God Hates Your Self-Righteousness Because He Loves You  

Justin RuddyNovember 29, 2011 

Here's a choice excerpt from Tullian Tchividjian's new book: Jesus + Nothing = Everything. The book is a great introduction to the radical nature of the gospel of grace, serving as a tenacious gospel remedy for hearts that lean toward "performancism" (read: all):

In our bones, we know that God hates unrighteous ‘bad’ works; we’re not nearly so convinced that he hates self-righteous ‘good’ works just as much, if not more. In fact, the most dangerous thing that can happen to you is that you become proud of your obedience.

In his excellent book A More Radical Gospel, the late Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde writes: 

Our misdeeds are not the real root of the problem. They are just what the tradition called actual sins. There is a much more serious problem, what the tradition called original sin. It is much more subtle and inevitably hidden from us. The relationship is broken by the presumption of our ethical behavior, our morality, our good deeds, our insistence on doing it ourselves. The relation is broken because these too turn us quite simply against grace. . . . The Almighty God desires simply to be known as the giver of the gift of absolute grace. To this we say 'no.' We say, rather, that we intend to make it on our own, that grace is 'too cheap.' Then the relationship is destroyed just as surely as it was by our immortality.

Our ‘good works’ can become the very thing that gives us so much self-comfort and self-approval, this very thing we find so killingly attractive. Self-righteousness is our attempt to provide our own righteousness apart from his. God hates it because he loves us. And because self-righteousness can lead only to the robbery of freedom (47). 

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