Many Folks want to Serve God, but only as Advisers

Man is carnal and selfish! This is his normal state.
Man is vain! He desperately needs to feel good about himself.
This is difficult for the poor creature because he has rejected God's Truth and does so many evil things.
Nevertheless, he has become very proficient at it. He has created an elaborate system of lies and confusion and clouded his actions in a pseudo righteousness, of his own devising.

In Roman 10:3, "For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteuosness of God."

Man walks this earth with differing degrees of this carnal righteousness, which he has invented, or borrowed from various man devised or demon inspired philosphies.
In the Western world, we have even adopted much of the Bible (perhaps ADAPTED is a better word) as our standard of righteousness.
Of course, we have shied away from those areas of Scripture that would require too great a change in our style of living or we have simply twisted their true meaning until we were able to be COMFORTABLE with our religion.

A long time ago we learned the trick of believing what we wanted to believe.

Man has created his own righteousness, which eliminates most of the responsibility for obedience to God, and at the same time, makes him feel good about himself.
What more could any selfish, sinning human being want - right?
When we look at man, in many ways, he looks pretty good.
He has learned over the years how to make plausable exuses and justify himself in his sins, so that he appears good to others, as well as to himself.
He has a certain sense of compassion for the less fortunate.
Sometimes, this can make him look almost noble.
He likes to look noble.
But we shouldn't be deceived by this; his righteousness is just that - his righteousness! He likes to look noble. He likes to feel noble, but he is not about to do the one thing that would truly benefit the less fortunate.
He is not about to submit his mind and will to the law of God.
No, he may deceive himself, and other men may be deceived by him, but his righteousness is emphatically NOT the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

He is man.

He has loudly and violently declared himself INDEPENDENT of the righteousness of his creator!

I didn't write that. It's just a few paragraphs from a much longer piece by Ed Burson. I just felt it needed to be posted here.