In this enlightening episode of Hope for Today, we explore the profound concept of righteousness within Christianity. Bible teacher David Hawking invites us into a deep discussion on the attributes of God, focusing on His righteousness, which remains unchanged amidst a morally shifting world. Through the lens of biblical scripture, particularly from the book of Romans, we examine how righteousness is declared rather than made, challenging common misconceptions within religious communities.
Christianity has been infested and infected with a human performance system that not only is affecting how to become a Christian, but definitely has affected all of us and how to live the Christian life. We’re not living on the basis of faith in what Jesus did. We’re living on the basis of our confidence in what we can do for him.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is Hope for Today. Welcome to our Thursday broadcast as we continue our series on the attributes of God. We’re living in a world that celebrates perversion, mocks what is right, and acts as though man can rewrite morality whenever he pleases. But the God of the Bible does not bend. He doesn’t drift. It does not change with the madness of the age. God is righteous, perfectly right, perfectly just, and perfectly pure in all his ways. Well, today, Bible teacher David Hawking begins day one of a message called The Righteousness of God. Stay with us as we go back to the Bible and face a truth that this crooked world cannot escape. First, Matt and I have a request for you, our listening family. And Matt, that request is? Please remember to pray for hope for today.
SPEAKER 02 :
Matt, what does it mean that people are praying for us? Well, it means everything to us. Because this whole ministry is not our ministry. We are not the main characters. It’s all about the Lord, first and foremost. And we are listener-based. I mean, we do not have any corporate sponsorship or anything like that. We are just preaching the Word of God, and that is it.
SPEAKER 01 :
We don’t do anything else. It is our listening family. praying for the ministry and if god directs and leads and provides making a donation as well amen to let us know you’re praying or to give reach out by calling 875 bible that’s in the u.s or 888 75 bible in canada bible is 24253 or just go to david hawking.org that’s david hawking.org and get in touch that way And here’s David with day one of his message, The Righteousness of God.
SPEAKER 03 :
Take your Bibles, please, and turn to Romans chapter 3. Romans chapter 3, beginning at verse 21, our subject, The Righteousness of God. We’re going to talk about exactly how we are blessed by God. Now, there are a lot of folks that want to bless us, you know what I mean? And it may not be what we want. But God has blessed us, according to the Bible, with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. I just like to know that I’ve got all there is to get. How about you? I mean, everybody comes around telling me that I need something else. I’m already happy. I’m already having a good time. Don’t pop my bubble. I’m going home to be with the Lord and having a wonderful time now. I don’t need any of your stuff. Amen? Isn’t it wonderful to know that you’ve got everything you could ever possibly get already in the Lord Jesus Christ? And yet I see a lot of us walk around like we haven’t got anything. We’re so discouraged and defeated. We’ve never really understood what God has said that we already have. We’re talking on the righteousness of God. And I know that sometimes I can overstate the importance of a given message. And sometimes a person may hear a message they like a lot that I may not have thought was too significant and vice versa. But I know from the standpoint of content alone and the problem of our culture that what we’re going to talk about today is extremely important. I believe our culture believes that one is made righteous by what one does. No doubt in my mind that’s what our culture believes. And unfortunately, many who call themselves evangelical Protestant Christians also believe the same. It comes under different names. Sometimes the word discipleship is used that way. We think by what we have done, either in our knowledge of the Word or our ability to pray or witness, or to do acts of mercy and kindness to others, that somehow we’re improving, that we’re getting a little more righteous. You can find it also in our conversation about people who are new to the faith. We speak about us and them. There are people who just have come to know Christ perhaps in the last month who don’t look like the rest of us who have been sitting around here for 30 or 40 years. The truth of the gospel is that you are never more righteous than the day you receive Christ as your Lord and Savior. You never improve on that at all. As a matter of fact, I do not believe that any one of us is made righteous at all in our life here. Now, you may have thought that. That may have given you attitudes of superiority over somebody, or holier than thou, or something else. But let me tell you, you are not any more righteous 30 years later than you are the day that you come to know Jesus Christ. That’s why Christians need to love each other, because we don’t all look and act alike. As a matter of fact, a lot of us look at others and see immediately areas of improvement. Have you noticed that? You can almost feel that. Just think, somebody comes to your mind, oh, if they would only learn. And some wives and some husbands have been working many years on improving their partner, only to discover that very little change takes place. My dear friends, what we’re going to talk about today could really change your life. It really could. If you really got a hold of it and really understood it. Romans 3 kind of captures the argument about the righteousness of God. Romans is a good book on that. There are 91 mentions of the word righteous in the New Testament. 