Lesson 5 - Righteousness in Christ Alone – Part 1
Read Ephesians 2:1-3 - https://www.bible.com/bible/59/eph.2.esv

Why do we need Christ’s righteousness to walk in His path? One of the most important things the Bible teaches us is that we do not have what it takes to get to God. We can never achieve it on our own. God says in Isaiah 64:6 the best of our righteous deeds are like filthy rags.

Jesus told a story about this in Matthew 22:1-14. A king made a wedding feast for his son and invited many guests. One of those guests apparently refused the wedding garment he was offered. The king had him bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness (one of the terms Jesus used for hell).

In our Ephesians passage for today, we are given another picture of ourselves without this righteousness from God – we were like the walking dead. Can you imagine the rotting smell, the filthy rags that a dead person would have on if they suddenly came out of the grave and walked toward us? That’s how God sees all our efforts to try to reach Him in our own efforts. We were spiritually dead, the prince of the power of darkness kept us blind to what we looked like while we lived in our own strength. We were God’s enemies (Colossians 1:21).

Every one of us must understand that without Christ’s righteousness we could never have come to God. Even now when we are children of God we must consciously put on Christ’s robe of righteousness – as we will see later in this book of Ephesians (4:24 and 6:14). We could not do that before coming to Christ because we were spiritually dead, but we can choose to do so now that we are alive in Him. Look at the reaction of the man in Jesus’ story when the king asked him why he wasn’t wearing suitable wedding garments – he was speechless. He was unable to see that he was not properly dressed – because the dead cannot see. We who are alive in Christ MUST see, we must choose to see ourselves as we really are – James 1:24.

Notice the words used here to describe what our deeds used to be:
*we lived by the passions of our flesh,
*carried out the desires of our body
*carried out the desires of our mind
*were by nature children of wrath

Those don’t sound like things we want to be now that we are children of God, do they? But they can still become the way we run our lives if we don’t choose to put on God’s righteousness each day.

Our next verse begins with two of the most wonderful words in all the Bible – “but God!” Our next lesson will look at that wonderful promise.
*The best efforts we make to get to God without choosing to follow Jesus are like _____
*Before we came to Christ we were spiritually _____
*What must we put on each day?