Righteousness or Self Righteousness?

The definition of righteousness:

Righteousness is an attribute of moral purity belonging to God alone (John 17:25 ). It is He alone who is truly righteous. No one in the world is righteous in the eyes of the Lord, that is, except the Christian. We are counted righteous in the eyes of God when we receive Jesus by faith (Phil. 3:9). Our righteousness is based on what Jesus did on the cross. The righteousness that was Christ's is counted to us. We, then, are seen as righteous in the eyes of God. Though we are actually worthy of damnation, we are made righteous (Isaiah 61:10) by Jesus' sacrifice on the cross. As a result, we will spend eternity in the presence of the holy, pure, loving, kind, gentle, and righteous God who is our righteousness.

Righteous - characterized by or proceeding from accepted standards of morality or justice; "the...prayer of a righteous man availeth much"- James 5:16

The Hebrew word for righteousness is tseh'-dek, tzedek, Gesenius's Strong's Concordance:6664—righteous, integrity, equity, justice, straightness. The root of tseh'-dek is tsaw-dak', Gesenius's Strong:6663—upright, just, straight, innocent, true, sincere. It is best understood as the product of upright, moral action in accordance with some form of divine plan.

The Definition of Self Righteousness:

The term "self-righteous" is often considered derogatory particularly because self-righteous individuals are often thought to exhibit hypocrisy, an idea similar to that of the Freudian defense mechanism of reaction formation .

Confident in one's own righteousness, self-assured, smug. The book of Job warns us against self-righteousness, since no man can justify himself to God.

Quotes on character, righteousness and hypocrisy that I like:

• What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street. ~Elbert Hubbard
• History is the chronicle of divorces between creed and deed. ~Louis Fischer
• If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state. ~Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You
• We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach. ~Bertrand Russell
• Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise. ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
• Just remember, there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way. Colonel Potter from MASH
• Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence. ~Author Unknown
• Quality means doing it right when no one is looking. ~Henry Ford
• Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. ~Chinese Proverb

Righteousness and self righteousness are subjects that I have made a real mental investment in lately. Or you could say they have been on my mind! While I weigh my own faults and defects of character to be the heaviest, I am also a keen observer of human behavior. I have observed in the lives of the people closest to me a kind of "budding" of self-righteous hypocrisy; it is the terminal variety. When I say terminal, I mean to say that it kills relationships where they stand with all the boldness and swiftness of a trained soldier. To overlook anything is to look over everything with a smug certainty that you are right and your conduct seems justified out of that self assured righteousness. Say for an example, two parents overlook the acts of a child with out of control behavior and a nasty attitude. What kind of parenting is this! When a child disregards the rules, mouths off to authority and then gets away with it because the parents turn a blind eye? When the parents have been confronted and act strange and aloof from the fact that their child is going in a dangerous direction under their tutelage and they deny any problem and say something to the effect of, "Your Overreacting" etc... What do you do from there? Pride goes before destruction, and these folks have experienced quite a bit in their lives recently. At this point, I can only go to God with my concerns, He is never dismissive. I will not let these people close to my family influence my children toward the same destructive path their family is going. That's my opinion anyway.

God be with me, hopefully he is with you as well.

Take Care,

~Jeremy