Philippians 3:9-11
"and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."

You know?

If I really wanted to, I could manufacture a lifestyle through perfect law-keeping or personal achievements, a self-righteousness, a system of rules and regulations of my own based upon my own idea of what is right and righteous.

I could do that.

I won't. But I could.

Paul himself did it for years: a Pharisee of Pharisees, blameless under the law by external standards, credentials stacked high enough to make anyone impressive. If we're to believe him, he had the pedigree, the discipline, and the rule-keeping down to the letter. If anyone could build a tower of personal achievement and call it "righteous," it was him.

But you know what the truth of the matter is? We all do this in our own little ways. We set ourselves up as a righteous person in our own eyes, we build our own towers of righteousness, founded upon the foundations of things that we deemed to be righteous. And even when we sort of skirt around our own standards, we make excuses for what is really going on. For instance, I can get very angry about something and lash out basically in truth, lose my self-control, but then I can tell myself "I'm just being indignant", that's not really a sin. And then I walk away feeling like I haven't lost my self-righteousness. 

We all build these private little systems. Paul’s was grand and public. But ours are often quieter, more internal, and therefore sneakier. We curate our own "righteous" code; maybe it’s "I’m not as bad as that person," or "I have good intentions." But there's no real security in that kind of righteousness, at any moment we can lose it all in a sudden burst of just being our own bad self.

That’s the precarious fragility of any self-constructed righteousness; it’s always one honest moment away from collapse. A single unguarded moment, a flash of unchecked anger, a selfish impulse, a hidden motive exposed, and the whole thing teeters. The tower doesn’t hold because it’s built on shifting sand: our fluctuating performance, our selective memory, our ability to bend the rules when convenient.

So is it any wonder that Paul sees the futility in all of this religious self-righteousness?

And so, he abandons the project entirely for a higher, better quality: "not having a righteousness of my own…but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith" (3:9).

And so, he discovers there is security in faith alone. He realizes that those fundamentalist systems were created by selfrighteousness architects and curated by men like him who were not capable of securing anything meaningful at all in the end. And worse then that, their systems were in truth angering God. He looks back at those systems; rigorous Pharisee life, the meticulous rule-keeping, the self-assured towers of achievement, and realizes they were engineered by self-righteousness architects like himself. Men who thought they could secure acceptance with God through performance, pedigree, and personal piety. But in truth, they couldn’t bridge the chasm of sin; they couldn’t produce the righteousness God truly requires.

Think of Romans 10:3, where Paul describes his fellow Israelites:

"For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness."

That refusal to submit; clinging to self-made righteousness instead of receiving God’s, this angers Him because it rejects His gracious provision in Christ. It’s like saying to the perfect sacrifice, "No thanks, I’ve got this covered."

Don't you know that that's exactly what we do every time we set up our righteousness as something that can be achieved through our religious activities?

This is what it means to crucify Christ over and over again in a ritualistic manner (Hebrews 6:6, Hebrews 10:26-29). The point isn’t that Christ’s death is literally repeated; Hebrews repeatedly emphasizes it was once for all. Instead, it’s a vivid way of saying that turning away from faith in His sufficient sacrifice is to treat it as inadequate, as if it needs to be done over or improved upon. And I find it very ironic that the fundamentalist religious systems will look down upon the reformation and the reformers, and it's ironic because in their fundamental systems, they are continually reforming the perfect sacrifice of Christ as if to say that it was insufficient. 

When someone, after tasting the truth, turns away or insists on adding their own system to "complete" what Christ already finished, it’s as if they’re publicly shaming the cross all over again, declaring by their own actions: "This isn’t enough; we need more."

That rejection insults the Spirit of grace and counts the blood of the covenant as common. The ones quickest to critique "reformers" like Luther, Calvin, or the broader Protestant movement for supposedly abandoning "true" faith, end up in a strikingly parallel position. They build elaborate structures of ongoing merit, repeated propitiatory acts, or performance-based assurance; whether through sacramental systems that present the sacrifice anew in a way that implies ongoing offering, or through legalistic rule-keeping that subtly adds human effort to divine grace. In doing so, they functionally imply the cross wasn’t fully sufficient on its own.

