I want to spend some time talking about righteousness, or how I will say it “Goodness.”

Not just any old type of Goodness, and not the type of Goodness that is in bondage to external actions, as the Pharisees.

I want to talk about, true goodness, the God type goodness.
The type of goodness evidenced in love. But not just any old type of love, but agape love, True Love(selfless love.)

Jesus came to earth and lived a life that exhibited this type of goodness.

This type of righteousness or “Goodness” is the word DIKAIOSUNE which means “the inner life of the soul when it is how it should be.” In easier terms, of “being a really good person.”

The life of Jesus was a demonstration of the God type goodness.

The Pharisees pinned being a good person by outward actions in adherence to the law.

The Pharisee takes his aim keeping the law, rather than becoming the kind of person whose deeds naturally conform to the law.

In the Discourse on the Hill (sermon on the mount) Jesus is telling us, and teaching us, what it’s like to live from kingdom of God, and have His goodness or “righteousness.”

Now how is it that we have His righteousness? It is because of we have His life, and His righteousness comes from His life.

John 10:10
”I came that they may have life, and have it running out there ears!” (in the original is used the word Abundantely)

Whose life, His life, and where is the life of Jesus? It is caught up in the kingdom of God

That’s the new birth, the birth from above. It is the Life of Jesus deposited into a trusting disciple of Jesus. It is His life, by which we are saved.

Romans 5:10 (NASB)
”10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”

It is the by our Lords blood we are cleansed, reconciled (say I like the use of this other word HARMONIZED-means to form a pleasing relationship) back to God, but it is by His life we achieve salvation.

His Righteousness comes from His life, and His life is the way by which you can make contact with the Kingdom of God, and its transformation power.

2 Peter 1:4 says that we have become partakers of His Divine Nature.

Now we have to come to realize what is the divine nature. Now we know that Divine Nature is evidence of something, and that something is LOVE. True, God type Love, Agape Love.

And you can see that when Paul gives his exposition of Love Is in 1 Corinthians 13, he is describing the same thing as when he writes about the Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5.

Now you see, some people will read these two descriptions of Love and say, now I have to go out and do these things, or I need to try harder to be this person.

But you can clearly see, by what Paul is saying, that it is Love that does these things, and not us, what we are to do is “pursue Love” 1 Corinthians 14:1

Jesus says the same thing to us when He says to us “Seek first the kingdom of God…”

Seek first His kingdom, and what is His kingdom, the Kingdom of God is Love, the very essence of the Kingdom of God is love, and that can be seen by Jesus personally inviting the unlovable and embracing the unlovely.

The only way that way that this life of love can be cultivated in us is if we train.

Instead of trying to live the Christian life (and failing) we ought to be training.

When Jesus was hanging on the cross and He prayed “Father, forgive them because they don’t understand what they are doing.” That wasn’t hard for Him. That prayer flowed out of who He was internally.

When we hunker down and train with Jesus, learning from Him how to be like Him, when we hit the playing field (the world) we won’t have to think about returning good for evil, it’ll just happen. We won’t have to think about how we can be patient, it’ll just happen.

The Lord does not call us to do what He did, but to be as He was, permeated with Love.
Then the doing of what He did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are, in Him.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God, and His kind of Goodness, and all these things will be given to you.”