Make Sure You Understand This
These two verses are important for anyone and everyone to understand:
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord;
my soul shall exult in my God,
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
Isaiah 61:10 ESV
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 5:21 ESV
We are clothed in the garments of righteousness. There are many of them. I would imagine a whole closet full because we’re royalty. One of them is the robe or righteousness. To me, a robe sounds like something you’d wear daily – not just on special occasions, right? Cool. It’s daily wear.
Then, Jesus was made to be sin even though he never sinned. Through Jesus’ sacrifice, we become the righteousness of God.
Here’s The Message Version’s version of this:
How? you ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God.
2 Corinthians 5:21 MSG
It’s just Jesus. We can’t earn it. Salvation is not based on our performance, but what Jesus did. We can rest on that. We can meditate on it. We can stop there. We can receive relief there.
Our sin is legally exchanged for Jesus’ righteousness. What’s righteousness? It’s being right. It’s blameless. The definition of it is:
The quality of being morally right or justifiable.
The spiritual realm works in legal terms, so legally we gave Jesus all our sin (past and future) when we accepted his free gift (his sacrifice, his graciousness) and we get his righteousness. God sees as as clean as Jesus. It’s a transaction – a one-time transaction, as legal and financial transactions are. If something happens legally, it’s done once and finished, then there’s a receipt of the transaction. It works the same with salvation. Simple.
And not only are we saved, we’re clothed in it and we become it. Our nature is no longer as a sinner, but as a saint. It’s done. We’re royalty because we’re in God’s family.
Can we still do unrighteous things? Yup. And we will – count on it. Does that void that legal transaction? Nope. Nothing changes except we’re gently nudged by Holy Spirit (who now lives in us) to not cast off our robes of salvation but keep them on. Instead, we’re to take off the unrighteous behavior. Don’t put on something dirty over your nice clothes, basically.
That’s it… if you’re wearing your best clothes, like a suit or expensive dress, would you throw on some rags you find outside? God comes by and asks us to remove the rags. We do and he cleans up any mess they left on us because he’s so gracious.
That’s what grace is – being gracious. Grace is unmerited favor. It’s being favored for something you didn’t earn. Live there. Live in understanding grace. You didn’t do it, Jesus did, and that’s all you need.