Approval

Our Lord keeps emphatically stating in his Word that gaining God’s approval flows not from good living but solely from trusting what Jesus achieved by dying for our sins.

To make this point, the apostle Paul lists all his spiritual achievements.

Not only was he born to the right family, he was renowned as a highly qualified and respected theologian and Bible scholar. He followed God’s Word to the letter from childhood; his whole life devoted to serving God.

And yet if challenged as to why he should go to heaven, he regarded all his clean living and sacrificial devotion and prayer and tithing and training and reputation and position among the cream of the religious elite of God’s chosen people, as being so much trash. When he stood before the x-ray eyes of the fearsome Judge of all humanity, he would sooner display his own bodily filth as hold up any of these as reason why Almighty God should accept him. He was resolute in this determination to put all his eggs in one basket and, on that fateful day when his eternal destiny hangs in the balance, ditch all his qualifications and declare,

“Lord God, my one and only hope of your acceptance is that the holy Son of God died for me, the chief of sinners.”

“ . . . I consider them rubbish,” wrote Paul about his every moral achievement, “that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own . . . but that which is through faith in Christ . . .” (Philippians 3: 8-9).

Paul did not want any righteousness that could be called his own.

With more reason than almost anyone on the planet, Paul used to pride himself on his moral achievements.

Then he encountered the terrifying holiness of Jesus and the unattainable beauty of his goodness. Suddenly, in the brilliance of Jesus’ purity, his own attempts at righteousness looked repulsive. Then he discovered that he could be credited with everything that Jesus has done, simply by asking for it in faith.

No wonder Paul wanted credited to his account not the slightest good that he had ever done. To try to be credited with both Jesus’ righteousness and one’s own would be like being given sparklingly pure water and mixing it with one’s own filth.

What separates people spiritually is not how much they have sinned but how much they abandon faith in themselves and cling to Jesus as their Savior. We dare not dissipate our faith by trying to hedge our bets. All our faith must be in Jesus alone. We must avoid putting even a microscopic speck of faith in our own devotion or in the presumption that there are others even more sinful.

Our certain but sole hope of gaining God’s approval is that on the cross Jesus swapped places with us.

2 Corinthians 5:21 says I am the righteousness of God in Christ.

2 Corinthians 5:17 says I am a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.

The end of Romans 8 says that nothing – not even suffering or calamity or persecution – can separate me from the love of God.
Romans 8:18 ‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.’

In 2 Corinthians 4:17, Paul, who was frequently tortured, says my sufferings are light and momentary and are achieving for me an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

Romans 8:35-37 ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.’