“Your belief in God does not define Him; His faith in what he knows to be true about you defines you.” I love that statement because faith never starts with what I believe; faith always starts with what He believes. Take this truth, for example, from 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” That word “become” in verse 21 is in the aorist tense in the original Greek language, and it represents summary past tense action. In other words, something that has been accomplished in “totality.” This is what God believes about you. You became the righteousness of God in Christ. You may not feel very righteous sometimes, and you might not act very righteous sometimes, but the truth is that because you are in Christ, your very identity is God’s righteousness. It’s imperative that you understand that righteousness is not about your performance before God. It is about your identity in Christ and His performance through you. “But by the Fathers doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us, wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption from God.” Do you see it? Jesus became to us righteousness from God. Righteousness is a person, not your personal performance. This should give all of us great hope because even when, especially when we blow it, our failure does not identify the truth about us. God says that I’m in union with the very righteousness of God in the person of Christ who is my life. What that says to me is that for one, my standing of acceptance before the Father can never change because it is as secure as Jesus’s acceptance is; and secondly, I can get up from my failure and start walking in the victory of the righteousness of Christ. Righteousness is not my behaving for Him, but His behaving through me. Even in our darkest moments, we have hope because we know Jesus knows how to get it right in us going forward. Stop trying to become a righteous person and start trusting in the Righteous Person who lives in you to behave Himself. He always does!