35 of them are in the book of Romans alone. The word faith appears 55 times in this book. The theme of Romans is the righteous live by faith. Martin Luther wrote in his German Bible, faith alone. In Romans 3, 21, it says, But now the righteousness of God, apart from the law, is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God, which is through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace. through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth to be a propitiation, a mercy seat, by application of satisfaction of God’s wrath. God set him to be a propitiation by his blood through faith. to demonstrate His righteousness. Because in His forbearance, His patience with us, God had passed over the sins that were previously committed to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just or righteous and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore, we conclude the man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Let’s look to the Lord in a moment of prayer. Father, we thank you for the wonderful book we call the Bible that reveals who you are and what you have done and what you will do. And I pray, God, that as we examine the that wonderful attribute and work of righteousness, that you will help us to understand our own position before you. We know there are lots of people who call themselves Christians who have never understood the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. And I pray, God, that you would bring clarity, meaning, powerful meaning to our lives as we begin to see what righteousness is all about. We thank you for what you’re going to do in Jesus’ name. Amen. I really have two questions. One, what is the righteousness of God? And two, why is it so important? When you ask me what is the righteousness of God, I can approach it from a grammatical meaning. When we look at the Hebrew word in the Old Testament, zadek, it has to do with straight in opposition to that which is crooked. Right in opposition to that which is wrong. Its grammatical meaning is important. When you come to Greek, dikao in Greek, and its many forms, means to declare righteous. It does not mean to make righteous. What I just said is probably one of the most controversial statements, though you may not have known it. It’s a difference between being Catholic and Protestant. Many of us here come from both backgrounds. But we need to understand something. Righteousness in its grammatical meaning never means to make righteous. But a lot of us have come to believe that. That somehow we are made righteous by what we do. or in Catholic theology, mediated to us perhaps through the sacraments. My friends, we are not made righteous. So let me give you some examples. In Proverbs 17, 15, it says, He who justifies the wicked is an abomination to God. Now, folks, we don’t make the wicked righteous. The meaning of the word is we just declare them to be righteous. Whoever declares a wicked man to be righteous, that is an abomination to God. Let me give you another example. Luke 7 29 says, even the tax collectors justified God. Now I want you to know God doesn’t need to be made righteous by any one of us. What it is saying is they declared him to be righteous because of the gospel that now affected them and they became believers. So they justified God. They didn’t make him righteous, that’s for sure, but they declared him to be righteous in the work of the gospel and thus believed in him. Here’s another example. 1 Timothy 3.16 says, great is the mystery of godliness, referring to Jesus. It says, God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit. Once again, Jesus did not need to be made righteous. What it means is he was declared to be righteous. Now, my friends, when you understand that, and by the way, I’ll say this without any hesitation, I have not found one usage ever of the word righteousness in the New Testament that ever means to make righteous. It is a doctrine that man wants, though, because we want to believe there’s something we can do to either become a Christian or to somehow live the Christian life. But not once in the Bible does it say to make righteous or even mean that. As a matter of fact, it cannot mean that, of which the previous examples are just a few. So we could look at grammatical meaning, but let me give you another one. Turn to Psalm 92.15. When you ask me, what is righteousness? I can approach it from a grammatical meaning, and it does not mean to make righteous. It means to declare righteous. I also look at it in terms of moral understanding. When you ask me, what is righteousness? Psalm 92, 15 would be an example of this. In that verse it says, to declare that the Lord is upright or righteous. He is my rock and there is no unrighteousness in him. From the standpoint of moral understanding, if you say, what does it mean when you say righteousness? It means there’s no moral understanding. unrighteousness. It means that it’s absolutely free from any sin or unrighteousness. If you say to me, David, do you believe that you are declared to be righteous by God? The answer is yes. If you ask me, David, are you righteous? Well, once in a while I leak out glory and do something righteous. But truthfully, no, I am not righteous. I am declared to be righteous by God. Well, that sounds like you think you are perfect. I