I need an alien...

...righteousness. I've been looking with some student ladies at Mahaney's Living the Cross-centred life and today was on battling our inherent tendency to legalism. Is my faith enough? Am I disciplined enough? Is God pleased with me now? The answers are all in Christ. It's alien to me - because God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, so that in Him I might become the righteousness of God. "Our righteousness consists in Christ's obedience imputed to me because I am unified with Him - I am in Him." (Piper, from Theology Network's latest tabletalk podcast.) Or Bunyan:

"One day as I was passing into the field . . . this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God's right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants [lacks] my righteousness, for that was just before [in front of] him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, "The same yesterday, today and, and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God."

Jesus said to His Father, of those who would believe in Him through the word of the apostles: "...you sent me and loved them even as you loved me." You've failed today? Of course. But will the Father reject the sacrifice of His Son? Will he reject the perfect righteousness of the Son of Man? Will he not delight in Him eternally? Will he not fulfil every promise in Him? Do not be so arrogant as to think that your guilt can get in the way of what Christ has done.