I received a comment from a friend regarding our positional righteousness in Christ.  I agree with this comment.  He said that once a person is saved, God accepts and deals with a saved person not on the basis of who he is or what he has done but on who Jesus Christ is and what Jesus Christ has done. I agree with this.

To my readers who are not Baptists, I have to explain.  The Bible says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.  So that, no matter how we try to be good, we can never, by our own works, hope to attain salvation.  But, when a sinner acknowledges before God that he is truly a sinner, asks for forgiveness and relies on the atonement secured by the blood and death of Jesus Christ for his salvation, the righteousness of Jesus Christ the sinless one is counted as the righteousness of the sinner.  Thus, all of the sinner’s past, present and future sins are forgiven.  From that point on, God looks at that saved sinner no longer as a sinner deserving of punishment, but a sinner who has been pardoned because the penalty of his sin has been paid for by another, by Jesus Christ, the righteous Son of God.  That is the truth of the propitiation and of the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ.  That is the truth.

The consequence of this is that God no longer judges us as to what sins we have done or what sins we are doing or what sins we shall do. God sees us as clothed with Christ’s righteousness.  This is the confidence of most Bible-believing Baptists when they declare “once saved, saved forever.” Once a child of God, no sin we commit can ever undo or revoke our status as a son of God.  Our salvation does not hinge on our own righteous works but on the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

To assert this is to assert truth, but, not the whole truth.  Our righteousness “in Christ” is eternal, it is unbreakable, no one can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.  But this is only one aspect of salvation.  There is another aspect of salvation: there is the communion aspect of salvation.  Once we are saved, we become accepted in the beloved ( counted as one whom God loves), but it is not only a relationship based on union, or son-ship  but also communion or fellowship.  God becomes our Father, Jesus Christ is our brother and we are joint-heirs with him.  But the relationship is not limited to only being in the family of God.  We are also expected to be in active communion and fellowship with God, the Holy One.

To maintain the active communion with God, we are to be holy as God is holy.  The righteousness of Christ secures our position before God.  But how we live our practical everyday lives, how we choose to seek first God’s kingdom, how we deny self and mortify the deeds of the flesh,, all these are the practical everyday outworking of our secure relationship with God. While no sin can ever revoke our status as sons, even the smallest sin can hinder and break our fellowship with God.

I remember hearing a message from Dr. David Jeremiah.  He recounted how as a teenager, he took his father’s car and while he was driving, he met an accident and the car was wrecked.  He knew he was still his father’s son.  He will always be his father’s son.  But he also knew that he had to go and talk to his father, make things right, ask for forgiveness for having taken the car without permission and having wrecked the car.  Once he did that, he and his Dad were on good terms once more.  He never lost his status as his father’s son, but what was wrecked was his fellowship with his father.

We cannot have God as our father and yet live as though we were children of the devil or subjects of this world.  We have been saved and we have been counted as children,, now we must live and walk worthy of the name of God the father.

If we do not choose to live holy lives after we have been saved, we do not lose our salvation.  Our sonship is secure.  However, what we lose is our communion and fellowship with God when we choose to continue in sin after we have been saved.  We lose our power to become witnesses, we lose the chance to grow and exercise our faith.  We stand to lose our eternal rewards.  This is a part of the truth that most people these days gloss over and ignore.

We preach righteousness in Christ without impressing on people that after we have been saved, God expects us to live in communion and fellowship with Him, and for this, we have to pursue a life of holiness and faith, we have to resist the devil, deny self and have no friendship with the world. We are to walk in the light as He is in the light.

To preach only righteousness in Christ without preaching holiness in the everyday life is teaching truth but not teaching the whole truth.  It is not teaching the whole counsel of God.  The result is that we have people professing salvation and yet their lives are conformed to the world but not conformed to Christ.  It is a sad state of affairs but it is true.  Our pews are filled on Sundays with people who profess to believe in Jesus Christ but refuse to live lives worthy of His name. We have people professing to be sons of God but they live lives independently of God, and away from the will of God.

We have to remembers that our job does not end once a sinner professes salvation.  Our job is to make disciples, that is to say, we cannot stop with simply teaching salvation, we have to teach those who accept salvation of their responsibility to follow Christ and be conformed to the image of Christ. This is the whole truth,