"I Choose Righteousness" (Theodore Roosevelt)

"I put on righteousness, and it clothed me...."  (Job 29:14a)

The Amplified Bible translates our text, "righteousness...clothed itself with me."  Job realized in his brokenness that he could cloth himself with nothing redemptive.  Only the Living Triune God could do that.  But he did realize the heart of the Gospel.  Jesus, "the Righteousness of God," clothing "[Him]self with me."  This Righteousness, embodied only in Jesus Christ, is the Righteousness which our Father had for Job, and has for you and me.  Right standing, sins forgiven, a life set apart solely to Jesus Christ will enable you and me to endure, and, in That Day stand at the Judgment Bar of God.

President Teddy Roosevelt once said, "If I have to choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness."  Israel and America right now, more than ever, need such men.  Both nations are forsaking righteousness for a peace which says, "Just as long as I have food on my table and a roof over my head, have guarantees from my government, and I can continue to do whatever I please without any interference from anybody, I will forsake all else."  This is man's desperate and pathetic attempt to save himself.  But "what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?"  The forfeiture of the soul to "gain the whole world"----------  this will be the epitaph of the nations. 

I pray that you and I have the strength of soul and character today to say with the twenty-sixth President of the United States, "If I have to choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness."  And make no mistake; it is "the righteousness of God [which] has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ."

Father, in Jesus' Name, cloth me in You.  Amen.


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