have gone astray; we have turned, everyone, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  Isaiah 53:6

Years ago, in the decade of the 70’s, this verse got a hold of my thought process.   So… I wrote music to this verse and sang it along with the verses around it.  Later the melody was transferred to

 The Shepherd’s Song

                          

Oh, I tell you, you’re a young lamb

With thickets in your fleece

You wandered in a different way

Toward grass you thought was green

Now you’ve found you’re all alone,

Stuck out in the freezing cold

But I am telling you my lamb,

I want you for my own.  (chorus)

 

I am the Good Shepherd    

I’ll carry you back in my arms

Even with a broken leg

You’ll be safe from harm.

Soon I’ll place you in my fold

And things will be quite clear

For I have given you my word

And this is what you hear. (chorus)

 

(chorus)

Can’t you see that I love you….Just be my sheep

Eat and drink of the good things that I give

My sheep have not many Masters

But One, One Shepherd

Know me and be my Sheep (KM 1980)

As a young Christian girl, raised in a Christian home, I always felt that iniquity was those terrible ugly sins that cause all kinds of problems down the road of life. But a few years later….my Shepherd was teaching me another lesson…

 

The Ugly Truth about Self Righteousness. 

Maybe this does not pertain to you, but in this season of my life, He definitely was speaking to me. 

 

 The parable: The Wedding Feast &‘The Wedding Garments”.

In Matthew 22:1-13, Jesus was sharing a parable about a King’s feast being given and his servants were told to go and invite people to come, but people were not paying attention.  Then he told them to go out into the main roads and compel them to come, both the good and the bad.  So the crowd showed up and the place was full.  But there was this one guy who got into the feast without the proper wedding garments on.  Well this is where my Lord Shepherd starting conveying to me that there are proper wedding garments to wear to His feast.  I may think that the garment I choose to wear, looks wonderfully made and fits me perfectly……but my garments…(”my self righteousness”)…is not the wedding garment that He has chosen.  So again,  I write, and sing my lesson from the Lord Shepherd.  I’m about 20 years old at the time.

 

Righteousness for My Soul

To a marriage feast, I was invited

But my garments were all spotted and unclean

I knew they would cast me out into utter darkness

Where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth

 

Then Jesus looked past all the filthy rags of my righteousness

‘Neath the hidden walls of pride within my soul

He possessed my every longing and desire

And became the only Righteousness for my soul.

 

Then Jesus, changed my life

Tearing down the walls of pride within my soul

Giving me a new garment, without spot or wrinkle

Then He said, ‘Enter in. I’ve made you whole.”

 

He looked past all the filthy rags of my righteousness

‘Neath the hidden walls of pride within my soul

He possessed my every longing and desire

And became the only righteousness for my soul. (KM-1975)

 

In recent days, 40 some years later, the Lord has brought me to ‘New’ brokenness in my life.  Rejection, grief, loss, anger and fear have hit me time and time again.  I fight against the Pride of the things I know and have learned from the Lord Shepherd.  I value those intimate lessons…..but again He challenges me to not wear them like filthy rag’s ‘pride’…..but to take His intimate personal instructions and lose my life in them.  Adorn myself in His Righteousness, not my own knowledge, attained wisdom which exalts man and can set him up in pride, but to humbly receive Him, Lord Shepherd, Jesus, the Christ the Son of the Living God, the Savior of the world to crown me with His loving-kindness, to redeem my life from destruction (self righteousness) and to wrap His robe of righteousness around me.  It is all about “Knowing Him”. 

I was brought to Isaiah 28 this last week.  I remember singing it as a scripture chorus when I was a child.  But it was a different lesson then what I found in Isaiah this time.  I perceived it as training in my youth….but this time I saw the rest of it and perceived it as a judgment to beware of.

Isaiah 28:9-13

“To whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message?  Those who are weaned from the milk, those taken from the breast?  For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little there a little.” 

“For by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue the LORD will speak to this people, to whom he has said, “This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose”; yet they would not hear.” 

“And the word of the LORD will be to them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little, that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken and snared and taken.”

The repetition reminds me of disciplining ourselves, like a marathon runner or athlete.  Keep doing it over and over again, just like you did it before…get it down….but we fall back into the rut after we have run that race and our life becomes…that rut….that self righteous rut. (I’ve got it down…with a capital ‘I”).

 

I love what Jesus has to say:

John 5:39, 40…. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

 

It’s like learning all the skills to play the piano, but never enjoying why you learned to play the piano…to make music.

 

Matthew 5:20 “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

My self-righteousness will never exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees because mine has the stench of filthy rags.  I’m good with accepting that fact.  It’s an ugly fact..but true. It’s a weight off my shoulders.  I simply choose to do good because I know He loves me and I love Him back….and I like to show Him somehow.  But that goodness is still polluted.

Isaiah 64:6.. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

 

Romans 3:10 as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

 

Don’t get stuck in the Religious Rut of knowledge and pride and self righteousness….you may even know more then me and probably do with ‘degrees’…but what will that matter in a hundred years if you are not intimate with Jesus and have eternal life?

 

All we, like sheep, tend to fall back on our self-righteousness.

 

And this is the name by which he will be called;

   “The LORD is our Righteousness.”  Jer. 23:6b

 

      Know Him and Delight in Him,

          Dress in His Righteousness alone.

                  Katrina Miller…it’s like making music.

     

 

Phillipians 3:8,9 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 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—