Four Aspects of Righteousness
Roger Henderson · Feb 2, 2003
Major Bible Themes (2002-03), No. 31
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826225229792

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Anyway, in the chapter, I've kind of delayed it a little bit. The chapter has four sections, hence the idea of four aspects of righteousness. God is righteous, and then it talks about the fact that man, from his Adamic nature, is self-righteous. He wants to place himself, a verse always kind of just really strikes me, you know, we will not have this man over him, the Pharisees are talking, The Jews are talking to the Lord Jesus and they don't want Christ over them. Man does not want, in his Adamic nature, does not want God over him. He wants to do his own thing. So we're going to see about God's righteousness. We're going to see about his righteousness in his being, his very being and his ways. And then we're going to see about this wonderful imputed righteousness that we have. And I kind of changed the fourth one. The fourth one was the imparted, the righteousness imparted by the Spirit.

And really, he covers position and condition. He calls it standing and state, and we're going to cover that quite a bit. But I think that's going to kind of show us the difference between what we have in our position in Christ, secure forever, and then what we have in our condition as we walk by faith in this world. So I kind of changed the fourth bullet, if you will, the fourth topic to position versus condition. It will cover some aspects of the the spirit control life. So that's kind of the four segments today.

Okay, well it's always good, I think as Harry mentioned one time, to start off with definitions. It's always good to kind of get your... As we're talking about righteousness today, Actually, we could spend the whole hour on just studying that word. I mean, it's really some neat things. I tried to just capture a few things, and you're going to have to suffer with my pronunciation some of these. The word in the Greek for righteous is dikeos.

I don't know. I hope I didn't fracture it too bad. The root word is dyke. Okay, well, all right, my pal. Great, okay, dikaios, okay. And from what I can have been able to glean out of – I use Vines dictionary a lot, and I use Weiss's material and others. It signifies just without being prejudiced or partial, and the root word is dyke, or whatever, meaning right or just. And actually, apparently the English spelling at one time was right-wiseness at one time. So it's kind of interesting.

So I kind of looked through and, you know, it's basically righteousness is what is right. And the key to that word is it's God's standard. It's God's standard. In fact, actually one expositor said that God is the objective standard which determines the content and meaning of righteousness. It's his measure.

You know, man wants to get his yardstick out and his weights out. You ever think about the, you know, in the old gold mining days, they had this little balance scale and, you know, they had their weights and they put the weights on one side and they measure your gold on the other side. Well, wouldn't it be neat if you were a gold miner, you bring your own weight? You know, an ounce, it could be your ounce, it could be the Roger ounce, Whatever, you know, I put my house on there.

Well, righteousness or righteousness is according to God's standards, not man's standards. And it's unchanging, unchangeable. Okay, so basically, there can be no other measure, even though in scripture, you know, you can find, in fact, I found a few verses that actually the word righteous was not used. necessarily in terms of God's standard. So there are a few usages of righteousness that are not in Scripture, that are not according, that are not referring to God's righteous standard. So you have to, you know, as you go through Scripture and you look at the Word, in most cases it will be God's standard. Sometimes there are a few cases when it's not.

So there are kind of two aspects that Dr. Schaeffer brings out, that God is righteous in His very being, His very essence, He is righteous. That's one of His attributes. And then also, he's righteous in his dealings, in his ways. So we're going to look at both of those. Both that he's righteous in his very being, in his very essence, and that all his ways are righteous. So let's look at James. Go to James for a second here. James, chapter 1. This is a very familiar verse. Can I get someone to read verse 17 for us? Only one verse.

Okay, good. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variable, and it's neither shadow of truth. Okay, thanks Hal. Okay, so I kind of just copied down the last part, and I copied it from the New American Standard.

So it says, coming down from the Father of Lights with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. And before we get into those two words I haven't read there, you'll notice that it comes down from the Father of Lights. And, you know, the fact that God is light is used a lot in Scripture. In fact, actually, we're going to look at that in 1 John 1, 5, that God is light.

