Free to Be Righteous – The Law of Liberty (12)

Free to Be Righteous

The Law of Liberty (12)

Readers will gain a better perspective on the main teaching of this series by reading The Ground for Christian Ethics, by T. M. Go to www.MyParuchia.com, click Publications, then click Waxed Tablet, and scroll down until you see this little volume.

“And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us.” Deuteronomy 6:25

Our secular age is hardly a strong friend to the righteousness of God. Increasingly, our culture drifts from the moorings of goodness and beauty which tethered previous generations. Practices abominable to God have become institutionalized in the law of the land. Personal morality is determined by pragmatic principles of pleasure and gain, rather than by the unchanging standards of God’s Law.

And yet, even those who promote such an agenda will insist that they are good people and are only doing what they understand to be right, true, and good. They want to be righteous, that is, and to be thought of as such, but they insist on defining righteousness on their own terms. Thus, all goodness and decency are personalized and made purely relativistic, depending only on such things as opportunity, desire, circumstance, and ability. Longing to be righteous, and to be regarded as such, people today are instead slaves to unrighteous lusts, and this is a bondage they have no power to escape and which, over time, they rationalize as no better or worse than other people they know.

But the believer, free in Christ, does not have to invent standards of righteousness to suit his errant and fickle tastes. In the fear and love of God, and the power of God’s Spirit, the believer looks to the Law of God and finds therein liberty from his petty lusts and desires to seek that which is truly good, truly beautiful, and truly righteous. All men want to be thought of as being righteous; only the believer in Christ is actually free to know this according to unchanging standards of goodness and truth.

Our lives become truly meaningful only in the pursuit of righteousness according to the standards of God’s Law, the example of Jesus Christ, and the power of the indwelling Spirit. In this pursuit of righteousness, though others may look askance at our morality–because it condemns their own–we can know that we dwell in the pleasure of God. And in that pleasure, we find full, free, abundant life as we delight in, study, and obey the holy and righteous and good Law of God (Rom. 7:12).

Daily meditation in the Law of God helps us along the path of holiness, righteousness, and goodness (Rom. 7:12). Order your copy of The Law of God, a compilation of the Mosaic Law for contemporary believers, by going to www.MyParuchia.com, point your browser to “Publications,” then click on the drop-down option, “Waxed Tablet Publications.”

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore.

T.M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.