Not our righteousness - March 2-6

You are not going to take possession of their land because of your righteousness or your integrity. Instead, the Lord your God will drive out these nations before you because of their wickedness, in order to fulfill the promise he swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. - Deuteronomy 9:5

Hello and welcome to this week’s blog for our bible reading plan! We’re reading Deuteronomy this month, along with Ephesians starting next week.

So far I’ve been really enjoying Deuteronomy, and this verse at the beginning of the blog really stuck out to me this week. It’s a great picture of our salvation and how we are to look at the grace given to us.

Now this can be difficult for us because often we can see the fruit of His work in our lives. That’s a good thing for us, but the problem is that our sinful, prideful hearts often want to turn His work into something we can claim as our own work. This leads to elevation of ourselves and looking down on others. We can begin to think, “I was good enough/smart enough/holy enough to 

choose God”, and get frustrated when we look at others not making the same choice, or look at others and condemn them as not being capable of salvation.

But we see here in Deuteronomy that God makes it abundantly clear to the Israelites that they have been chosen and saved due to nothing but God’s mercy and desire to remove wickedness. It’s important for them to remember this so that they do not become prideful and turn away from the Lord, it’s important for us to remember for the same reason. We see Paul address this as well in Ephesians 2 which we’ll read next week, reminding us that we are saved by grace through faith, and that saving faith is not something that we somehow conjure up in ourselves, but it is a gift from God to us! This is so that we will not boast in our own works but in the power and mercy of God!

This humility of acknowledging our undeservedness bears wonderful fruit, it builds our faith that God can and will save even some of the very worst of us, it causes thankfulness to come from us, and it brings glory to God as we seen in chapter 10 of Deuteronomy.

The heavens, indeed the highest heavens, belong to the Lord your God, as does the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them—he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today. - Deuteronomy 10:14-15

Brothers and sisters in Christ, be blessed to know that of all the people in the world, God chose you. Not because of any great thing you did or could do, but because of His own will and mercy. It’s not about your performance, it’s about His, and He will finish the good work that He started in you.

Have a great week!