither our failures nor our
good works have any part, nor do they play any role in Christ
being our righteousness. Neither one of them. This is
the most blessed truth. Old Philip Henry, Matthew's daddy,
wrote a little book called Christ is All. I think Jim gave me a
copy. It was the first copy I ever
had. And he said something about Christ,
our righteousness. He said three things about it.
Do you remember that little essay he gave? That the knowledge of
Christ will help you. The knowledge that Christ is
your righteousness will help you in three times during your
life. First, it will help you when you fail, as we do every hour of the day. Our life would be nothing but
utter despair were it not for the knowledge that Christ is
our righteousness when we fail. Thank God He is our righteousness,
because I don't seem to be able to do anything. When you find
yourself out of the way, filled with guilt and shame,
believe. Against all evidence, to the
contrary, that Christ is your righteousness. Because that is
good news to a poor, frail, faltering, weak sinner saved by grace. Secondly, this blessed truth
is the best guard against self-righteousness. Because you know and I know,
it is sad but true, that we have a natural and vile bent toward
self-exaltation. I like to be patted on the back
and so do you. It is just natural. Often having
performed some act of kindness, some philanthropic gesture or
some good deed, we spend our time in consideration of it.
Soon we find ourselves looking to the act as personal righteousness
and trying to find someone that we can talk to long enough that
they might bring up something that we can bring in what we
did. The best medicine. The best antidote for presumption
is a lethal dose of reality. The reality is that Christ is
our righteousness. So when you do something good, remember this, what you did ain't
your righteousness. It's Christ who is our righteousness. And thirdly, when all is said
and done, we go to death's door. When the final leveler comes
to our bedside, when we look at our life now, past, and see
rightly what we have been, mowed bad and no questionably good,
what will sustain us then? We try to search out to find
a thing that had merit. Shall we lie in the slough of
despond and despair of hope? No, the banner over us is love. The banner of our hope over our
weary head is the heaven-scented pillar that we will lay upon
is this, Christ is our righteousness. Christ is our righteousness. Now, some believe that this righteousness
is only positional. I hear people say that. Well,
that's a position. Are you talking about a positional
righteousness? I don't have any difficulty with that. I don't
have any difficulty with that. belief except that it is often
stated as if it weren't enough. Legalism often speaks of a righteous
standing with God as if a better standing can be attained or improved
upon by personal righteousness by keeping the law and such.
I'm here to tell you it can't. It can't. Some such usually distinguish
between what they call imputed righteousness and inward righteousness
or infused righteousness or imparted righteousness. And again, their
emphasis is that imputed righteousness is somehow insufficient to get
the job done. It's God who made Jesus Christ
to be our righteousness, not us. Not us. Anything good that is accomplished
by the believer flows from the knowledge of imputed righteousness. Or it is merely righteousness,
or rather, it merely works for righteousness. It is either positional or it works for righteousness.
The new man of which All the elect are partakers upon regeneration,
is in fellowship and like-mindedness with God. And when God says Christ
is His righteousness, those two walk together in agreement. The
new man, however, is not our righteousness. Christ is our righteousness. He's all of it. Well, what is
this righteousness? According to 2 Corinthians 5,
verse 21, when it talks about the death of the Lord Jesus Christ,
when He was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we
might be made the righteousness of God. It's not that essential
righteousness of God. It's that righteousness revealed
in the gospel of that righteousness, which is Christ. It's that righteousness
fulfilled by Christ in His death without us dying, as our brother
just read in Romans chapter 3. And refused, it's the righteousness
refused by the legalists. They hate it. They say, you preach that and
you're preaching that you sin that grace may abound. That's
what they preach. Paul said that's scandalous. That's scandalous. This righteousness is the person
of Jesus Christ. And believers know that this
involves the work he accomplished in keeping the law's penalty.
And that's how he kept the law. Mark it down. Jesus Christ didn't
keep the law as to the ten words of the Decalogue of the Ten Commandments
of Moses. He kept the law one way, the
same way you'll keep the law, the same way everybody keeps
the law. How do you keep the law? You die. That's what keeping
the law is. Jesus Christ, the law had nothing
to do with Christ. You know why? He was a righteous
man. He was a righteous man. So the law didn't have anything
to do with Him. Does the law have something to do with a righteous
man? Of course not. Why? Because the law is there
to identify what sin is. The law is there to set the penalty
for sin, for transgression. There's a speed limit sign out
there. That don't make you drive the speed limit. That don't make
you righteous because you keep under it. What that tells you,
if you go over it, I'm going to penalize you. Other than that,
if you drive the speed limit, you ain't got nothing to worry
about. Why? Because that has nothing to do with you. The law has nothing to do with
the righteous man. That's what Paul told Timothy. When those
others were preaching some other doctrine in Ephesus, when he
left it there in 1 Timothy, he said they don't know what they're
saying. They don't understand what they're doing when they do this,
when they preach the law for righteousness. When they try
to bring a believer back under the law, they don't get it. What
they're actually saying is Christ's death was in vain. It meant nothing. That He really didn't make them
righteous. That He really didn't become the righteous. That they
are still sinners and whoremongers and manslayers and killers and
murderers and everything else that doesn't apply to sound doctrine. Jesus Christ is our righteousness. By His voluntary suffering, by
His death, which we celebrate in baptism, one ordinance, And
in the Lord's Table, the other ordinance, we celebrate His death.
