Matthew 5:20—Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees, you shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Legalists Are Not Concerned About What You Are, But What You Do. You Can Gossip And Slander, Lie And Live A Double Life, Just As Long As You Keep Their Rules!
There are three dimensions of righteousness in scripture: Self-righteousness, imputed righteousness and imparted righteousness.
The Pharisees were self-righteous. They were legalists who kept man made rules to obtain righteousness from God. They fasted, prayed and tithed yet they were smug, arrogant, heady and high-minded. They were religious, but very lost.
The second kind of righteousness is imputed righteousness. “Imputed” means “credited to my account,” and it refers to the righteousness we receive at the cross. Romans 4 says, “And therefore it was imputed to him Abraham for righteousness. Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him, but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe in Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead” verses 22-24. When I accepted Christ, He gave me a dazzling white robe of righteousness that covers all of my imperfections.
The third kind of righteousness is imparted righteousness. “Imparted” means ‘that which is done in me.” When I got saved, God handed me his book of standards, the Bible, and said, Make your day to day choices based on my Word. Imparted righteousness is living by the standards of God as specified in the Bible, the owner’s manual for the soul.
Source: Twelve Sunday Morning Part 3
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