Righteousness
Matt 5: 1 – 12
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 20 July, 2003

ONE OF the most basic issues throughout the Bible is God’s passion for justice and righteousness. We, God’s children, must show a family resemblance to our Father in our own passions.
  Today there are some great heresies. One of them is  far too common among fundamentalists. It's the idea that our job is to preach the gospel and leave justice and righteousness to someone else. I have heard Christians attacking other Christians for trying to get things done rightly. Sadly, where once it was the Evangelicals and the Catholics who had the great passion for righteousness, after World War I, Evangelicals backed away from the issue. Anyone who wanted to see right done was criticised as a “liberal”.
  Jesus says,

  If you really want it, you will get it.

WHAT RIGHTEOUSNESS IS NOT
  I once heard a woman criticising another person. “He’s so... so... righteous!” she said.
  Isn’t it sad that a word with such a rich meaning is so misunderstood!
  I happened to know the chap she was talking about. He wasn’t righteous: he was self–righteous. That little “self” bit makes all the difference. If you are righteous, you do right things; if you are self–righteous, you have a high opinion of how good you are.

  To give you an example, I knew a young man who thought God must really love him, because he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t swear, and he only had sex with women who were not of his faith.
  He didn’t think much of me because I occasionally drink a glass of wine or beer and I hadn’t done the washing up the night he came.
  This man was seriously self–righteous, yet I couldn't see anything he was doing to change the world for the betterment of all humanity.

  Self–righteousness often goes with a judgmental attitude.

  Its like the saying: God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts... Or, as the old song says,
Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t goin’ there.
  It’s easier to find someone who talks about how good he is than it is to find someone who is producing spiritual fruit in a life of righteousness.

  You’ll notice that I used the masculine gender there. I don’t for a moment believe that men are self–righteous and women never are.
  But men and women often do their self–righteousness in different ways.
  A woman doesn’t often tell you how good she is. She will do things to show you how good she is, she will criticise people who aren’t as good as she is, but she rarely boasts about her righteousness. On the other hand, a man is more inclined to tell stories about his righteousness or get into an argument about his righteousness, but is less subtle about it.
  I knew an elderly lady many years ago who looked down on disgusting, dirty children in the neighbourhood. Not that any of them was all that bad, it was just that her children and grandchildren had to be better than anyone else, because that was how that lady defined herself. She shuddered when neighbourhood children came past the gate.
  In the house, she always sliced her bread extra thin, or ate crispbreads, because she wasn’t a glutton like some people. She wouldn’t use the same washbasin in the bathroom that her husband used, because he had spat in it when he brushed his teeth, and she wasn’t going near anything so unclean. She was a clean woman. That was how she defined herself.
  As you can imagine, her husband spend a lot of time in his mate’s garage where they could have a couple of beers, chat together, listen to the races and spit in the handbasin as much as they liked.

  So there are a lot of ways of being self–righteous, there are a lot of ways of setting yourself up to appear righteous according to your own standards, but the basic fact is still the same — it doesn’t cut any ice with God.

  Paul criticised his fellow Jews of the sect of Pharisee. He said

  You can see that Paul clearly states that the very act of setting yourself up as righteous is an act of rebellion against God, unless you conform to the righteousness which comes from God.

  Righteousness is not self–righteousness.

  And we should say that true righteousness is not boring or unduly restrictive or at all judgmental.
  What is boring or restrictive or judgmental is the straight–jacket people put themselves into to try to become self–righteous. Self–righteous people have to set up a lot of rules for themselves, and they can never move without consulting their inner rule book. It stops them from having a passion for real righteousness.

  When I was younger, I was more self–righteous. The people I worked with didn’t have much time for me because I couldn’t be involved with them. I didn’t drink a beer with them, I didn’t eat meat, I didn’t socialising much with them. So they had no time for me, either. I was bound by my Little Red Rule Book for Good Boys.
  I’m much less rules–bound these days. And I loved a comment on the card they sent me from work after my father died. Someone wrote, “I hope we can be as supportive to you in your hard times as you have been for us in ours.”

  I’m not getting drunk in the pub after work, I’m not smoking behind the Customised section, but I’m free enough to be there when people are having good times or bad. I don’t need to check a rules book every few minutes. It makes all the difference to how people see me.

WHAT RIGHTEOUSNESS IS
  We know what righteousness is not, but do we know what it is?
  If you study the Old Testament, you need to know a few Hebrew words. There’s shalom, the word for peace. There’s hesed, that special love God has for us, a love rooted in God’s covenant with us. There’s mishpot — justice — which comes from the word, shafat, a judge. And there’s tsedekah — righteousness — which is the characteristic of a tsaddik, a righteous person.
  Tsedekah is one of the leading words in the Old Testament. Psalm 1 is a good example:

  The righteous man is defined as someone who keeps away from wicked or wilfully sinful people, who loves God’s word and purposes, and as a consequence will pass safely through the Judgment under the watchful eye of the Lord.

