The Righteousness of God • Romans 3:19-28 • Sunday, October 26, 2025

The Gift We Cannot Earn: Understanding God's Righteousness

We live in a world that celebrates achievement. From childhood trophies for soccer and swimming to adult accomplishments in career and community, we accumulate evidence of our worth. Perhaps you have medals tucked away in a drawer, plaques hanging on walls, or certificates gathering dust in the attic. These symbols represent our efforts, our dedication, our success.

But here's an uncomfortable question: What if none of it matters when it comes to what matters most?

The Problem with Human Achievement

The Apostle Paul confronts us with a startling reality in Romans 3: "Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God."

Every mouth stopped. Not boasting. Not explaining. Not justifying ourselves.

This is jarring because we desperately want to believe we can earn our way to righteousness. We want to stand before God and present our resume of good deeds, moral choices, and charitable acts. We want our trophies to count for something eternal.

But Scripture is clear: "For by works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin." The law doesn't save us. It reveals our need for a Savior. It shows us we are failures when measured against God's perfect standard.

Nobody likes hearing they're a failure. Yet when we honestly examine our lives against God's holiness, that's exactly what we discover. We fall short. We miss the mark. We fail to achieve the glory of God through our own efforts.

The Most Misquoted Verse

Romans 3:23 is perhaps the most frequently misquoted verse in Scripture: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

We stop there. We use it to remind people of their sinfulness. But that's only half the sentence. The complete thought continues: "and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus."

This changes everything.

Yes, we have all sinned. Yes, we fall short. But we are justified—made right with God—by grace. Not by achievement. Not by accumulating spiritual trophies. By grace. As a gift.

The Righteousness We Cannot Manufacture

Paul writes that "the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law." The word "manifested" means displayed, made visible, shown in concrete form. God's righteousness took shape in a person: Jesus Christ.

This righteousness wasn't theoretical or abstract. It walked among us, taught, healed, and ultimately went to the cross. The perfection we could never achieve was lived out in human flesh, then offered as a sacrifice for our imperfection.

Throughout the Old Testament, the law and the prophets bore witness to this coming righteousness. Psalm 22 describes crucifixion in vivid detail centuries before it happened. Isaiah 53 paints a portrait of the suffering servant who would bear our sins. The entire Old Testament points forward to the moment when God's righteousness would be fully revealed.

And that righteousness comes to us "through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe."

Clothed in Righteousness

Imagine standing before God on judgment day wearing filthy, tattered clothes—the accumulated stains of every sin, every failure, every falling short. Now imagine someone placing a beautiful, pure white robe over those rags, completely covering them.

This is what happens when we receive Christ's righteousness by faith. We are clothed in His perfection. God sees us through the lens of Jesus' perfect life, sacrificial death, and victorious resurrection. We stand before the throne not in our own inadequate righteousness, but draped in Christ's.

Paul calls Jesus our "propitiation"—a word meaning atonement, the means by which we are made right with God. Jesus is the gift that covers our sin with his blood, received not by our effort but by faith.

Divine Forbearance

Consider this remarkable truth: God could have judged us instantly for every sin. The moment we committed our first transgression, He could have delivered immediate punishment. Every single one of us would be condemned.

But He didn't. He held back. He exercised "divine forbearance," passing over former sins until Jesus came to pay the price for them all. This patience, this withholding of deserved judgment, reveals God's character and His plan to save rather than condemn.

Laying Down Our Trophies

So what do we do with our achievements? What about those medals, those accomplishments, those things we've worked so hard to attain?

There's a powerful image in the hymn "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name":


We lay them down. Not because they're worthless, but because they cannot save us. They cannot make us right with God. They cannot earn us the righteousness we need.

At Jesus' feet, we spread everything we've achieved and acknowledge that He did it all. He lived the perfect life we couldn't live. He died the death we deserved. He rose victorious over sin and death. He offers us his righteousness as a pure gift.

The Only Boasting That Matters

Paul asks, "Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By law of works? No, but by the law of faith."

Our boasting is redirected. We don't boast in ourselves but in Christ. We don't celebrate our achievements as the means of salvation but receive His achievement on our behalf.

This is the gospel: We are justified by faith apart from works of the law. We are covered in Christ's righteousness. We are made right with God not by what we do but by what has been done for us.

Living in This Reality

Understanding this truth transforms how we live. When we grasp that we're clothed in Christ's righteousness, we're freed from the exhausting effort to earn God's approval. We're liberated from the burden of trying to be good enough.

Instead, we live in grateful response to the gift we've received. Our good works flow not from desperation to earn salvation but from joy at having received it.

The righteousness of God, manifested in Christ, received by faith, displayed in lives transformed by grace—this is the hope that anchors us, the truth that sets us free, the gift we could never earn but can freely receive.

(Content generated by PulpitAI from sermon transcript)