How do you see yourself? Are you doing well or struggling to be good enough? God sees each of us as righteous. That can be hard to get our heads around, especially when we feel insecure. We can feel like we’ve made too many mistakes to possibly be seen as righteous. But our righteousness is nothing to do with us. God takes unrighteous people like us and makes them ‘righteous’. The Bible says: ‘People are counted as righteous, not because of their work, but because of their faith in God who forgives sinners’ (Romans 4:5 NLT). We can’t earn our righteousness. There’s no amount of good works we need to do in order to be righteous. It’s through believing in Jesus. God made His sinless Son to ‘be sin’ and to die for us so that sin was defeated. Now, when God looks at us He doesn’t see a sinner, instead He sees the righteousness of Jesus. When we do something wrong, we can feel guilty about it and that feeling can make us think we’re unrighteous. But Jesus took away all our guilt, along with our sin. When we become Christians, and we’re made righteous through faith, we are a new creation. The Bible says: ‘Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun’ (2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT). And guilt is really just our spirit telling us that we’re doing something that’s at odds with our new life. Because God sees us as righteous, we can approach Him at any time with complete confidence (take a look at Ephesians 3:12). We don’t have to hide from God, because He sees us through Jesus – the One who is completely righteous. 

What Now?

Write out the words ‘God sees me as righteous’ and then look at them every time you’re feeling insecure about who you are.