In high school there was a beautiful, intelligent, kind, confident, and honourable woman that always made me secretly feel unworthy, because she was far more righteous than me and even though I tried to be righteous, I failed miserably.
One day I dreamed she came up to me and asked me if I was still trying to establish my own righteousness and I responded that it did not work, and than God revealed to me that I was a grain of dust and I should rely on God’s help to become righteous, and not try to be righteous on my own.
Many Christians try to train themselves and their romantic partners and sometimes their children to be righteous with admonishment and pressure, but righteousness cannot be trained through habit because the rules of moral behaviour change when the circumstances change.
What the I get from studying the Jewish bible is that God makes you righteous when you embrace His love, do His kindness, and accept His guidelines, because obedience to God is like a martial art skill, it becomes better, more sophisticated and more natural with experience and attempted obedience.
As you do what you can to serve God by being kind to others, God increases your ability to serve and obey Him and God makes you increasingly more righteous, rather than you making yourself righteous through disciplined self monitoring etc…
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