King David said in one of his Psalms:
“For the Lord is righteous, He loves righteousness; His countenance beholds the upright.”
Psalms 11:7 NKJV
We do know that in many ways children tends to be like their parents. If they have lived and had been mentored into adulthood by their blood birth parents, the tendency is there for them to be living in following the pattern of life, that had been set before them by their parents.
Those who rebel against parental authorities normally suffer for the rest of their lives in their rebellious ways. And this is evident in the world around us today. Children who are not living right are basically living by the bad standards, which they had seen in their parents as they are growing up.
And the child that is rebellious to godly instructions and upbringing from the parents, often ends up living by the standards of the world. In most cases such a child will end up being taught to live right by the governmental authorities, which the Lord God had established to exercise His authority, over those who are disobedient to His word (see Romans 13:1-7).
Our Heavenly Father is Righteous, and it is normal that those who are born of His Spirit resemble Him in righteous living also. He watches over those who are living uprightly in accordance with His ways, to bless them and make their pathway in life prosperous.
Our Heavenly Father is Just in everything that He does. However, those who are living in rebellion against His word will always suffer for their disobedience (Jeremiah 17:5-6).
We must however acknowledge that it’s because of His love for us, that He has chosen righteousness as the pathway for our prosperity in life as His children.
Adam was exactly like the Lord God on the earth. He was like God on the earth, until he rebelled against the love of God, and eventually fell from his high position to suffer for it. That’s why up till this day anyone who has chosen his or her own standard for righteous living, suffers under the same curse that follows the children of disobedience.
Jesus said:
“As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.”
John 15:9-10 NKJV
When we are living in obedience to God’s written word, we are showing Him that we do love Him. It’s just as children will express their love for their parents by obeying them. Obedience to God’s word is the direct expression of our love for Him. If you can’t obey as the standard for living what God’s word says, then you don’t love God. Anyone who is trying to justify disobedience to God’s word, is just a filthy and dirty liar like the devil.
By abiding in God’s word, we are abiding in His love. His love that is manifested in our lives causes righteousness to shine through us. And as His love in our lives brings out Christ’s righteousness through us. It causes us to be prosperous and fruitful in everything that we are doing.
Righteousness will cause you as a child of God to abound more and more in His grace, so that you can begin to reign with Christ Jesus on the earth. It will cause you to prosper first of all spiritually, even when others around you are not prospering spiritually, until your prosperity begins to affect every other area of your life.
Get yourself protected with righteous living
Most importantly righteousness is your shield of protection from the wiles of the devil. If you are not living right with God as a Christian, the devil will exploit your disobedience with that opportunity. Your unrighteous lifestyle has opened up a door for him into your life. And he will exploit it aggressively with the aim of destroying you.
That’s why the Bible says to every Christian:
“Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness,”
Ephesians 6:14 NKJV
The breastplate of righteousness will protect your faith in God, from failing you whenever the enemy attacks. It’s not a matter of if the enemy will attack you. It’s a matter of when he will attack, will you be prepared? And he will never inform you that he will be attacking you before doing so. It’s just as a thief will never tell you that he is coming to steal from you (Matthew 24:43). You have to be spiritually prepared at all times, by constantly having your breastplate of righteousness on the heart as the protection for it.
Righteousness will protect your faith in God. It will get you prepared at all times for anything from the enemy.
Faith is of the heart, and that’s why the breastplate of righteousness is referred to here, as a form of covering over the heart area from where your faith works. The fiery darts of the enemy cannot penetrate your breastplate of righteousness, as long as you are well dressed up in it.
It is one of the protective weapons of your spiritual warfare, as a soldier for Christ. The devil is always looking for loopholes in your breastplate of righteousness, so as to target and attack your faith. And if you are not properly dressed up in it, by first fixing any loophole into your life; so as to start living right before the Lord God, you will be making yourself vulnerable to being attacked by the devil.
The evil one will first seek to weaken your faith before attacking you spiritually or physically. He will look for the moment when you are not focused with your faith, before sneaking into your territory so as to tempt you with evil.
The breastplate of righteousness is your last standing ground against the onslaught of the devil. If you are not being steadfast with your faith walk, you are obviously losing ground to the devil. He will definitely exploit that weakness in your life against you.
And we can say also that physically any injury to the heart area can be fatal. It can be a matter of life and death, as opposed to the injury to the arms or the legs.
That’s why it’s important to always stay on course with the eyes and the heart on the word of God. The moment you take your eyes off God’s word, so as to stop confessing it; the enemy will sniff his way into your life. He will not rush in momentarily, but he will test the ground of your heart first before coming after you. He will sniff in to see if one demon is enough to take over your life, or if he needs to get more demons in deceiving you and destroying your life (see Luke 11:21-26).
