Following along the Path of Righteousness

True righteousness requires that we open ourselves to Him, that we allow ourselves to be honest and vulnerable with Lord in prayer – coming to Him and presenting our true self --not the self we show others, not even the private self that we ourselves see, but our inmost self, the hidden person of our heart – the self that God sees in order that we might be forgiven and changed. 

Don’t mistake what I am saying. We do not live righteously, and no amount of trying harder will get us there. Yet righteousness is God’s dream for us. It is His call. It seems we have two natural responses. Many of us are overwhelmed by our own sense of unworthiness and failure. We have lost hope that things in our lives will ever be different than they are today. We know becoming righteous is not something that we will ever accomplish, so we have stopped trying. Somehow we have come to believe that trying to become all that God dreams for us to be, is legalistic, goes against grace. We think that because transformation is by grace and not by works, we shouldn’t make any effort to try to become righteous. We reason, if transformation is all a gift of His grace, then we simply need to entrust His work to Him, and in the process, we relieve ourselves of all responsibility to be growing in righteousness.

Psalm 23 says that the Lord guides us in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake –He guides us, but it seems, we must follow, step by step, to walk along the path He shows us.

Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." Luke 9:23

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