Daily Lenten Devotion for 3/13

“As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.’” – Romans 3:10-11

Here Paul draws a lesson from Psalms 14 and 53: No one is righteous. Pretty depressing words, huh? Here we are thinking we’re doing a darn good job: we’re loving God with worship, prayer, sacraments, singing, and studying scripture, and we’re loving our neighbors by inviting them to worship, serving those in need, giving them a shoulder to lean on, laughing and playing with them. These scriptures must not be talking about us, then. It must be talking about all those terrible heathens who reject our invitation to come to church, those lazy bums who choose homelessness, those people “living in sin.”

Well, it is talking about those people. But it’s talking about us too, we the God-fearing, church-going, law-abiding Christians. In fact, the blanket of unrighteousness is spread across all of humanity – we’re all unrighteous. So we mustn’t think that we are righteous, because the Psalms and the letter to the Romans tells us otherwise.

Gee, thanks Paul. Thanks for putting me down, ignoring all the good things I’ve done. Now I have to accept myself as is – as a broken, unrighteous sinner of a man. What’s the use? Why should I even try to be righteous if I’ll never get there?

John Wesley was often mistaken as someone who believed in works righteousness, that is, that one could attain salvation through good deeds. But J-Dub believed in salvation by faith in the saving power of Jesus Christ, and faith alone. The misunderstanding comes from Wesley’s insistence that anyone with such faith would necessarily perform works of piety (loving God) and works of mercy (loving neighbors).

For those who have faith in Jesus Christ, these works are done out of the motivation that faith provides. So we do good deeds because we are saved, not so that we are saved. We are not righteous, no matter how many sermons we preach, how many hymns we have memorized, how much scripture we can quote, how much money we give away, or how many hours we’ve logged at the soup kitchen. We are decidedly un-righteous, and only Jesus Christ can change that. Pretty humbling, huh?