It’s for this same reason that the Lord advised Joshua:
“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.”
Joshua 1:8 NKJV
Joshua had to be meditating day and night on God’s word, so that he could become a doer of what it says. He had to separate himself from what many were doing around him, to be able to effectively do this every day and every night.
We meditate with the heart and not the head. We believe with the heart, but the mind which uses our brain needs to be renewed with God’s word also. Your breastplate of righteousness protects the heart and your faith from the wiles of the devil – his fiery darts.
And those fiery darts of the devil are the evil thoughts that are going through your mind day and night. The devil uses thoughts of evil to attack your righteousness. Righteous living will help you to overcome them, by speaking out with faith filled words to extinguish them as they come. You will have to open your mouth to be declaring, what God’s word says from your heart, so as to be dealing with those negative thoughts.
Righteous living eventually pays off for the righteous man. It becomes part of his lifestyle pattern, until righteousness begins to shine forth through his life. He will become prosperous in everything that he does, as a result of obeying whatever the Lord says in His word. And by obeying God’s word, Joshua showed his love for the Lord. If it worked for Joshua, it would surely work for you.
In a world today that is increasingly becoming evil, righteousness will protect anyone who is living in obedience to God’s word. It will protect him and keep him safe from harm.
It’s only God’s standard for righteousness that will prosper you
The world has been setting up their own standards for righteousness for a long time now. And these standards do vary from nation to nation, from one region of the world to another. The world’s standard for prosperity even varies from community to community.
But in every one of them the evil one is the one, who had been setting up those standards for them. The world does not follow God’s standard for anything in righteousness. They don’t set their principles for life in accordance with God’s written word, because they don’t live by the word of God. The world lives by the opinions of men and women within their spheres of influence. That’s how the enemy works to control nations, peoples and the societies. He infiltrates the thought patterns of people in setting up his own rules and standards for their lives, which are contrary to God’s.
In fact, there are many Bible professing Christians today, who do know what God’s word says, about the ways that they are living their lives. But these ones have chosen to be following the standards of the world, concerning how they are making certain decisions in life.
God’s word however gives us His original and authentic standard for what is right in everything, so that we don’t get ourselves deceived by the enemy.
It’s the evil intentions in people that has often made them, to be setting up their own standards for what is right and wrong around them. A person who likes unrighteous living will always look for every opportunity to commit sin. And because of the evil intentions within them, they will set up their own rules and standards to make it look like it is the righteous way to be living. But in actual fact it’s evil, because their self-made rules and standards are against the principles of the written word of God.
Most especially during the ongoing pandemic, the devil has aggressively been attacking people with evil thoughts, so as to set up his own standard for living in several communities, nations and regions of the world. And there are even Christians who are buying into these deceptions of evil to sin against God, by setting up their own rules and standards for living.
They will set up their own personal standard for what is right and wrong, without regards to what the Creator of our world says. To many of them their personal feelings form the basis for their standards of living. And because feelings are always changing, they are always changing their standards for many things in life, based primarily on what the world says to them that it should be.
It was this same attitude that made the Lord God to create different languages for all men on the earth, so that people could not understand one another anymore. They became confused with each other’s languages, as they started speaking different languages to one another. The confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel was as a result of the rebellion of men against God (see Genesis 11:1-9).
However, the Lord God told us in His word not to be setting up our own standards for righteousness. He had said:
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8-9 NKJV
God’s thoughts and ways are available for us to find out in His written word. He will never compromise His thoughts and standard for our world’s, just because you don’t like them. You will have to repent and change from those evil ways, by bringing your thought patterns for life to fall in line with His own.
People who are rebellious will want to have their own ways in all things. But as we had seen from the Tower of Babel, God will throw confusion within them, until they are scattered and extinguished from the world of the righteous.
When we are reading and meditating on His word day and night, we will get to discover what God’s standards are in everything that we are doing in life.
Anyone who wants to know what God thinks about anything, ought not to be looking at the world, but at God’s written word. God’s word is His standard for living on the earth that He had created.
His thoughts about anything that is troubling you right now are in His written word. Get into the Bible to know what God is saying about your world today. It will not be something that you will have to do for just a season. For Joshua as an example, meditating on God’s word was what he did for the rest of his life – days and nights.
The society and the so-called professionals of this world don’t have a clue about anything concerning righteousness. Jesus is the only answer and solution for all the world’s problems. They don’t know it. But you as a child of God do know this spiritual truth. That’s why you need righteous living for your personal protection in a world that is so full of evil.