And it kind of speaks of His holiness, His purity, His righteousness. But what's needed in this verse, I think, is, and we're going to see, there's two words that are used, this variation or variableness, and then shifting as shadows. And in those two verses, in those two words, I think we kind of capture the idea of righteousness as being God's standard, not man's standard.

And the Greek word here is pera, perage, and we get our English word parallax from that. I was going to ask, And my family can't answer this. I don't know. Does anyone know, I mean, I know in your science courses, the English word parallax, has anyone studied that and can tell us what parallax is? You don't have to give me a scientific, just gut, what is parallax? What is it? Any, you know, common...

Okay. That's hey, good X. That's excellent. Hey, well, that's OK. Anyone else? I mean, just kind of a change in position. OK, OK, that's that's getting there. OK, you're on. That's great. That's great. Well, I think the I have a picture I want to show you here in just a second. I mean, I'm using my scanner. I've got we got this all in one. Even the pills, they don't get all in one. So there's less than two hundred dollars, you know, copy scan, all this kind of stuff. really using it, so I scanned a bunch of stuff in for this one.

So anyway, I think that, and I haven't done a study a lot on parallax, but I think that astronomy was kind of the place this word was, maybe they used the Greek word, and it's the idea that they were looking at the stars, and they would see motion in the stars, and they'd say, ah, this star moved over there.

Well, they forgot to account for the fact that the Earth turned. So the observer was turning where the star was actually fixed. And that's the usage I've seen a lot from astronomy, where the Earth is turning, so your observation point is turning, but the star is relatively fixed. And they were counting that motion of the Earth turning in the star's motion, and they got miscalculations. So once they took into account the rotation of the Earth, the movement of the Earth, and it's around the Sun, they were able to correct that. So I think that's the original. idea of parallax, maybe a more common one.

And have you ever been driving in your car with your wife or maybe with your kids and you look at your gas gauge and your wife says, it's almost empty. And you'll say, nah, we've got plenty of gas. You've had experience with parallax. That's good. That's really good. OK, so so here in picture A, how much gas do we have in picture A, do you think? Yeah, what what is it like? So half. I think it's OK. Three eights, three eights. OK, how about picture B? Okay, so what's happening here, if I'm sitting over in the passenger seat, I look at that and I say, hmm, it's a half. I'm in the driver's seat and I say it's three-eighths.

So, what I'm trying to get to here is that with God, there is no parallax. No variableness. God does not have parallax. Now, I kind of pondered that. Obviously, man can say that. Man can say, well, you know, I look at God. But God in His very essence, His very nature, there is no such thing as parallax. There is no such thing as variation. It's impossible.

So I thought that was kind of neat. Man likes to say, I know what's going on. He looks at things and he gets one picture, he looks at a different way and gets another picture. For me that was neat. I was telling Crystal, I kind of came across, wow, look at this. That's exciting to me. Roger, you get excited at strange things.

Okay, let's go back to the chart here. But it doesn't stop there. It doesn't stop with the idea that there's no parallax with God. It goes on to talk about this idea of shifting shadow or shadow of turning. And Wiest renders that shadow which is cast by the motion of turning. And in looking at this, It looked like, again, this astronomical kind of thing. A shadow may be cast by one heavenly body on another. And I found an expositor that basically said this.

He tried to compare the variation and the shifting of shadow, the shadow of turning. And he said this, God is alike incapable of change or parallax, and incapable of being changed by the action of others, or the shadow of turning. God is not influenced by man, really. He has set his purpose in place, and he's not influenced. He's unchanging. He's not going to be influenced in what his plans and purposes are. Now, it's not to say all his other attributes aren't in place. His mercy, his love, that's all not in place. But to his very essence, he's unchanging and not affected by external things. I think that's the idea of that shadow of turning. Even though it's not, in looking at it, it's not 100%, but it's, from what I gather, both astronomical kind of things.

