God’s Word for You
Philippians 1:11 Righteousness through Jesus
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, February 15, 2026
11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.
The only opportunity of man to enter into heaven and to avoid the punishment of hell (for there are no other options) is through the grace of God. Man cannot earn heaven, cannot deserve heaven, cannot be worthy of heaven, and cannot enter in by stealth, trick, or accident. He can only be brought in by God by his grace on account of the merits of Jesus Christ and no one else. Since the fall into sin, man cannot achieve righteousness through any natural perfection, and on account of his sinfulness, both inherited and committed, he cannot achieve any voluntary perfection. Free choice and free will only drag man through the mire of sin; human reason is flawed and mutilated by sin. Only Christ can give what God demands, and what God demands, Christ freely gives. This is “the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.”
Consider the words of James: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17). What gift could possibly be a more good and perfect gift than perfect holiness and righteousness? So, even as faith is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8), so is love (Ephesians 2:17), so is the spiritual growth of sanctification, since apart from Christ we can do no good thing (John 15:5).
Consider what is meant by a “good work.” Any good work can only be an action in man that pleases God, recalling that before the fall all things were good and declared to be so through the judgment of God (Genesis 1:31). Since our thoughts are acts in this sense that can be sinful in God’s sight (Isaiah 59:7; Psalm 66:18), we also are grateful to be told that such internal works as thoughts can also be seen as good and righteous in God’s sight, cleansed by the blood of Christ every bit as much as our words and external actions. We see this, for example, in Galatians 5:22 (“the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness…”) where most of the things described are emotions and thoughts—good works of the heart and mind, made possible as a gift of God. All of these fruits of sanctification are good works which have come through faith.
How Christians have agonized over the path to righteousness which is justification! How many have been deceived into thinking that righteousness must come from inside of the person, rather than coming from the outside. One day Martin Luther described how he came to understand the truth. We sometimes refer to this as his “tower experience,” since it took place in a tower of the Black Cloister where he had been a monk, in a heated room or cell in the tower of the monastery. He said:
“The words ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness of God’ struck my conscience like lightning. When I heard them I was exceedingly terrified. If God is righteous, I thought, he must punish. But when by God’s grace I pondered, in the tower and heated room of this building, over the words, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live’ (Romans 1:17) and ‘the righteousness of God’ (Romans 3:21), I soon came to the conclusion that if we, as righteous men, ought to live from faith and if the righteousness of God contributes to the salvation of all who believe, then salvation won’t be our merit but God’s mercy. My spirit was thereby cheered. For it’s by the righteousness of God that we’re justified and saved through Christ. These words (which had before terrified me) now became more pleasing to me. The Holy Spirit unveiled the Scriptures for me in this tower.”
And in the verse before us, we have a ringing bell that confirms all of this. How can “the righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ” be credited to anyone but Christ? This should be so simple that even the most wicked sceptic could see it, and yet more than half the world is blind to it. And more than this, how can righteousness in any Christian (such as me) be “to the glory and praise of God” if it weren’t all God’s doing, from first to last? For it is not my friends who credit my faith to me as righteousness, nor is it any human judge, but it is God who credits man’s faith as righteousness (Genesis 15:6). Man’s faith is a gift, as Paul says in Ephesians 2:8, and this faith with stand for him forever. As Peter says in his second epistle, the faith of each Christian places each one of us in equal standing (“as precious as ours”) in the righteousness of Christ (2 Peter 1:1). We are forgiven, we are saved, we are declared to be righteous and holy in God’s sight. And this is the one and only entry into heaven. We respond with acts of righteousness in our sanctified life, giving thanks to our heavenly Father and to his dear Son.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.