Righteousness

Righteousness

For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.

2 Corinthians 5:21

One Saturday my son Jordan stopped at a garage sale, where he spotted a distortion pedal for an electric guitar. Because he’d been looking around on eBay long enough to know that distortion pedals are worth a fair amount, he purchased it for four dollars. After returning home and checking it out on eBay, he discovered that the particular model he had purchased was one of the oldest and best ever made. It was worth much more than he’d thought. He put it up for sale on eBay, and the next day (I’m not making this up) he sold it for 350 dollars!

eBay is built on the principle of exchange. You put an item up for sale and wait to see what another person is willing to pay for it. All of us make exchanges every day—one dollar for a bagel and a cup of coffee, several dollars for a gallon of milk, and so on. Most things in our world can be exchanged or traded for a price.

Not righteousness. We can never earn enough money to buy righteousness, nor can we ever do enough good deeds to earn it. But gaining righteousness does involve a trade of sorts. What’s the trade? Our sin. The Life Application Study Bible explains it this way: “In the world, bartering works only when two people exchange goods of relatively equal value. But God offers to trade his righteousness for our sin—something of immeasurable worth for something completely worthless.”^a

The righteousness of Christ, God’s priceless gift to us, comes only through faith in Christ’s death and resurrection.

Father,

Thank you for sending your Son to die for us so that we could be made righteous. We praise you for giving us such an incredible gift when we have done nothing to deserve such kindness. In your Son Jesus’ name, amen.