His death. When He was made to be sin for
us. He suffered the punishment of God for sin in three hours
of darkness. Came out on the other side alive.
Nobody killed God. He died of Himself. Nobody killed
Christ. God didn't kill Christ. You didn't
kill Him. I know these words are used. You know, you slew
the Savior. These are biblical terms. But
what that's talking about is intent. Because the fact of it
was that men did their worst, hung Him on a tree and beat Him
halfway to death and revealed what men think of God. And then God did His worst. In
those three hours of darkness, He rolled up His sleeves and
pummeled Christ for every sin that we've ever committed. And
Christ suffered a hell in three hours of darkness. And He come
out on the other side and God forsook Him. In His hour of greatest
triumph, God forsook Him. And then he said, well, that's
done. I've saved my people. I've redeemed my people. One
thing left to do. The law must be satisfied. I've
got to keep the law now. And he died. He gave up the ghost. He gave up the ghost. Exacting
justice was satisfied, and by that substitution, the law was
fulfilled. Paul said because of what he
did in Romans chapter 8 verses 1 through 4 that the law was
fulfilled in us. The righteousness of the law
was fulfilled in us. What is the righteousness of
the law? What is the righteousness of the law? Oh, it's doing good
and being good. No, the righteousness of the
law is death for sin. And that was fulfilled in us
when Jesus Christ died for us. The righteousness of the law. Our text, however, does not declare
Christ to be the righteousness of the law for us, but rather
that He is our righteousness. He is our righteousness. And
you ain't going to get nowhere with religious folks when you
say this. When you say, No, Christ is my righteousness. Well, what
do you mean by that? Just that. I'm righteous before God because
God made Him to be my righteousness. Well, don't you have to go to
church? You don't have to. Appreciate it when you do. But
if you don't want to come, you can go fishing. That's all right.
Jail will say that. If you don't want to be here, go fishing.
Might ought to wonder why you want to go fishing instead of
coming to church. But still, you don't have to do these things.
I used to have to do them, didn't you? Remember when you had to
do them? My soul, you was afraid if you didn't do them, God was
going to do something to you. My, my. Christ is our righteousness. That's what God has made Him
to be. And the reason for this is simple. First, He and His
work are inseparable. Who He is and what He did just
can't be separated. One cannot even speak His name
without reference to His work. It's impossible. His name is
Jesus. Well, we know what that means.
Our brother said that last night. Thou shalt call His name Jesus.
Why call Him that? Because He's going to save His
people from their sins. He's the Savior. That's not a
job He's applying for, folks. Religion has Him applying for
that job at the desk of some will of humanity. Won't you let
me be the Savior? He's not applying for the job.
That's a title. given to Him because He saved
His people. He is the Savior. But you cannot even speak His
name. The Lord Jesus, the Christ, be anointed for salvation. Against
thy holy child, Jesus. Both Pontius Pilate and Herod,
the Jews and the Gentiles were gathered together. for to do
whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel had before ordained to be done."
Now, holy child Jesus. Secondly, since He is our righteousness,
He is such without any necessity or reference to the law or to
works. You find anything about the law
in I Corinthians chapter 1, 2? How far you have to go in. Some reference to the law here.
No reference to the law at all. It just says this, God has made
Jesus Christ our righteousness. This is actually declared in
reference to where our confidence is and in whom we should glory. Nothing more needs to be said
than this. No further explanation needs to be rendered than this.
Christ is our righteousness. Say it and say it and say it
again. Rehearse it in your mind. When
you get up in the morning, think, God has made Him to be my righteousness.
When you go to work, think, God has made Him to be my righteousness.
When you foul up, think, God has made Him to be my righteousness.
When you do something good, God has made Him to be my righteousness. This is our confidence. God has
made Him to be righteousness unto us. Because He has thee,
then He is our righteousness and our only righteousness. Finally,
Christ is our righteousness by the sovereign act of God. God
did it. What God does, He does forever.
Nothing can be added to it. Nothing can be taken from it.
And it is beautiful in its time. It simply means that God at once
and for all time calls Jesus Christ to be the righteousness
of His people. without our input, without our
fingerprints, even without our okay. And this is an unchangeable
fact. The name by which he shall be
called is the Lord our righteousness. And then if you go on a few chapters
over, it says the name by which she shall be called is the Lord
our righteousness. Jesus Christ has been made to
be unto us by God, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. You know, if we ever get a hold
of that and believe it, that'll float this old boat, woman, I
guarantee you. God bless you.