The Lord God created the earth and everything in it for us to be enjoying. But you can’t experience the fullest of the enjoyment on the earth by setting up your own standard for it. You have to go to the “manual book” which the Creator of the world had given us to follow. The Bible is the “manual book” of God for the world. Get into it to discover His instructions and standards for living life on the earth.
We can’t be setting up the standards for ourselves in a world, that we never had an input to create. This is one way by which the world has missed out of the very best from God. We don’t set the standard for our Creator – God. We are His creations, and He is the Creator.
Righteousness will cause you to stand out in the crowd
The life of a person who is not living right with God is a life that is full of crisis. Such a person will often continue in the deceitfulness of his own unrighteous living, as he tries to manipulate his pathway through the system of the world in unrighteous living. But at the end self-destruction is waiting for him:
“There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.”
Proverbs 14:12 NKJV
That’s why as a child of God you don’t ever have to be surprised, if you see evil men prospering in their evil ways. There is a sure end to their ways. The prosperity of evil men never endures forever. Destruction is waiting for them at the end of it all.
Do you know that it’s not every person who claim to be rich on the earth that’s actually rich? A lot of rich people are actually living in debts. They have debts that they are able to pay off with installments through their banks. And as long as they are making their installment payments, they are allowed to borrow more money from the banks.
This is how they manipulate the system of the world for their temporary wealth. Some of them have investments and capital assets, that they have acquired with borrowed money. They will put up all of these as part of their total wealth.
However, this is not the real truth. It’s when they are dead that you will need to find out about what happened to their so-called riches. There are a lot of them who are leaving huge debts for their children to pay. And when their children can’t exhibit the form of righteousness in their character to carry such wealth, everything that they had accumulated starts to disappear. How can you describe that as prosperity?
As the Psalmist said:
“The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously;”
Psalms 37:21 NIV
Jesus described them in one of His parables – the Parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21). Jesus concluded that Parable by saying:
“So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
Luke 12:21 NKJV
People who are laying up treasure for themselves are not actually rich, because they are not rich towards God. As soon as they are dead their riches disappear with them. Wealth that is acquired in unrighteous living vanishes into the air. You don’t ever hear about them and their wealth anymore.
But real prosperity is with those who are actually investing in the lives of the people within their communities. The Apostle James gave us an insight into the prosperity of the righteous when he said:
“And the seed whose fruit is righteousness (spiritual maturity) is sown in peace by those who make peace [by actively encouraging goodwill between individuals].”
James 3:18 AMP
When you are “encouraging goodwill between individuals” by investing in the lives of your fellow Christians, you are spreading the prosperity of the Lord through your fruit of righteousness.
Those Christians will testify before the Lord one day about it. And by investing in their lives, you are investing into your incorruptible riches in Heaven. Eternity will record it to your account with the Father. An eternal account that will never disappear, unlike the riches of this world which is temporary.
You don’t evaluate wealth by what you have or own on the earth, but by the standard of living of the people that are being transformed with your riches and wealth. This is what the righteous person does with his prosperity.
King David said again:
“O Lord, how great are Your works! Your thoughts are very deep. A senseless man does not know, nor does a fool understand this. When the wicked spring up like grass, and when all the workers of iniquity flourish, it is that they may be destroyed forever.”
Psalms 92:5-7 NKJV
A man who acquires wealth through unrighteous living is destroyed forever. This is the prosperity of a fool who has no fear or honor of God at heart.
As God’s child you are exempted from all the crisis, that the world around you are going through right now. You do have a blood backed Covenant with God the Father, that covers you supernaturally. You dwell in the secret place of the Most High God (Psalms 91). And His written word is the standard for your life.
It’s in accordance with that Covenant by the blood of Jesus Christ, that you are able to be advancing the Kingdom of heaven on the earth; even though the world around you is regressing.
As the Bible says:
“But for you who fear (revering) my name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in his wings. And you will go free, leaping with joy like calves let out to pasture.”
Malachi 4:2 NLT
The reverential fear of God is the same as honoring God. Righteousness will cause you to be joyful in doing exploits for the Lord, in saving the lost, healing the sick and setting the captives free.
This is how the healing anointing flows with joy from your heart, thereby causing you to be doing exploits in reigning on the earth with Christ Jesus.
Your righteousness in Christ Jesus will cause you to abound with His prosperity in every area of your life, as you are doing the perfect will of God for every believer in Christ Jesus. It is inevitable. It is real. Keep on walking in righteousness. You will see the prosperity of the Lord in the most unusual way:
“Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, And He shall bring it to pass. He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, And your justice as the noonday. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him; Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, Because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass. Cease from anger and forsake wrath; Do not fret—it only causes harm. For evildoers shall be cut off; But those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.”
Psalms 37:5-9 NKJV
