My Daily Pause

Most people consider themselves good. The question becomes then, “By what standard do I consider myself good or righteous?” Perhaps before I can even settle on a standard, I have to ask myself “What is righteousness?”

Setting the Standard of Righteousness

The opening line of Psalm 4 (Psalm 4:1) will give you the answer. David calls on the “God of his righteousness.” What an excellent acknowledgement of the Father! Unfortunately, when we are not careful, we can place our measuring stick against nearly anything and come up with a way to call ourselves good.

By what measurement do we consider our righteousness?

We attend fund raisers, help the needy, volunteer for the PTA or any list of “good” things in the world. This is usually an effort to tip the scales in balance to the sins we have. When we do this, we are settling on the approval of people rather than God.

The truth is, anything other than God is a poor substitute for goodness. In fact, when God is not the standard, there is no righteousness at all. James 1:17 says that God is the only thing good.

Seek Righteousness Diligently

Jesus promised that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be filled. (Matthew 5:6) This gives us our direction. There is no purpose or meaning in our lives if we are not seeking something – as Christians, that something is righteousness. (Matthew 6:33)

• We find righteousness in the Gospel (Romans 1:16-17)
• We give ourselves to God to be used for righteousness (Romans 6:13)
• Being in his kingdom is all about righteousness (Romans 14:17)

The world is doing a good job in tricking people into believing goodness and righteousness is something far different than what God told us. Our job is to seek his kingdom and righteousness.

Daily Bible reading for August 6

Psalm 4
Judges 16
Jeremiah 32
Mark 1

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance Gal 5:22-23

The underlying Greek word here is agathosune defined as virtue or beneficence

If we really run with the metaphor of the fruit, we might consider goodness to be the skin or the rind. Goodness isn’t something that gets done, Goodness contains all the things we do. Look at Ephesians 5:9 KJV –

For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth

It is difficult to get a gasp of what a “good” person is. The world looks at it as someone that does things that are socially applauded, but that isn’t a very good benchmark. They might even consider a person that does more good things than bad to be ultimately a “good” person.

The reality though, is that God is the only standard of good offered in the Bible. James 1:17 says that everything good is from above. Even Jesus told the rich young man that the only one good is the Father. (Mark 10:18)

This sheds a lot of light on what David sang about in the 23^rd Psalm. When the Lord is our shepherd we know that

… goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…

 ⁵ The goodness of the innocent makes life easier,
but the wicked will be destroyed by their wickedness. – Proverbs 11:5 NCV

The import result of practicing good habits is the momentum we get as a reward. The body gets stronger, the mind gets stronger and the spirit gets stronger. It becomes easier and easier to maintain all three of these parts of ourselves as they improve.

Isn’t this a major teaching point all of the major New Testament players were trying to make? (Galatians 6:7)