When I think of imputed/imparted/practical righteousness, this is what I'm thinking,
Imputed righteousness - Nothing about the man is changed, only that God has declared him to be righteous. This is a judicial decree of innocence.
Imparted Righteousness - The man has been changed from an unrighteous into a righteous being. This is a transformation of one's nature.
Practical Righteousness - The man does what is right as a result of being made righteous. This is the result of said transformation.
Much love!
Glad you’re okay and glad to know you don’t come in that often on the weekend. It will keep me from worrying next time that something happened to you!
I don’t know if a ton of people will be interested in our discussion, but I sure will be!
If it helps you to break down righteousness into 3 separate kinds of righteousness, I guess I say…go for it. I guess I even do a little of that in my own mind because if I force myself to think about it, I guess I would say your “imputed” righteousness would be this to me: God justifies sinners when they admit the truth. Of the two sinners who went to pray, It was the one who admitted the truth about himself that walked away justified.
I can’t really follow or connect to your last two though. Even when I force myself to try I can’t do it. I just come up blank.
I do know the scriptures are good for training in righteousness. And my own experience has been that they have trained me to be able to see right from wrong. But even though my senses have been trained to see right from wrong, it doesn’t make me able to always DO the right. My nature is still there and I am still capable of coming up with a bunch of reasons why I should do the wrong, and even convincing myself I am not doing wrong when I am doing wrong. It can take quite some time before I see I did wrong, gave excuses for why. It’s like when the man came and told David a story and David railed against the man in the story and then was told, YOU are the man in the story. David could clearly see the man in the story was doing wrong, but what he couldn’t see is that HE was the man in the story.
At some point, for me, that morphed into tossing out all excuses and treating myself very roughly. I realized that although God justifies sinners who are truthful, I am very capable of being untruthful and not realizing I’m being untruthful. My heart is that evil. So the two men who went to pray, sometimes I am one and sometimes I am the other one.
That led me to terrible agonies. I worked very hard to be good. But all my trying just seemed to make me worse.
Believe it or not, it took me many years before I gave up one day and said, wait…I just need to return to trusting God for the child He has promised…and I told God I could now clearly see I would remain the way I was unless He did something, unless He made me good.
Soon after, all the bitterness and angers and offendedness and spitefulness and murdering others in my heart and resentfulness seemed to melt away. I can be very forthright and open with others now but without those things. They just aren’t there anymore. It doesn’t stop others from reacting to me with those things and it doesn’t stop others from assuming I am being mean and spiteful, but I can walk without them and stay in love. I trusted God. That’s the only thing I did. I got brutally honest about my heart, stopped trying to fix my own heart, and just went back to trust.