Christ in us

Christ's righteousness. Do you ever get kinda discouraged when you think about it? It just seems that we can never make it apart of our lives. Why does it seem so hard to be righteous like Christ? At the cross was when the power of sin in our lives was broken.  But then, where do we take it from there? I was reading about Christ's righteousness this morning in my devotions, and an illustration that I thought of on Monday, came to mind again. And it made things so much clearer in my mind about how Christ's righteousness works in my life. Here is the illustration: your washing dishes, and you have the dish covered in dirty soap. Now what? You want to get it clean right? So you rinse it under the running water. But if you have ever done dishes before, you will know that sometimes it just seems impossible to get the soap out of the cup? You put a little water in the cup and swirl it around, and then tip the cup and dump out the water, but low and behold, there is still soap in the cup! And you do this process over and over again. Then you realize, that if you just hold the cup under the running water, and let the water fill the cup to the brim, the soap will just overflow and the cup becomes clean. In the same way, Christ has promised us His righteousness, His cleanliness, but we can't gain that same cleanliness on our own. We have to allow Christ to just start filling us, and then very soon, the cup will be full of only Christ, and none of self. We can't focus on getting the soap out, only on getting Christ in, and by getting Christ in, the soap will have no choice but to overflow.