All right, so then the verse in 1 John. Let's turn to 1 John. Can I get someone to read the first five verses in 1 John? OK. Thanks, Sue. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled the word of life, for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and therewith, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us, that which we have seen and heard, declare we unto you. that ye also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son, Jesus Christ. And these things rightly unto you, that your joy may be full. This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. So the verse I want to talk about is verse 5, but I think in this passage It's really interesting to see, and this is another one of these things that is just so wonderful about God's Word. There are a set of phrases in there.

We have heard, we have seen. Like in verse 1 it says, what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen. And the tense of the verb there, what we have heard, what we have seen, that there is this perfect tense, which is the idea that This is John writing. They were privileged to hear the Lord Jesus speak. So they heard him, and the tense of this verb is such that they heard him, perfect tense, they heard him in the past, but they're still remembering, up until the present, up until right now, in the time of this writing, they still can hear him speak. And actually, it's rendered, which I think is just really wonderful, we have heard with the present result that it's ringing in our ears.

So it says, what we heard from the beginning, they still hear it, they still can hear it, and we have seen, they can still see it. You know, something that's so, you know, like the tragedy yesterday, quote tragedy. You know, people that saw it in the sky and it burst into, you know, what they saw, I mean, and it's still made in their mind or something, you know, traumatic happens to you. they're saying that we still can see it.

So when it gets down to verse 5, and actually it occurs again in verse 3, what we have seen, what we have heard we proclaim to you. So they're telling them sort of eyewitness accounts, we were with the Lord Jesus, and I'm telling you what I, remember what he said and what I saw. So they're eyewitness accounts. When we get down to verse 5, this is another eyewitness account, because it uses the same perfect tense in the word, what we have heard from him and announced to you. that God is light, as to His very nature is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.

So they're saying that that's something that they had personal experience with. And if you think about the Mount of Transfiguration, they saw that He was light. I mean, right? They fell down. So they had personal experience with that. So to me, that really kind of brought it into focus.

We have heard from Him. and we still can see it, we still can hear it, that God is light. And the idea of light here is, once again, it's as to His nature, we talked about that, His very nature is light, holiness, purity. And in Him is no darkness at all. Darkness in Him does not exist, not even one particle. That's another rendering of that part. Not even one particle of darkness. And we'll see in Scripture there's always this comparison between light and darkness.

God is holy, pure, righteous, and the antithesis of that is darkness. So that's a couple of verses that really speak that he's righteous in his very character and very being. His very essence is righteousness. The next part is God is righteous in his ways. So let's look at Romans chapter 3. And I have another passage of Romans chapter 3 and 21 to 26. I'd like to volunteer for that.

But now a righteousness from God, apart from the law, has been made known to which the law and the prophets testified. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ, to all who believe. and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice because in his forbearance he has left the sins committed beforehand uncommitted. He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Thanks Marilyn. So actually I've only pulled out a couple of parts of that. There's a lot we could look at that verse for. The idea that the righteousness of God has been manifested. And here's another one of these really interesting words in the original language. I'm probably going to get killed here again. Phaneroo, I think is the original word. And it's the idea to make visible. And it has this wonderful idea to remove, you know, if something's in a box or covered up, it's to remove the lid, to make it visible, to expose it, to put it in view.

So this idea is that the righteousness of God has been manifested. And it's been manifested in, as this passage talks about, it says that the law and the prophets bear witness to God's righteousness or testify to his righteousness. That the law and the prophets show us the very righteous standard of God. So the fact that he gave the law, the fact that the prophets came and told about who he was, that they testify to this, they open the lid, they expose it for us to look at of what his righteousness is. And then the second part is that his righteousness was made clear by God letting the sins of earlier times go without, he overlooked them it says, he passed over them without punishment.

