God may say to every self-righteous man, as he did in the case of Sodom, “Show me ten; yea, one perfect good action, and for the sake of it I will not destroy.” (Thomas Adam, Private Thoughts on Religion)
“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
As human beings try to hide their hearts from others and themselves they reflect so little on the smallness of their own righteousness. In all actuality, however, when a person looks in his own heart in truth as illumined by the Spirit, he will not find any righteousness at all. While Scripture speaks (Mat 5:3) of the blessed man as being one is utterly impoverished of spirit, that is, has no righteousness of his own and no way to obtain any either, human beings constantly want to find something good about themselves. So on the one hand Scripture says we are blessed if we are poor (utterly impoverished regarding righteousness) in spirit and yet that blessedness is seen in having Christ alone as our righteousness. Oh how the Reformation made justification by faith alone a common doctrine of the brain, but how hard it is for human beings to be brought to the point of believing that and living like it from the depths of their souls.
The heart that is filled with self-love and self-sufficiency does not want to hear that it has never fulfilled one command of God by love and it has never obeyed His law to its stringent and spiritual demands. O how the heart of man, and perhaps especially the religious folks, rebels and fights against the law being applied to the depths of the soul and stripping it of all righteousness and all good works. O how the heart does not want to be left naked with nothing but filth and wickedness to cover it before the searchlight of the Word of God. Nevertheless, Adam is right. If God did make the offer to human beings that if they could come up with one good work that had no sin in it, He would not find one person that could honestly make that claim if that person knew his or her heart.
Romans 3:12 may be read a fair amount, but it is not truly believed. The piercing words can be passed over by the eyes or go in one ear and out the other, but this passage of Scripture is utterly devastating to all who will take a few moments to pray for the Spirit to give them understanding. “ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.” Humanity as a whole and each individual have become useless or worthless. They do nothing good, not even one of them. If not one human being does good, then that means that I have never done one thing good. A person that is dead in sin has no ability to comply with the law of God and cannot do one thing to please God in any way. A person that is dead in sin with an unbelieving heart cannot please God in anything he does because it takes faith to please God.
The heart that has arrived at the startling realization that it has no righteousness to claim for its own and nothing to point to but sin, is a heart that has started to realize the utter necessity of divine grace. The Divine Potter does not start with a few good deeds of ours and then work to make us better, but instead He starts with clay and forms it as He pleases to the glory of His own name and grace. While God will never make that offer that Adam spoke of above, perhaps it would be good to use that approach in evangelism. After all, until a person is broken from all hope in self how will s/he rest in grace alone? We are so easily satisfied in our day with professions of faith and knowledge in the head of grace. Until a person knows his sin and knows in the depths of his heart that he has no righteousness at all (none, zero, zip, nada), that person does not truly understand the glory of the grace of God in the Gospel of Christ alone.
God Loves... Himself 
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