Will a Man Commend His Dung to the LORD? That is What Our Good Deeds are Before HIM! All Our Righteousnesses are as Filthy Rags! A Point to Ponder!

A Devotional Thought for June 13, 2025.

From the Pen of John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress

All Our Righteousnesses are as Filthy Rags

(Isaiah 64: 6)

“As it is written; ‘None is righteous, no, not one’”

Romans 3: 10

“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (Isaiah 64: 6).

In these words we have a relation both of persons and things.

1. Of persons. And they are a righteous people, a righteous people put all together—"We, we all are.” 

2. The condition of this people, even of ALL of them, take them at the best, are, and that by their own confession, “as an unclean thing.”

3. Again; the things here attending this people are their good things, put down under this large character, “Righteousnesses, ALL our righteousnesses.”

These expressions therefore comprehend all their religious duties, both before and after faith too. But what are all these righteousnesses? Why, they are all as “filthy rags” when set before the justice of the law. Yea, it is also confessed and that by these people that their iniquities, notwithstanding all their righteousnesses, like the wind, if grace prevent not, would “carry them away.” This being so, how is it possible for one that is in his sins, to work himself into a spotless condition by works done before faith, by works done by natural abilities? Or to perform a righteousness which can look God in the face, his law in the face, and to demand and obtain the forgiveness of sins, and the life that is eternal? It cannot be: “men must therefore be justified from the curse, in the sight of God while sinners in themselves,” or not at all.