And maybe, thinking about that one, that might actually show another aspect of maybe his compassion, his mercy. So there might be more than just that. He wasn't going to judge him before there was, I think that's referring to the fact before the law was given, he wasn't going to judge him. You might say it's unfair if you're driving down the street and there's no speed limit posted and a policeman stops you and says you're going over the speed limit and you say, well, it wasn't posted. So God is so right and so fair that he He passed over that. I think that's what that's referring to.

And there's actually a lot. I mean, this is one of these cases where I could have spent my whole time looking at that passage. But I just wanted to kind of pull out a couple of things. Do you have some other thoughts or observations about that? So what I'm trying to get with this particular chart is to kind of, you know, what is righteousness? according to His standards, that God is righteous in His being, in all His dealings with man. So now we come to the other side of the ledger. Here's what Scripture says about man and how he tries to... And these four verses talk about how man... tries to show that I'm okay. My standard is okay.

And scripture has much to say about the fact of man's own righteousness. In Isaiah 64, it says that for all of us have become like ones, one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like filthy garments. Actually, the idea is like a polluted garment. And the unclean is like defiled, So, if you think about our fallen nature outside of Jesus Christ, there's nothing that we can offer to God that can satisfy His righteous demands. All our deeds are like polluted garments or filthy garments.

And then in Romans 3.10, there is none righteous, not even one. Actually, it's the idea that there's not a righteous person. You cannot go out and find a righteous person. The only righteous person is the God-man.

And then the last couple of verses, we kind of see that not only is man not righteous, but he wants to establish his own rules. This is back to the guy who wants to bring his own weights. He wants to bring his own rules. He wants to establish his own righteousness.

And in doing that, that really impedes them severely, if you will. They didn't subject themselves. The idea of subjecting is to order under. They did not line up under the righteousnesses of God. And there's a passage, I think, that talks about that. It's very familiar.

Just go back in Romans to chapter 1. I'd just like to read a section, Romans chapter 1, the fact that they did not subject themselves or line up under, even though they knew about God. It's verse 21 in Romans 1. It says, for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculation and their and their foolish hearts, and the foolish heart was darkened." So it's not the fact that man doesn't know about God. He does know about God. I think one of the things that... I had an office mate, and I think Hal maybe knows this gentleman, but it's funny, and over the years at work I would talk to him and ask him about...

I invited him to Bible studies, I'd ask him about this and that, and he always was very reticent Never ever in all the years, maybe it was 10, 15 years I knew him, never would Blake wanted to talk. He was very antagonistic about anything about God or the Lord. But then one day, I wrote him a letter. I wrote it to him and I mailed it to him. And he said, you know, Roger... I've probably told this story before, so if you've heard this story, I apologize. He said, you know, if I come to your Bible study, you know what's going to happen? I'm going to be just like you. I'm going to learn about God. I'm going to start dressing like you. I'm going to act like you. All these things. And you know, I don't want that.

I staggered back. And that's good. And he shared, he said, you know, I've had people, he mentioned the people that had witnessed to him in his life. He said, you know, so-and-so brought me to this church and that pastor was talking right to me when he was talking. He went through this long tirade, all these things that people, he said, and I don't want that. And I walked away thinking, he doesn't want that. He knows it.

You know, he knows, he can see that if he looks at God's Word, that it's going to change him, but he doesn't want that. I don't, and that's what, and I think that's the picture we're going to see before the judgment seat of Christ, not judgment seat of Christ, the white throne judgment, where men do not want Him. They do not want Him. They know about Him, they do not want Him. And it's just a hard thing for us to see as believers that maybe look back to when we, before we were believers possibly and think, I really didn't want Him.

So anyway, that just kind of strikes me about man, He doesn't want to subject himself to God's righteousness. In 2 Corinthians 10-12, this is the idea about the weights. What does man want to do? He wants to measure himself by himself. I was thinking about or compare himself with himself.

