How to Have an Abundance of Righteousness
We become righteous before God when we trust Jesus as our Lord and Savior by grace through faith in Him. However, that is just the beginning. We should grow in our relationship with God and our relationships with others, so that we are more and more righteous. Righteousness consists of being fully right with God and fully right with other people. It is not enough just to be saved and be waiting to go to heaven. God's purpose in our salvation is to have a close relationship with us and for us to be like Jesus, who was fully righteous. Then, we will love others like Jesus did, so we will be fully right with them, too. Many Christians do not know how to bring about this abundance of righteousness. Hosea described the process using agricultural terms. (Hosea 10:12) We must plant or sow righteousness in our life to have righteousness. The more we plant the more we will reap. God will make sure in His mercy, we harvest a lot of righteousness. However, to get started we have to break up the fallow or hard ground of our hearts, then plant the seeds, so they will sink in well. That will please God so much that He will rain righteousness down on us in abundance.
So we must start with the soil of our heart. Has it been bearing a lot of righteousness? We should see that we are growing in the Lord and our relationships with others all the time. If not, we need to break up the hardness of our heart by allowing the Spirit to point out our sins and then, confessing them. This will cause us to have soft hearts. Then, we plant the seeds of righteousness by doing all that God tells us in His Word. It is a process of doing everything we learn as we read all of His Word. It is possible, if we are constantly learning and we obey all we learn. Then, we will see the harvest by God's mercy. He will bless our efforts to relate to Him and others according to His will, so that righteousness rains down on us. After a period of time, we are amazed at how much we have grown in righteousness and how much better our life has become because of it. Let's all be diligent to do these things and experience a real abundance of righteousness and the rewards it brings.
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Tomorrow, I intend to read Hosea 11-14.