All in Favor

Because of what Christ did on the cross, we can expect God’s best

All believers want to experience God’s unmerited favor. We all want to enjoy God’s best and richest blessings. We want His provision, health and power flowing mightily in our lives. All these blessings are wrapped up in God’s grace. When His unmerited favor is on our side, nothing can stand against us. But if we can’t earn or deserve it, how can we be confident that we have His unmerited favor?

Our righteousness in Christ is our right to God’s unmerited favor. At Golgotha, the sinless Man became sin so that we could become the righteousness of God in Him. We can ask God for big things because we’ve been made the righteousness of God through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

Many believers associate righteousness with a list of things they have to do. If they fulfill this list, they feel “righteous”; when they fail in terms of their actions or behavior, they feel “unrighteous.” This is the wrong understanding of righteousness.

The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For He [God] made Him [Jesus Christ] who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (NKJV). We aren’t righteous because we do right. We became righteous because of what Jesus did for us at the cross. Christianity isn’t about doing right to become righteous. It’s all about believing right in Jesus to become righteous. Attempting to be justified by good works and trying to keep the Ten Commandments to become righteous is to negate the cross of Christ. It’s as good as saying: “The cross is not enough to justify me. I need to depend on my good works to make myself clean and righteous before God.”

The grace of God is the unearned, undeserved and unmerited favor of God. When God answers you in your most undeserving moment, that is grace. That is His amazing, unmerited favor. At our lowest point, our darkest hour, His light shines through for us and we become a recipient of His unmerited favor. In and of ourselves, we don’t deserve anything good. But because we are in Christ and in His righteousness, God will not withhold any blessing from our lives today. Our part isn’t to struggle in our own works and be independent from God, but to focus on receiving all that we need from Him.

I believe the more righteousness-conscious we are, the more of God’s unmerited favor we will experience. When the voice of disqualification comes to remind us of all the areas we’ve fallen short in, that’s the time to turn to Jesus and hear His voice, which qualifies us. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, we can expect good things to happen to us. We can ask God for big things and reach out to the blessed destiny that He has for us and our family members. His righteousness is our right to God’s unmerited favor.