do. You can touch me afterwards. Does that mean my state? No. It means my standing before God. Are you talking about performance? No, I’m not. I’m talking about my position in Jesus Christ. As a matter of fact, the only righteousness I have is that. I don’t have any other. It’s just Christianity has made me believe the other, not the Bible. Christianity has been infested and infected with a human performance system that not only is affecting how to become a Christian, but definitely has affected all of us in how to live the Christian life. We’re not living on the basis of faith in what Jesus did. We’re living on the basis of our confidence in what we can do for him. Even making such statements as, I want the righteousness of Christ to live through me. Really? Well, wait a minute. You already are all the righteous you will ever be. The moment you come to Christ, you have a position that’s absolutely righteous. In a moral sense, it means you are already free from any sin or unrighteousness. You say, I don’t understand it because I do sin. We know. We all know about each other. But that’s what makes Christianity so wonderful. Let me give you a little insight from a man who died a few years ago, a generation ago. His name was Dr. Alvin J. McLean. He wrote a great book called Romans, the Gospel of God’s Grace. And in discussing the whole issue of the gospel on page 59 of that book, it’s interesting what he said. Turn to Romans 1, 16 and 17 to know why he was saying it. Romans 1, 16 and 17. This is the theme of the whole book of Romans. It says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it, that is the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just or righteous shall live by faith. Now you can see two things there. One, the gospel, it is the power of God unto salvation. That’s what it says. And also, in it, you see the righteousness of God revealed. Dr. McLean wrote these words about those two verses. He said the gospel is the power of God for salvation because in the gospel is a revelation. And that revelation is a manifestation of the righteousness of God. That is the reason the gospel has the power to save a sinner. Man has no righteousness, but God in the gospel has provided a righteousness. And he gives that to men if he will only take it. This fact makes Christianity different from every other religion the world has ever seen. Every great scheme to save men has failed on just one point. Its success depended on man’s righteousness when in reality there is no righteousness in man. Christianity attacks the problem at this point of righteousness. It recognizes that man has no righteousness and then brings the righteousness of God and clothes that man in that righteousness and saves him. Boy, is that ever the truth. You see, from a moral understanding, when we speak of righteousness, it’s absolutely free from any sin. And are we actually saying as believers that we have that kind of a position before God? And the answer is absolutely yes. On the basis of what Jesus Christ has done at the cross, I am absolutely righteous in every sense of the word. Now, in addition to a grammatical meaning or a moral understanding, you can look at the question of what is the righteousness of God from a practical application. Turn to Psalm 145, please, and look at verse 17. A practical application when you ask, what is the righteousness of God? And by this we mean that every act of God is righteous and fair. It’s just and fair. So you say, what’s the righteousness of God? I would say it’s the acts of God that are always just and fair. God never does anything unfair. Psalm 145, 17 says, The Lord is righteous in all His, what? What does it say? His ways, what He does. So here it’s a practical application that God in His righteousness would never do anything that’s not right. In Genesis it says, Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? So when we speak of righteousness, it’s every act of God is definitely righteous and definitely just. Now one last thing, as you begin to examine what is the righteousness of God, not only a grammatical meaning or a moral understanding or even a practical application, what really concerns us is the theological usage of that term. And it really is two things, and I hope you’ll listen carefully. I don’t want these confused in your mind. It’s two things, theologically. One, it refers to who God is. Folks, listen to me. That’s non-transferable. You will never be righteous like God. Ever. It’s non-transferable. The Bible says in 1 John 2, 29, you know that He is righteous. Righteousness is an attribute of God. It’s what He is. It’s non-transferable.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, that’s Bible teacher and author David Hawking, and this is Hope for Today. We’ll bring you day two of this powerful message on the righteousness of God tomorrow. But in a moment, David’s back. He’s going to put the finishing touches on our study time today with some additional teaching. Stay tuned for that. First of all, Matt and I want to tell you about a few resources you might just want to add to your home Bible study library.
SPEAKER 02 :
Matt? In Psalms 86, 8 through 10, we see the majesty of our God. The psalmist states,
SPEAKER 01 :
You’ve got to ask the question, and folks are asking this question, why do we have confidence that the God of the Bible is the only true God? Do we have an accurate understanding of God? What might we be missing? Yeah, good questions. Well, this month we’re featuring The God of the Bible by David Hawking. In this essential and powerful study, David tackles the questions we’ve mentioned and so much more.
