God Sees Christ Before He Sees You

Gift Righteousness: The Heart of the Christian Message

There is a righteousness that God offers through the gospel that comes not from obedience to the law and not from any kind of human accomplishment. It comes only through faith in Christ, given as a gift to all who will receive it. And it gives you a confidence with God that nothing else can.

This is what we call gift righteousness — let me encourage you to write that down. This is the heart and center of the Christian message, and it's what distinguishes the Christian message from every other religious message on earth.

Christ's righteousness given to us as a gift. It is when Christ's record, his resume, gets credited to your account.

Imputed vs. Infused Righteousness

The Apostle Paul calls this, in his letter to the Romans, imputed righteousness. Imputed is a legal term that means something gets credited to you — a status gets conferred upon you.

Follow this carefully, because it is different from you slowly becoming more and more righteous in your thoughts and behavior over a lifetime. That is called infused righteousness, and it is different from imputed righteousness.

• Imputed righteousness is when you are positionally put into Christ so that when God sees you, he counts Christ's righteousness as yours. It happens all at once.
• Infused righteousness is the process of Christ's righteousness and his Spirit slowly infiltrating you over a lifetime until it completely takes you over. It happens over a lifetime.

An Illustration: Baby Yoda in the Water

Here's a way to see it, because I thought this might be confusing. Let this jar of water represent Jesus — the righteousness of Christ. And let's say you are Baby Yoda.

When you put faith in Christ — when you accept him as your Savior — you get put into Christ. That is the language Paul uses in Philippians 3:

I've been found in him.

So now, when God sees you, he actually sees Christ first. He literally cannot see you without first seeing Christ. That is imputed righteousness.

But something else is happening to Baby Yoda while he's in the water. Slowly, the water of Christ's righteousness is seeping into him. This is infused righteousness — the process of Christ's righteousness slowly seeping into you. That is called sanctification, and it is an important part of your spiritual growth, too.

But it is not the same as imputed righteousness. Imputed righteousness is a legal declaration that happens all at once, the moment you put faith in Christ and you get put into Christ.

Why This Distinction Matters

I take pains to explain this because our Catholic friends often confuse the two, which is why so many of them, frankly, lack an assurance of salvation.

They teach that righteousness gets put into us little by little by means of the sacraments — it's infused into us over a lifetime. That literally is the language they use. God's righteousness, they believe, is like a medicine: the more you go to church, the more you go to confession, the more you take the Eucharist, the more righteousness comes into you.

So they're always going to mass or confession, but the problem is they never know if they have enough righteousness inside of them to really say they fully belong to Jesus and are assured of heaven. That's why, when you ask many of them if they're sure they're going to heaven, they'll tell you they don't know — and they assume they'll probably have to finish the righteousness saturation project in purgatory. That's because they confuse infused righteousness with imputed righteousness.

Simultaneously Righteous and a Sinner

In this passage, Paul is talking about that moment where positionally we are put into Christ all at once — where Christ's resume literally becomes mine.

Martin Luther had a great way of expressing this. He said that when you get put into Christ, you are simultaneously righteous and a sinner.

That is, I am fully righteous in God's eyes even while I'm still sinful and dry on the inside. Right now, even before I'm soaked all the way through with Christ's righteousness, when God sees me, he sees Christ first — and he sees Christ's full record as belonging to me.

And like I said, that gives me a confidence in him that nothing else can.