A Lifetime of Leaning

Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Romans 3 brings the sobering reality check set up in the previous chapter. And it’s something our culture despirately needs to hear: “There is no one righteous, not even one” (3:10). Then, in the very same breath, Paul says: “and all are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (3:24). No one earns their way in. We’ve heard that from the pulpit a million times already. What our culture today forgets is that no one ignores their way to redemption either. To deny that sin is sin is to reduce the value of grace, and the costly measures that God undertook to grant it to us.

Psalm 71 reads like the biography of someone who has lived exactly that truth over an entire lifetime. “From my youth, God, you have taught me… Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me” (71:17-18). This isn’t a prayer of a man who has finally accumulated enough righteousness to deserve God’s favor after decades of faithfulness. It’s the opposite. It’s the prayer of someone whose need for grace only deepened with age, whose whole life became one long exercise in leaning rather than achieving. That’s exactly the shape of the righteousness Paul describes in Romans 3: not a ladder we climb but a hand we hold, from our first faltering steps of faith until our very last breath. The psalmist doesn’t outgrow his need for God; he grows more honest about it. That is what a life shaped by grace actually looks like.

Devotional Prompts:

Read Psalm 71:1-12 alongside Romans 3:21-24. How does a lifetime of leaning on God prepare us to receive grace and give us an appreciation for its value?
If “no one is righteous” is true, what does that truth free you from having to prove to God, to others, or to yourself?

Prayer: Faithful God, from my youth until my final years, be my refuge and my rock. Teach me to lean rather than strive, to trust rather than perform. Let grace be the story of my whole life, not just its beginning. Amen.