Imagine in this room we have Broncos fans Raiders fans, I dare say. I mean, we have Tampa Bay fans or whatever it is, right? So, if I say, I compare myself with myself, I'm going to get all the Bronco fans and we're going to say, hey, we're pretty cool. We're rooting for the Broncos. We're on the right side. You guys are Tampa Bay or the Raiders, you know.

In our little clique, we compare ourselves with ourselves. But what does God say about that? They're without understanding or actually He says, they don't have good sense. That's not wise. We compare ourselves with ourselves and measure ourselves by ourselves. We only... God wants us to measure ourselves with His perfect standard. And then what's wonderful is we see we fall short of that. And we see we need a Savior. It's just, you know...

So these four verses, you know, I kind of put down to kind of show that aspect. And those are the ones, most of the ones that he mentioned in the text. Any other thoughts about man's self-righteousness? Do you have a team that you're collecting? Right. That's good. That's very good. Well, that's really good. I think the picture that Hal did with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, after the fall, all those good things that man would do, Well, I'm going to do this good thing. I'm going to do this...

Have you heard people say? I've been... I said it too before I was a believer. I'm a good person. I said that to people. I said, I'm a good person. I don't see how God can not accept that. And I said that. I said, not very smart, but I said, I'm pretty good, is what I said. And I don't see... And God's going to have to accept that. He says, no, I can't accept that. And that's just, you know...

That's a hard one. The good things, quote, man's goodness, human goodness. Because the source is wrong. The source has to be from God. And we're going to come to that in a second. The source of any righteousness that man has as a believer has to come from God. If it comes from us, it can't be righteous.

Okay, so now we've looked at, we've kind of defined what righteousness is. We've looked at the self-righteousness of man, and now we come to basically the imputed righteousness of God. And we're going to look at the facts about that, a couple of verses about the facts of the imputed righteousness, and some of the results. of that, and then some illustrations will be the third one in that.

So some of the facts about that, and some of these verses that I mentioned before, some of these verses we looked at, if I were to look at this one a couple of weeks ago, in 2 Corinthians 5.21, 2 Corinthians 5.21, just a tremendous verse. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. And first to observe here is that what's the source of this righteousness? We might be made, I want to look at that word made just in a second, It's the righteousness of God in him. So that's very important to observe. And many, many verses talk about all that the believer has in our position in Christ are in him. Everything that we have are in him. And that word made is this word that I mentioned last week. It's this ginome.

And it's the idea to come into a new state of being. If you think about before we knew the Lord Jesus, we were an atom, we had one nature, and now we've come into a new state of being that never existed before. We have God's very nature, this new nature, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him, to come into a new state of being, something we never had before.

So that's the... And then the second verse in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. In this verse, can I have someone... I'm kind of curious as another... Does someone read verse 30 in 1 Corinthians chapter 30? It doesn't have a numerical standard, another rendering. Hal?

I read it from the King James. It's a good one. But of him are you and Christ Jesus, who of God is made, once again, liberal and righteous Okay, that's good. So you have, of him, and actually, sort of a literal translation, it's out from him as a source, you're in Christ Jesus. Taking the tense of the verb there and stuff. Out from him as a source, you're in Christ Jesus.

So again, it's our righteousness, the source of our righteousness is God, is Christ. There can be no other source. And then, It talks about these four aspects who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. And today we're kind of focusing on a righteousness, and then next week Hal's going to talk about sanctification. So, the source of our righteousness, of our imputed righteousness, is the Lord Jesus Christ. There can be no other source.

In England, Hal, they call it the authorized version. We had people, I remember, we were fortunate to live in England for five years, and we had people come up to the podium, I'm getting digressing here, to read, and I'm going to read from, you know, the New American Standards, which only a few of us Americans would read from. And then the British would get up and they'd say, I'm reading from the authorized version, You kind of tremble. Well, it's the authorized version.

