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The sermon presents self-righteousness as both a denial of Scripture and evidence of spiritual blindness. Because God’s law demands perfect righteousness, no sinner can be justified by works or personal moral comparison. Spurgeon emphasizes that Christ bore the sins of His people on the cross and that believers are accepted through Christ’s righteousness. The appropriate response is confession of guilt and wholehearted reliance on Christ alone.
Theological center: Salvation is grounded in Christ’s substitutionary atonement and imputed righteousness, never in human works, faith, or repentance as independent merits.
Applications: Abandon self-righteousness · Confess your guilt · Trust Christ alone · Examine your confidence
Primary texts: Job 9:20 · Isaiah 53:6 · Romans 3:20
“If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me perverse.” Job 9:20 EVER since man became a sinner he has been self-righteous. When he had a righteousness of his own he never gloried of it, but ever since he has lost it, he has pretended to be the possessor of it. Those proud words which our father Adam uttered, when he sought to screen himself from the guilt of his treason against his Maker, laying the blame apparently on Eve, but really upon God who gave him the woman, were virtually a claim to blamelessness. It was but a fig leaf he could find to cover his nakedness, but how proud was he of that fig-leaf excuse, and how tenaciously did he hold to it. As it was with our first parents, so is it with us—self-righteousness is born with us, and there is perhaps no sin which has so much vitality in it as the sin of righteous self. We can overcome lust itself, and anger, and the fierce passions of the will better than we can ever master the proud boastfulness which rises in our hearts, and tempts us to think ourselves rich and increased in goods, while God knows we are naked, and poor, and miserable. Tens of thousands of sermons have been preached against self-righteousness, and yet it is as necessary to turn the great guns of the law against its walls today as ever it was. Martin Luther said he scarcely ever preached a sermon without inveighing against the righteousness of man, and yet, he said, “I find that I still cannot preach it down. Still men will boast in what they can do, and mistake the path to heaven to be a road paved by their own merits, and not a way besprinkled by the blood of the atonement of Jesus Christ.” My dear hearers, I cannot compliment you by imagining that all of you have been delivered from the great delusion of trusting in yourselves. The godly, those who are righteous through faith in Christ, still have to mourn that this infirmity clings to them. While as to the unconverted themselves, their besetting sin is to deny their guiltiness, to plead that they are as good as others, and to indulge still the vain and foolish hope that they shall enter into heaven from some doings, sufferings, or weepings of their own. I do not suppose there are any who are self-righteous in as bold a sense as the poor countryman I have heard of. His minister had tried to explain to him the way of salvation, but either his head was very dull, or else his soul was very hostile to the truth the minister would impart. For he so little understood what he had heard, that when the question was put, “Now then…