At McKinney Church we've been preaching through the book of Romans chunk-by-chunk for the last several weeks. This past week we finally made our way out of the "bad news" of Romans 1:1-3:20 and into the "good news" of the rest of the book, talking about how righteousness for God is different from righteousness from God.
Righteousness for God turns us into performers who hope our good performance will elicit God's applause. The only problem with that idea is that Romans 1-3:20 is true and, as it turns out, we're awful performers.
Righteousness from God turns us from performers to receivers, which is better because it's our only hope.
When you understand that right standing in the eyes of the Judge (righteousness) is a gift, it eliminates your need to perform and eliminates your room to brag. Whoever bragged about what a great gift-receiver they were?
You can't brag as the receiver, you can only boast in the Giver.
We don't have right standing before God because we were good, holy, righteous, moral, upright, or religious. We have righteousness because God gave us an extravagant gift that we receive freely by faith. We can't accept the credit; we can only accept the gift.
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