So anyway. All right. So then the results of imputed righteousness. Actually, we looked at this kind of before. I mentioned like last time, if you look at God's grace and all the wonderful things you have, this is just another little snapshot of that wonderful grace. It says that we're members of his body, we're branches of the true vine. And then there's a series of statements here, which I found, and Dr. Schaefer is always kind of, his language is so, I don't know, it's so great. He says, God the Father loves us as He loves His Son.

In fact, let's look at that just for a second here, just real quick. That's in John 17. That's a pretty incredible statement. How can that be, you say? It's because we're in Him. John 17 and verse 23. It says, I and them, and thou and me, or you and me, that they may be perfected in unity, that the world may know that you did send me and did love them even as you did love me. I'm translating that. I need the updated version of the numeric standard. I still can't read the these and the thous.

So as incredible as it may be, he loves us as he loves his son. And it goes on. God accounts us to be what he accounts his son to be. And that's another incredible statement. He counsels us to be righteous because we're in His Son. And then people worry about acceptance. Even believers are worried about acceptance.

He accepts us as He accepts His Son. We don't have to seek for His acceptance. We don't have to work for His acceptance. When we put our faith and trust in Christ, we are accepted. And that's one of the wonderful, marvelous things of His grace. We are accepted in the Beloved or in the Beloved One.

So, illustrations of his imputed righteousness. He said he spared no expense with the graphics here. Well, actually, the other one is from a couple of weeks ago. See, I'm getting all these points on colorfulness. Content, colorfulness, I get big points on.

Well, actually, the one for Abraham, the story goes along with that. It's a children's series of books we've had, and actually it says, you know, God made Abraham go outside and he said, look at the sky, try to count the stars. Actually, I was going to ask you a question.

You guys all know this, you're good. What did he believe God about when he went out and counted the stars? Do you believe that there are a lot of stars out there? Is that what he believed? Good, good suit. You guys are good. He basically believed God that... What was that? That it looks like he has a gas mask on.

So Abraham believed God that his offspring would be as the number of stars. And God says, count the number of stars in the sky. Can you count them? That's your descendants will be. So based upon that, it says that it was reckoned to him as righteousness or imputed to him as righteousness. It's pretty incredible.

I think we, in our Christian walk, we make the Christian life So difficult when God says, really, I want your faith and trust. That's all I want. Don't try to go beyond that. You think, boy, just by that simple act of saying, yes, God, I know you're able, as incredible as it may seem, you're able to do that. I can't figure it out, but you're able to do that. That simple faith and trust is what was reckoned to him as righteousness. Incredible.

The one about Adam, the one about the garments of skin, I think, and this is Dr. Schaefer again, that was one of his examples, and I think the idea here is it's showing that it required the shedding of blood, the animals had to be sacrificed, not so much that, and I kind of struggled, I mean, when they put the garments on, I didn't think that he was, he's talking about the shedding of blood, I don't think the fact that they wore the garments, that he provided the garments, and it says we're clothed in his righteousness. I don't know. That one I thought about a little bit. And then, of course, in Revelation there about the wedding clothes, the fine linen garments that we have, it talks about that they are called the righteous acts of the saints, the wedding clothes that we'll be wearing, these righteous acts.

So those are some illustrations. I'm sure there's actually a lot more than that. That's just what he had. Okay. So I called Hal yesterday and I said, Hal, I remember this picture. Hal gets these calls all the time. Remember this picture you had many years ago? Had this guy standing on the earth and had this guy up in heaven. Do you have that picture? Electronic form. Yeah, I have it. So here it is.

And if you've been around Holly Hills any amount of time, you know that position and condition is talked about. And I think it's one of those things that is just very, very important. And as you go through scripture, you know, we saw these wonderful verses that talk about being in Christ, in Christ. And then we see a multitude of verses that talk about our walk by faith, abiding in Him, walking in the Spirit. So it's so important to look at those verses and say, is it talking about our position, unchanging position, eternal, unchangeable position in Christ? Really, who we are? Think about this. I like the illustration about when we talk about position or standing.

