Righteousness Restores Hope

by Annie Yorty ©2022

As a teenage girl with the weight of the world crushing me, I longed for hope beyond my circumstances. I didn’t yet understand how righteousness restores hope.

My Bible study recently prompted me to delve into the doctrine of righteousness. Before you tune out because I used the word “doctrine,” I want you to know I learned several surprising characteristics of righteousness. You won’t want to miss the connection between God’s righteousness and hope.

Hopeless

When I was sixteen, God met me in my pain and pointed me to faith in Him through Jesus. That day, God covered me in His righteousness, restoring hope to my wounded heart. Since then, I have clung to the promise of eternity spent with God.

Without salvation through Jesus Christ, every individual stands before God condemned because of sin. The result is eternal punishment. Talk about a hopeless situation.

But righteousness conveyed to those who put their faith in Jesus restores hope to the doomed. When God sees Jesus’ righteousness covering us from head to toe, He unconditionally accepts us in the same way He accepts His holy, beloved Son.

For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes—the Jew first and also the Gentile. This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life” (Romans 1:16-17 NLT).

Two Kinds of Righteousness

In the Bible, God mentions two kinds of righteousness—His own and man’s.

God’s Righteousness

In the book of Genesis, we read of a time when God promised Abram that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars. Abram, though old and childless, believed God and a miraculous thing happened.

And Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith (Genesis 15:6 NLT).

In the New Testament, Jesus explains the eternal outcome for the righteous.

“And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46 NLT).

Because Abram trusted God, he received God’s righteousness. As a result, God welcomes him into eternal life in heaven.

Man’s Righteousness

We tend to define righteousness based on what we intrinsically know—human standards. Often, we measure our own good deeds against another person’s deeds to decide if we are righteous or not. Conveniently, we find someone whose actions seem worse than our own to make the comparison. That’s how we fool ourselves into trusting our own definition of righteousness.

But God is not fooled. He sees the wickedness we bury in our hearts. His prophet, Isaiah, laid out the hopeless human state in no uncertain terms.

We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind (Isaiah 64:6 NLT).

In the New Testament, Apostle Paul confirmed Isaiah’s assessment.

As the Scriptures say, “No one is righteous—not even one (Romans 3:10 NLT).

Soon summer will turn to fall. Colorful leaves like Isaiah talked about will crunch beneath our feet and become dirt blowing in the crisp, cool air, reminding us of the fate of those who trust in their own righteous deeds.

Any individual who depends on his own standard of righteousness will one day come before God for judgment. Filthy rags will never measure up to God’s perfection, so the result will be eternal condemnation.

Whose righteousness restores hope?

Which type of righteousness sounds useful and productive, restoring hope to the hopeless?

Maybe you’re like my sixteen-year-old self, slumped at the lowest point of your life and wondering how you can carry on. Look up and perceive God standing next to you. He offers the mantle of Jesus’ righteousness that restores hope.

Or will you continue to wrap yourself in your own filthy rags?

If you have never received righteousness and the hope of eternal life, I encourage you to read Steps to Salvation and receive Jesus’ righteousness to begin a hope-filled relationship with God.

If you already have the covering of God’s righteousness that restores hope, I rejoice with you. I pray you experience the reality of hope for both today and eternal life.

Join the conversation:

How does the God’s righteousness spark hope in you?

I welcome your comments!

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