Religious vs Righteous

2 Corinthians 4: 6-7

2 Corinthians 3: 17-18

Can you tell the difference between a religious person and a righteous person?

I think the world is full of religious people.

You can see them according to how they dress, how they speak and how they sometimes tell you how wrong you and are how right they are.

What about righteous people?

Do any exist?

I think the world is also full of righteous people.

They are not easily found according to how they dress, but you can sometimes tell by their manners and their choice of words...especially in difficult and challenging situations.

From a righteous person you may learn about how wrong you are, and what the right thing to do is, but perhaps not from them telling you directly as the religious person would, but in other ways.

You learn by observation and through experience from the righteous person...how to be righteous.

You also learn by observation and through experience from the religious person...how to be offensive and think oneself to be doing the right thing.

We learn about how wonderful grace is from observing both the righteous and religious person.

How is this so?

Through the righteous person, we can experience grace extended from them to others (or, better said, from God through them and onto others).

Through the religious person, we can see how God is gracious to them despite their arrogance, their ill mannered ways, and how they misrepresent Grace Himself.

We can learn what grace actually is when learning to imitate the righteous person according to how they are gracious to others, even those who don't seem to deserve any kindness.

We can then learn how to be gracious to the religious person when it comes to handling their blindness and impatience.

But how do you tell the religious person that they are in no way righteous according to their manners, their choice of words, their attitude and their misrepresentation of He who is full of grace and truth?

I don't think it is possibly done in words, for if the heart is not receptive to a kind correction, they are more concerned about pointing out what they perceive to be wrong in you.

This is the joy of the religious...while the joy of the righteous is to silently pray for those around them while always extending gracious words and kind action.

If only the world's observers can see clearly that the religious are attempting to imitate the righteous, and they only way they know how is by trying to pull all that is outside within...yet it is the other way around with the righteous.

Christ revealed this:

Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Yeshua replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in within you.” 

- Luke 17: 20-21

If only the observers who are seeking God can tell the difference between religion and righteousness.

One attempts to teach the other (religion teaching righteousness), but those who actually traverse such paths know how false this idea is.

Religion is a residual effect left over from the wake of righteous paths.