You can think about a couple of things. You can think about Like a diplomat. If I'm a diplomat to Russia, I represent my position as a diplomat. I represent the United States. Now I may act differently. I may act abominably. I may do things that I shouldn't do that would disgrace my country. But my position is I'm an ambassador for the United States and Russia. Do I act in accordance with that? Do I act as a diplomat would act? Do I bring praise to my country?

Very similar analogy, I think, with Scripture in terms of our position and our condition. Do I act in accordance with that? And our position can change. It's changeable. It changes moment by moment. God doesn't want it to change. He wants our condition, our walk by faith to reflect who we are, just like you'd want a diplomat in Russia to reflect who he is as an American. And he says this operation, this conditional aspect, is to be the same as what Abraham did. It's by faith. He hasn't added any new requirements. He's not saying, here's another hoop to jump through. He's saying it's the same hoop. It's the same as you receive Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him. You receive Him by faith, you're to walk by faith. There's no difference in the walk by faith that are conditional than what we came to know Him as savior.

So what I did here, actually, I found another thing that had been done in the past. And actually, I pulled out some quotes here. But actually, several years ago, Hal had put together a bunch of quotes by a variety of men talking about position and condition, or state and standing. So I thought it'd be valuable just to look through these quickly. And there's actually quite a few more, but I just pulled out the ones that kind of spoke to me.

State refers to the... So state is our condition, right? I'm sorry. I'm getting confused here. Yeah, state, right. State refers to the changing and imperfect condition of our soul from moment to moment. That's what Schaefer says. God's training and development is to the end that believers may be more conformed in his state to what he possesses in the standing from the moment he is saved. That was kind of along with the verse I kind of quoted. As our state comes from the fact that our old nature can never be anything other than the filthy thing that God declares it to be, we must yield to the Lord for daily death with Christ.

And actually the picture, how you got the picture, was that, was the picture something that Barnhouse had done in the past? The idea kind of came, so you just kind of redrew it? Okay, so that was Barnhouse. And then Stanford, Miles Stanford has three here.

Our condition is variable. We're pretty well aware of that. Through exercise of faith, our eternal position, the source, affects our daily condition. We're to focus on Him. And as we do that, our daily condition, just like Abraham, he focused on the fact that God can provide my offspring. That's what he wants.

When our focus comes back to ourselves, we're going to worry about, well, I can't really do this, I'm not worthy, and all the things that might go along with that. Or the opposite side is, I am worthy, I can handle this, You can err both ways. I'm not worthy or I am worthy. Both are an error.

And the last one Stanford has is, Scriptural fact-centered faith in the Lord Jesus as our position before the Father is the one means of experiencing the finished work and the growth of our daily condition. Any questions or additional thoughts? The position and condition is something that answers so many Bible questions, many, many times.

You'll say, well, is the Holy Spirit showing me here something about my position in Christ? My imputed righteousness from Christ? Or is He talking about something that comes in my walk by faith? Is it something He's talking about there? And that will resolve. We seem to have conflicts. God says that you're perfect in Him. At the same time, He tells us to abide in Him. He tells us one place where it's a done deal. The next place, He says, abide in Me. Keep abiding in Me. Continually abide in Me. Hang out with Me. Walk with Me. So He gives us two pieces of information that at first seem to be conflicting. How can He tell you it's already done and complete and then tell you, well, you've got to abide and walk and exercise faith?

So seeing both of those is just so important. Dear Heavenly Father, we just thank You, Lord. We thank You so much that You have provided Your Word, Lord. Thank You that You've given us Your Spirit that helps us to see the truths that are there, Father. Thank You that You want our focus to be on You. As we focus on You and walk by faith, We can live a life that is not our life, but your life. And we thank you for that. In Christ's name, Amen.