"...not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith." (Philippians 3:9b)
There is no "I-did-it-My-Way" version of the Christian faith.
It turns out that the only way to follow Jesus is on his terms, not our own, which also means admitting that we don't bring even our own righteousness to the table. We can only ever borrow Jesus' righteousness, which turns out to be on permanent loan to us as an outright gift from God. As the apostle Paul tells us in this passage which many of us heard this past Sunday, either we trust in the grace God gives us through Jesus, or we don't have anything to hold onto at all--because there's no way we can do enough rule-keeping, point-earning, or commandment-observing to earn a spot on some sort of heavenly roster. Even what we like to think of as our own goodness is on loan from Jesus, who tells us that what is his is ours.
This is a difficult thing to hear if we are the sort of people who like to think we are all-stars and that God is lucky to have us on the team. And, to be quite frank, all too often we are exactly that sort of people: we tend to think we are owed a place in the starting line-up because of our talent, virtue, or devotion, when it turns out that none of our accomplishments came into consideration on God's part. And while Paul believes that this truth is deeply good news, since it means we are home-free simply by trusting that what Jesus freely gives us is enough, this free gift has a price: we can no longer pretend that we are in control or look down on somebody else for not measuring up to our expectations.
There's the rub: if I can convince myself that my standing before God comes down to rewarding my performance or recognizing my accomplishments, then I've got bargaining chips. I've got "leverage" with the divine. And of course, I also have a way to set myself "above" anybody that I don't think is "good enough." If our status in God's sight depends on comparing scores on our Religious Achievement Tests, we will be forever grading each other and trying to elbow each other out of the way to get to the head of the class. But if Paul is right (and I dare say he is), then I don't get to judge you, condemn you, or push you out, because we are all here simply by grace. All of us are borrowing goodness from Jesus. There's no other righteousness around to be found anywhere else anyway.
So that's the trade-off: will we surrender our imagined "right" to judge each other's worthiness (which was never really our "right" to begin with) and discover we have already been given Jesus' own goodness freely, or waste our lives trying to achieve the unachievable while bitterness poisons our relationships with everybody else? This seems like an obvious choice. Paul certainly tells us what he recommends, because he has discovered it was his only hope. After having spent years of his life trying to be "good enough," the apostle finally dared to believe it when Jesus said to him, "I already accept you as you are. My goodness will be yours from now on. You can trust me on that." Christ says the same to us today, too.
How might it change the way we interact with other people if we follow Paul's example and give up pretending we can earn what only God can give? How would we be freed from constantly comparing ourselves to each other and endlessly obsessing over our permanent records? Let's dare to live in that freedom right now.
Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see that your own goodness is sitting in our open hands already, given as a gift from you.
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