  The prophets thought of justice and righteousness together. Righteousness is never just personal for the prophets. A righteous man does justly. He doesn’t use false weights, he doesn’t oppress, he doesn’t bear false witness, he doesn’t even gain a legal benefit from a poor man if that benefit means the poor man goes hungry or without shelter. In fact, the righteous person, according to the prophets, is someone who makes special provision for the poor, the oppressed, the helpless.
  So the person who says, “I am a good guy. I donate my tithe, I pay my tax, I minimise my drinking, and I help out where I can,” that is not true biblical righteousness. If we are happy to live with unjust dismissal laws, if we are content with the abuse that workers suffer in the workplace, if we let refugees rot in desert Stalags or drown, then our righteousness is not just incomplete, it is defective and falls far short of God’s standard of righteousness.

  When Tyndale was translating the Bible into English, there was no good word for righteousness. So Tyndale invented a word that translated the idea well. It was rihtwisnesse: right–ways–ness. It’s an attitude and a desire which expresses itself in right living and a passion for having things right in yourself and in your world.

ESTABLISHING RIGHTEOUSNESS
  In the 1530s, the Anabaptists began arguing against war. People still don't really listen that hard to what they said, but it is interesting that, in the areas where Anabaptists were really strong, that is, in Germany and France, that was where the greatest opposition to the Iraq expedition came from. Eventually, their passion for righteousness began bearing fruit.

  In the early 1600s, the Baptists pleaded for total liberty of conscience for all varieties of Christians, for Jews, for Atheists and for Muslims. Gradually, that idea has been taking hold, and most Western societies have some kind of idea of liberty of conscience.

  In the 1640s, the Quakers decided to oppose slavery. Over a hundred years later, an evangelist named John Wesley took up the Quaker idea and it quickly spread among Methodists. An upper class evangelical Anglican, William Wilberforce,  caught the idea from Wesley and pushed it for about 40 years until the British Parliament decided to pass a Bill condemning slavery. Those who hunger and thrist for righteousness eventually get it.

  In the early 19th Century, Evangelicals and Utilitarians banded together to fight against sati in India and to reform welfare in England.

  Father Damien went to live among lepers in Tahiti, to minister to their souls and bodies and to bring a better life to them, even when that meant confronting the powers of this world.

  Later the same century, people like George Müller and Dr Barnardo — both keen Christians — led child welfare into new directions.

  These were all people who stood for personal righteousness and social righteousness. They didn’t make a distinction. A righteous person, through faith in Christ, in a righteous world through the application of justice and love.

GOD’S CALL TODAY
  The Lord is still seeking people who will serve him in personal righteousness while pursuing goals of social righteousness. God wants everything to be made right. Jesus pronounces God’s blessing for those who pursue righteousness in all its forms:

  God is looking for a passion, for a hunger and a thirst for everything to be right. It is not a call to think that rightness is a good goal, or to believe that the world would be a better place if there were more righteousness. Even major criminals generally think that; but they lack a passion, a drive, to go after righteousness whatever the cost.
  I knew a man once who had a well–developed sense of justice and injustice. He knew very well when he was being ripped off. He understood the consequences of a world where unrighteousness prevailed. But it didn’t stop him from being a thief! I walked around the block with him one evening, and his eyes were everywhere: a gardening tool in a front yard, a garden full of blossoming flowers, someone's spare bike wheel... he took his pick. “They are stupid to leave them out!” he said, and helped himself.

  You can develop a passion, a hunger for righteousness.

  The first step is,
Begin realising your own unrighteousness. Instead of hiding it, tell the Lord about it. Receive cleansing and forgiveness through the blood of Christ. Then you will have righteousness of your own, not through a rules book, but through the indwelling power of Christ, by his Holy Spirit.

  When you are not so afraid of being exposed,
Think about the people hurt by unrighteousness. Maybe there are some people you need to square things up with yourself, people you’ve hurt, whom you need to apologise to and help sort out the damage.

  Next,
Get informed: read the news, ask questions, begin to see where injustice prevails, where unrighteousness has gained the upper hand

  Fourth,
Pray for your desire for righteousness to grow and be directed. If you look at the whole world for too long, and see the enormity of the task, you will easily be discouraged. But if you look at the bit God has specially planned for you to begin tackling, you will see possibilities, and want to grab them.

  Finally,
Start doing what you can where you are, and depend on God to enlarge your vision and your passion and your compassion.

  May he bless you in all you do for him, AMEN