I was talking to a large group of women at a college one day and an illustration came to my mind which I think they all understood. I said, “Just imagine one of you working your way through college. You have very little with which to do; your parents are not able to provide for you; possibly you have no parents. There is going to be some great affair and all are supposed to be nicely dressed for this occasion; you do not like to be shabby, but you have so little to go on. Then you see that at the five and ten cent store there is a splendid sale on dress material for ten cents a yard. You have only a few dimes, but you go down and get a few yards and try to make a nice gown so that you can go to that function. But you have never had much training as a seamstress and you have a lot of trouble. However, you work away on it, trying to make it look respectable. Then one day Lady Bountiful visits you; you have always dreamed about her, but never expected to see her. She takes a kindly interest in you and says, “Look, I want you to go down town with me.” You go, wondering why she should be interested in you, and then she takes you into one of the most beautiful outfitting establishments of the city. You are stirred as you walk up and down those aisles; as she stops at the dress section, she says, “Now, my dear, pick out any dress you please — a gown for yourself, any one that you like.”
“Well, really,” you say, “that seems too good to be true. I am afraid my taste would lead me to pick out something too expensive.”
But she says, “Go right on — anything you want.”
And so your fancy for color leads you to select a certain one and you say, “Well, I think that would be very becoming.”
“All right,” she says, and to the saleslady, “How much is it?” The answer is, “Seventy-five dollars.”
“Oh,” you say, “that price is altogether beyond a poor girl like me.”
“But that is all right,” she says, “you like it and you are going to have it.”
Imagine the girl coming back to her little room, seeing the poor old figured goods at which she had been working so long. She gets the new one out and tries it on and parades up and down before the glass. Finally, she calls in the other girls and says, “Oh, now I shall be found not having my own dress, this poor inexpensive thing, but this beautiful gown that has been given to me so freely!”
Paul looked at it that way. He had been trying to work out his righteousness himself, trying to make a beautiful garment in which to stand before God; but when he got sight of the risen Christ, and learned that every believer is made the righteousness of God in Christ, he said, “Away with that thing of my own providing, now that I can be dressed up in the righteousness which is of God in Christ.”