Talking About Wanting to be Righteous

Talking about it can be awkward. It sounds backwards. Some of us have experienced religiously abusive, position-hungry people who use "righteousness measurement tools" to arrange their world. They need us to need their religious approval. The word "righteousness" often comes out of their mouths, so it doesn't come out of ours. The problem with this is the cross. The cross of Christ, when it becomes more important in one's life than the opinions of people or the opinion of any one person, especially a self-important, self-appointed religious person, demands a truly righteous life. What is this? Few of us know. And, because it feels weird, we don't have productive conversations about it in the church or as the church. Our men's/women's groups or Bible studies feature personality and Scriptural banter, but little real conversation about the nature of temptation and confession. Confession, in Evangelical circles, usually turns into a type of social performance. As evidence of our mishandling it, we tend to applaud after a particularly moving public confession. How cold this is. Such a confession must be edited, dramatic, and end like a 1/2 television show: neatly packaged. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, except that after all this we haven't talked together about wanting to be righteous; we've talked at each other in ways to reassure each other that we already are. I think this is one of the ways that we as Christians make each other feel so alone sometimes.

I confess that I want to live a righteous life. My attempts at such feel so weak. Even though I'm a pastor with the unbelievable privilege of being able to spend so much time in Scripture and in the things of God, I struggle with how little support we give each other when it comes to this basic response to the cross. The Bible in 1st Corinthians 1:18 says, "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." One of the scariest parts about being a pastor of a Christian church in America in 2011 is that I see how the message of the cross is often foolishness to those of us who say we believe. If we don't start talking about this, how will it change? God wants us to start talking to Him and each other about how to live the cross-inspired, cross-enabled, righteous life His Son died to give us.