Me Being Me (pt. 3)

Maybe you should read this slowly or something because you might get a little dizzy.            

So back to this idea of righteousness.  I decided to look up the word in the Greek and it told me that the word meant…drum roll…righteousness.  Awesome.  Then I decided to look up righteousness in my Webster’s dictionary.  Now I don’t know if it is because my Webster’s is really old or just lame, but the word righteousness could not be found in my dictionary, buuuut it did include, “right.”  The word right is defined as, “Proper and fitting, properly adjusted, disposed, or placed; orderly; sound in body or mind.”  This started to make sense. 

See in Romans chapter 6 Paul says, “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.  What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of?”  Things that I am ashamed of.  These tend to be things that I wish I would never have done.  Things that seem to be out of character.  These are things that I do and then find myself saying, “You shouldn’t have done that, that’s not like you.” 

Then in chapter 7 Paul goes on this somewhat confusing rant about the things he does and things he wishes he would do instead.  It’s almost like we’ve walked in on this conversation he is having with himself.  After it’s all over though Paul says something really interesting.  In verse 22 of chapter 7 Paul says, “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law.”  This is interesting to me because there is this well-known Psalm, Psalm 139, and in verse 13 David says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”  It’s this intimate picture of God creating someone before they were born, knitting together the deepest parts of what it means to be a human being.

So maybe righteousness has something to with all of this.  Maybe following Jesus, becoming a slave to righteousness, is reconnecting with something that was created even before I was born.  Maybe it’s being the kind of person that God has always intended me to be.  I wonder if it’s not necessarily about following some list of rules, but instead what if righteousness, what if putting my faith in Jesus is me being…me for the first time?

To be continued...