Identifying With the Righteousness of God

UV 3349/10000 Identifying With Christ
21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

2 Corinthians 5 v 21


Christ’s identification with our sin was total and absolute.
He also bore the consequences of such identification in a complete way. He paid the full price for our prize of eternal life. Yet our identification with Christ’s righteousness is incomplete, partial, unfulfilled. We need to exchange our sinfulness for His righteousness by increasingly identifying with Christ. His mind has to be our mind. His thoughts, our thoughts, His desires, our desires, His feelings of compassion, ours. Christ has imputed to us His righteousness but in real terms, too in time and space, we while we live in this world have to be saturated with His righteousness and reflect it in our daily walk.

We will not identify with the righteous character of Jesus unless we empathise and feel the pain and sorrow He underwent on the cross and in the lead up to the cross. We need to feel His pain as if it were His own even as He feels our joy and pain as if it is His own. Instead, believers world wide are taking the pain of Jesus for granted. It is seen in our lack of identification with His righteousness. Identification with His righteousness implies that we take on the character of Christ, His attitudes and qualities of head, heart and speech.

Just as Christ is the visible image of the invisible God, the Father, we are to be the visible image of the unseen Christ on earth. This is doubtless a high calling for sinful people like us and we cannot do it except by the grace of Christ and the enablement of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit enables us to produce the fruit of the spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self control which taken together is the righteousness of God and of Christ.