shall be righteous, for I the Lord your God am righteous.” By way of ex- trapolation, it is instructive to substitute “righteous” and “righteousness” whenever “holy” and “holiness” occur in Scripture. The “saints” — the holy ones — are righteous because they do what is right in the likeness of God and the Lord Jesus: “If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of him” (1 John 2:29; 3:17). Righteousness, then, is not static or inert or confined to the Trinity. Jesus continues the theme of doing right as stipulated in Leviticus 19 when he commands his disciples emphatically in the Sermon on the Mount to “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33). He understood that they would not be able to do what was impossible in the Old Testament and impossible until the law would be put within them and written on their hearts (Jer. 31:33). Such was the moment that Jesus antici- pated in the life of his disciples, that moment when that law was written on their hearts by the engrafting of the Holy Spirit and they received the very character and power of Jesus to do what was right by treating their fellow Christians and their neighbors (everyone else) as they would be treated, “for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12).
Paul understood and practiced that fundamental understanding: “Let us do good [what is right] to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith” (Gal. 6:10). It must be noted that this char- acter and power of Jesus are engrafted (Rom. 11:17, 23-24), not imputed but implanted (cf. “implanted word,” James 1:21) by the indwelling Holy Spirit (John 14:20, 16:13-15; 1 Pet. 1:11), which made them new creatures, capable of performing righteous deeds of “the divine nature” and charac- ter of Jesus himself (2 Pet. 1:4)! They are like branches of a vine (John 15:1- 5). The vine is righteous and the branches produce righteous deeds! There is, then, only one way to obey the command to seek God’s kingdom and his righteousness. Do what is right and you will not do what is wrong! To do otherwise is sin, according to James: “To the one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin” (4:17). And according to Peter, “It is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing right rather than for doing what is wrong” (3:17), for Jesus bore our sins “so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (2:24). John is in total agree- ment: “Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God” (1 John 3:10). And to all who are in Christ he says, “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. The one who does good is of God; the one who does evil has not seen God” (3 John 11). We learn, then, from the mouth of Jesus and from the apostles’ under- standing, preaching, and practice that doing what is right is the only way to demonstrate that believers belong to God’s Kingdom of Righteousness, the new heavens, and the new earth, “in which righteousness dwells” (Matt. 6:33; 2 Pet. 3:13; 1 John 2:29, 3:7, 10). No calling or achievement or act of obedi- ence is greater than doing what is right. As an act of worship, doing what is right is unsurpassable and irreplaceable. There is no substitute. This alerts us to a “problem” with worship because there is a profound distinction between worship in the Old Testament and the New Testament. For the point of this essay, suffice it to say that in the Old Testament private and public worship were of no value for fulfilling the way recorded in Le- viticus 19. The people did not have the law placed within them and written on their hearts, as Jeremiah points out. That is to say, they did not have the inward and personal power to love God with all their hearts and their
November/December 2023
neighbors as themselves. To that end, worship of any kind was use- less as an aid to righteous behavior or to salvation. In the New Testa- ment, we learn, on the other hand, that believers are themselves now temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19-20). That means that only true believers can actually worship and that they worship by doing what Jesus stipulated in the Sermon on the Mount and what was acknowledged by the apostles! There is no worship apart from the obedience of the faithful, those who “present their bodies a living and holy sacrifice, accept- able to God” (Rom. 12:1) because they have the living presence of the Lord Jesus Christ within them by the engrafted Holy Spirit, who ef- fects union with Christ (John 14:20; cf. 15:4.) Without his presence there is no effective faith, only something believed. “The righteous deed done” is a believer’s only actual, personal act of worship!!! The worshiper no longer bears the name of God “in vain.” He is a good tree “bear[ing] good fruit” and is known by it (Matt. 7:16-17).
What, then, is the purpose of Christian public worship? It is to acquire strength and encourage- ment from other worshipers by remembering the Lord’s suffering and final, end-of-time victory and to fortify ourselves through prayer and the preaching and teaching of the commitment required for belonging to God’s Kingdom of Righteousness, which is the same kind of personal commitment re- quired of all believers, who must prepare to face the (potential) de- mands, difficulties, and persecu- tions promised the Lord’s follow- ers and who must resist to the point of shedding blood in striving against sin without growing weary (Heb. 12:3-4). This signals the need for a dramatic change both in the purpose and content of private and
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