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A Righteous Man is a Saved Man
By Steve Gallagher
(From Resisting the Rise of Lawlessness Episode #6) In this series, we’ve been working our way through the biblical story of God’s dealings with mankind as we seek to understand the contrasting subjects of righteousness and lawlessness. Today we’re going to zero in on righteousness.
The first thing to understand about righteousness is that it has an unbreakable bond with faith. The Bible not only tells us that Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness but also that any righteousness man may conceive without faith is worthless. And yet, James tells us that faith without a resultant righteous life is dead. In other words, a person’s faith is proven genuine by a person’s righteous living.
Oswald Chambers wrote, “Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.” That perfectly describes Abraham’s frightening journey into the unknown when the Lord called him to leave the safety of his homeland for some unknown destination. A.W. Tozer put it this way: “You will remember that the Scripture does not say, “Abraham believed the text, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.” It says, “Abraham believed God.” It was not what Abraham believed, it was who Abraham believed that counted.”
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| | Tweet This: “Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.” -Oswald Chambers |
| Yes, it is a relationship that is built in mutual trust that finds acceptance with the Lord. David was a man who had a great trust in God. In his spirit, he knew that God existed, that He was the type of person He represented Himself as, and that He could be trusted in every situation. In Psalm 9 he wrote, “And those who know Your name will put their trust in You, for You, O LORD, have not forsaken those who seek You.” His trust for the Lord came through his experience with the Lord.
The truth is that professing faith without a righteous life to back it up proves that the person really does not believe in God or in what He says. Consider a soldier who tells his commanding officer that he has complete faith in his leadership, yet has a habit of disobeying his orders and acting as if he is not required to answer to him. What would the general think of such a soldier? He would disdain him as a fraud, which is what God must think of those who make empty proclamations of loyalty to Him while maintaining a lifestyle that brings dishonor to Him. James equates such faith with the belief in God which devils possess. Do they believe in the existence of God? Of course, and it makes them shudder in terror because of their rebellion to His authority. Obviously they do not possess saving faith.
The modern professing Christian who attends church on Sunday but whose life does not reflect God’s righteousness is on very dangerous ground. Although he says to God with his mouth, “I believe in You,” the statement coming forth from his lifestyle is: “I really don’t trust You. There is nothing You can say that I feel like I can believe.” Of course, he would never utter such words—but his lack of true, God-inspired righteousness is making that statement nonetheless. How could there be anything but estrangement between two people if one of them had such an attitude toward the other?
One of the great contributions of the Protestant Reformation was that it reclaimed the beautiful truth of justification by faith—that righteousness is imputed and imparted to man not through his own efforts, but as a gift of God. In other words, only righteousness that originates in God can be pleasing to God. But let’s take a moment to consider what it means to have God’s righteousness imputed to us.
In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul wrote, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” What an astounding exchange! When we repented and committed ourselves to obey the Lord, God took our most selfish, shameful and hurtful deeds and attached them to His beloved Son. By doing this, He imputed the righteousness of Christ to us so that when we stand before Him, we will find that the judicial sentence we rightly deserved has been set aside. All of this was done for us simply because we repented of our sinful ways and put our faith in Him. That is pure grace!
However, we must not take the biblical doctrine of imputed righteousness further than it is meant to go. Oswald Chambers wrote, “Imputed righteousness must never be made to mean that God puts the robe of His righteousness over our moral wrong, like a snow-drift over a rubbish-heap; that He pretends we are all right when we are not. The revelation is that ‘Christ is made unto us, righteousness’; it is the distinct impartation of the very life of Jesus on the ground of the Atonement, enabling me to walk in the light as God is in the light, and as long as I remain in the light God sees only the perfections of His Son.” Yes, as John said, “the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.”
God doesn’t impute His righteousness to us just so we can rest in the assurance of our salvation. He does it so He can live it out through us to other people.
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| | Tweet This: God doesn’t impute His righteousness to us just so we can rest in the assurance of our salvation. He does it so He can live it out through us to other people. |
| First and foremost, righteousness refers to obeying the will of God. Jesus tells His followers to make it their life’s great ambition to obey God’s will for their lives. He would not tell His people to crave it if it were not possible to live it. And, just like hunger and thirst are appetites that must be satisfied every day, this is an appetite that should be a consistent part of one’s daily life throughout his lifetime.
Speaking of the spiritual blessings that come from a life of righteousness, Matthew Henry exclaimed: “Give me these or else I die!” How few in our day and age desire God’s righteousness as if their very life depended on it.
For the most part, God gives people what they want. If they have an intense desire to please Him, He is going to satisfy that desire. Scripture repeatedly promises blessings to those who hunger for and actually live a righteous lifestyle. In Psalm 5, David says that the Lord “blesses the righteous man” and surrounds “him with favor,” and in Psalm 34 he wrote that the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and His ears are open to their cry. And in Psalm 11, David says, “For the LORD is righteous, He loves righteousness; the upright will behold His face.” And Solomon claimed in Proverbs 4 that while “the way of the wicked is like darkness… the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn that shines brighter and brighter until the full day.”
Such blessings don’t come to people just because they attend church once a week. No, these blessings are for people who actually live out the righteousness of God in their daily life.
There is arguably no statement about Jesus Christ that more clearly reveals His passion than what the writer of Hebrews said of Him: “You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness above Your companions.” He loves it when people live out His righteousness, and He hates it when they take on a lawless mindset.
This is the heart of God that was and is in Jesus the Messiah, and this is in the heart of every genuine believer who has truly been imputed with His righteousness.
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| | Steve Gallagher is the founder and president of Pure Life Ministries. He has dedicated his life to helping men find freedom from sexual sin and the abundant life in God that comes through deep repentance.
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| Copyright © 2025 by Pure Life Ministries. Permission is granted to use, copy, distribute, or retransmit information or materials on this page, so long as proper acknowledgment is given to Pure Life Ministries as the source of the materials, and no modifications are made to such material.
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| | Oh How I Love Your Law
Resisting the Rise of Lawlessness Episode 4 |
| Psalm 119 can seem like an intimidating collection of 176 verses that all feel like they echo the same theme again and again. But what if, within this expansive masterpiece of ancient poetry was a linchpin for learning to follow God’s will?
This episode:
• Explore the richness of this powerful psalm
• Uncover one of our great spiritual needs
• Learn a prayer strategy for real heart-change |
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