SPEAKER 02 :
The God of the Bible is just $20, and it’s a perfect companion resource to our current radio series. Speaking of which…
SPEAKER 01 :
We’re making this radio series, the current series, The Attributes of God, available for $20 on MP3 CD. Everything you’ll hear in this series from start to finish and some extra material we won’t have time to include. 16 audio messages. And, Matt, we take two to three days on radio, as you know, per message. And the MP3 set will save and preserve it all for your encouragement, encouragement, in the years to come.
SPEAKER 02 :
Get the Attributes of God radio series on MP3 and share it with a friend or use it in a Bible study. And again, it’s just $20.
SPEAKER 01 :
For more information on these resources, call or visit our website. Well, Matt, we also want to let folks quickly know about a tremendous resource available this month. This is David’s message outlines and study notes for all 27 of his New Testament teaching series. the message outlines and study notes he used to preach each and every one of the messages that he has taught through the New Testament books. This complete collection is available right now for the special bundle price of just $75. And what a great way they are to follow along with David as he teaches here in the future, or maybe to have your own Bible study. To order, visit davidhawking.org or call us at 800-75-BIBLE in the U.S. If you’re listening in Canada, 888-75-BIBLE. And as this month comes to an end, well, the last day of April, can you believe it? And well, we’re asking you to prayerfully consider standing with Hope for Today with a financial gift. Your support helps keep this broadcast on the air and online and helps us continue sending out the truth of God’s Word to people who need strong, clear, biblical teaching. That’s everybody, isn’t it? It helps us reach listeners through radio, make these resources available, and continue pointing people to the gospel and the Lord through His Word. To send your gift by mail in the United States, write to Hope for Today, Box 3927. Tustin, California, 92781. In Canada, write to Hope for Today, Box 15011, RPO, Seven Oaks, Abbotsford, BC, V2S, 8P1. If you need those addresses again, you’ll find them on our website. You can also make a donation on the website, DavidHawking.org, or call us at 875-BIBLE in the U.S., or 888-75-BIBLE in Canada. And once again, here’s David.
SPEAKER 03 :
David Hawking Our subject of the righteousness of God is such a big one. We have the whole book of Romans. If you say, what’s the theme of Romans? Well, it’s righteousness by faith. And those two words, righteousness and faith, appear multiple times in the book of Romans. The key verse might be Romans 1.17, that the righteous shall live by faith. And then the whole argument. about the righteousness of God is laid out for us. It was the very doctrine and teaching that changed Martin Luther and made him realize that everything he learned as an Augustinian monk was contrary to what the Bible really teaches. The righteousness of God is the righteousness of God. You say, what do you mean by that? I mean that we don’t have any of our own. That’s a false doctrine. It is not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy that he saved us. That’s Titus 3.5. And then when you look at the Bible in the Old Testament declaring about our righteous acts and deeds, it says like in Isaiah 64 that all of our righteousness is like filthy rags in the sight of God. We’re kidding ourselves. According to the New Testament, when I believe in Yeshua, Jesus as my Lord and Savior, His righteousness is imputed or put to my account. I have none of my own. So I stand, my position is in the righteousness of God. It says in Romans 5.1 that we are justified or declared righteous by faith. And this also gives us access into this grace in which we stand. Folks, we’ve got to get this straight. A lot of people believe that their own righteousness is making them acceptable to God. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to the Bible, the only righteousness I have is a declared position based on my faith in what Jesus Christ did when He died for my sins and rose again from the dead. The Bible says he was raised for our justification or our righteousness. We can be declared righteous because the work of our Lord Yeshua was finished and completed at the cross. Many people are trying to establish their own righteousness. It won’t work. God bless you.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, thank you, David. And friend, if you’d like to know more about the work of Jesus Christ on the cross and about the relationship he wants to have with you, if you’re not yet a Christian, as the Bible describes, we’d love to send you David’s booklet, What is Christianity? And a Bible study by mail. absolutely free these resources were prepared to help you understand the gospel and to see what the bible says about salvation what it means to truly know the lord call us at 875 bible to receive these or 888 75 bible in canada well next time it’s day two of the righteousness of god and we’ll see you then right here on hope for today
