Sermon quotes on Righteousness
Mark Batterson
We fixate on sins of commission far too much. We practice holiness by subtraction-don’t do this, don’t do that, and you’re okay. The problem with that is this: you can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Righteousness is more than doing nothing wrong-it’s doing something right.
If: Trading Your If Only Regrets for God’s What If Possibilities
Paul Chappell
Many people live righteously for selfish or misguided reasons. If you are striving to please God, examine your motives today.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints.”
The Brothers Karamazov
John Grisham
I’m alone and outgunned, scared and inexperienced, but I’m right.
The Rainmaker
R. Kent Hughes
A taste of righteousness can be easily perverted into an overweening sense of self-righteousness and judgmentalism.
C.S. Lewis
Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.
Martin Luther
This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
If every man and woman in the world knew what it was to hunger and thirst after righteousness, there would be no danger of war.
John Piper
The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.
Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist
Henry David Thoreau
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.
J. A. Motyer
Those who are Biblically righteous are “right with God and therefore committed to putting right all other relationships in life.
The Prophecy of Isaiah: An Introduction and Commentary, InterVarsity Press.
Martin Luther
There is a righteousness which Paul calls “the righteousness of faith.” God imputes it to us apart from our works. . . . [Now] though I am a sinner in myself, with regard to the moral law, . . . yet in that righteousness I have no sin, no sting of conscience, no fear of death. I have another righteousness and life above this life, which is Christ the Son of God.
Taken from Timothy Keller, Generous Justice, Penguin Publishing Group.
N.T. Wright
“Righteousness,” within the lawcourt setting-and this is something that no good Lutheran or Reformed theologian ought ever to object to-denotes the status that someone has when the court has found in their favor. Notice, it does not denote, within that all-important lawcourt context, “the moral character they are then assumed to have,” or “the moral behavior they have demonstrated which has earned them the verdict.
Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, IVP Press.
Timothy Keller
When God “credits righteousness”, He is conferring a legal status on someone. He treats them as actually righteous and free from condemnation, even though they are still actually unrighteous in their heart and behavior. They are “justified.”
Galatians For You, The Good Book Company, 2013.
Blaise Pascal
There are only two kinds of people: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
Pensées
Timothy Keller
If you seek righteousness first, you get happiness. If you seek happiness first, you get neither.
Martin Luther
The command to you is not to crawl into a corner or into the desert, but to run out, if that is where you have been, and to offer your hands and your feet and your whole body, and to wager everything you have and can do. What is required is a hunger and thirst for righteousness that can never be curbed or stopped or sated, one that looks for nothing and cares for nothing except the accomplishment and maintenance of the right, despising everything that hinders this end. If you cannot make the world completely pious, then do what you can.
The Sermon on the Mount, trans. Jaroslav Pelikan: in vol. 21 of Luther’s works, Concordia, 1956.
W.R. Smith
The ideas of right and wrong among the Hebrews are forensic ideas; that is, the Hebrew always thinks of the right and the wrong as if they were to be settled before a judge. Righteousness is to the Hebrew not so much a moral quality as a legal status. The word ‘righteous’ (sΩaddiîq) means simply ‘in the right’, and the word ‘wicked’ (ras¥a{) means ‘in the wrong’. ‘I have [Vol 6: Rom, p. 84] sinned this time’, says Pharaoh, ‘Jehovah is in the right (A.V. righteous), and I and my people are in the wrong (A.V. wicked)’, Exod. 9:27. Jehovah is always in the right, for He is not only sovereign but self-consistent. He is the fountain of righteousness … the consistent will of Jehovah is the law of Israel.
The Prophets of Israel (1882), pp. 71f.
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