"Once for all" gets reframed as "once started, now perpetuated by us."

It’s a quiet but profound re-forming of the perfect sacrifice, as if Calvary left something unfinished that our religious machinery must keep alive or reapply repeatedly.

The reformers saw this exact dynamic and cried out against it. "Reform" wasn't rejection of Christ's plan for the church, it was not out of rebellion against Christ's authority, but out of zeal for the gospel’s radical sufficiency. They weren’t inventing something new; they were recovering the biblical insistence that Christ’s death was complete, final, unrepeatable, and fully effective for all who believe. Back to the future really, not reinventing, but reforming what Christ formed. The reformers weren’t revolutionaries tearing down Christ’s church out of spite or invention; they were restorers, pulling back layers of human accretion to recover the original gospel shape. Not reinventing the wheel, but realigning it to roll as Christ designed it from the start.

Every so often, as you spend months and years driving around through bumps and grinds, your wheels get knocked out of alignment. Do you argue with the mechanic who wants to restore alignment that you can't abide by someone messing around with the way things were originally planned? No, of course not. You don’t argue with the mechanic. You hand over the keys, let him get under the car, and trust the process; even if it means things feel "off" for a bit while the adjustments are made. What started out straight; Christ-centered, gospel-grounded, resting fully in His finished work, begins to pull to one side. We veer toward self-reliance, performance, additions to grace, or clinging to traditions that subtly re-form what was meant to stand complete. The ride gets tiring: constant correction needed just to stay on the road, uneven wear on the soul, reduced "fuel efficiency" in joy and peace.

When the Mechanic (the Holy Spirit, working through Scripture, conviction, faithful teachers, or even reformers calling the church back) points out the misalignment and says:

"This needs realignment to the original specs, back to the sufficiency of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice, faith alone, grace alone,"

The temptation is to resist:

"But this is how it’s always been done! Don’t mess with the setup, it’s out tradition, it’s familiar, it’s ‘the way things were originally planned’ in our system."

Yet the original plan wasn’t our accumulated machinery; it was Christ’s perfect work, unrepeatable, fully sufficient. The "original alignment" is the apostolic gospel.

Justification by faith apart from works of the law (Romans 3:28), the cross as finished (John 19:30), no ongoing propitiatory additions needed (Hebrews 10:14). Anything that pulls us away from that, however sincerely built or defended, needs correction, not preservation out of loyalty to the current pull. Arguing with the Mechanic in those moments is like refusing an alignment because "the car has been driving this way for years" or "this is how my model was built."

Sure, it might feel like interference, but the result of refusing is continued drifting, wear and tear, eventual blowouts, or running off the road entirely. The reformers weren’t "messing around"; they were the mechanics God used to restore proper alignment when the ride had veered off road badly. They didn’t invent new specs; they dusted off the Manufacturer’s manual (Scripture) and said, "See? This is how it was meant to run all along."

Where do you sense the "pull" most in your own life right now, the drift that needs realignment?

Time to visit with the Mechanic (The Holy Spirit) in "Spirit and Truth". Time to pull over, hand over the keys fully, and let the Mechanic do His work without resistance or second-guessing.

This was Jesus’ revolutionary answer, "worship in spirit and truth". This means worship must come from the inner person; the heart, the regenerated human spirit empowered by the Holy Spirit. It’s not rote, mechanical, or merely external (like going through motions in a "correct" place). It’s sincere, passionate, whole-hearted engagement. It involves the whole inner being: loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Without the Spirit’s work, it’s just form without power, because only a Spirit-renewed person can offer this kind of authentic, living devotion. No hypocrisy, no self-deception, no hidden agendas or rebranded sin. Honest confession, accurate theology about God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), and response to the gospel’s truth (Christ’s finished work, grace alone, faith alone). "Truth" here isn’t some vague sincerity; it’s conformity to divine reality, not our feelings, traditions, or self-curated ideas of righteousness.

To worship "in spirit and truth" is the only kind of worship the Father seeks and accepts. It’s the antidote to the very things we’ve been discovering as we devote our time to studying God's word. This is what Jesus was inviting the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (and us) into; a deeper, freer, more real relationship with the Father.

He’s seeking exactly that kind of worshiper in you.

Amen.