Righteousness is the foundation

Righteousness is paramount to receiving all of the benefits of God and His will for you. His perfect will for all humanity is Christ and being in Christ and experiencing His BEST. The paradox of receiving His righteousness is that it is probably the hardest thing to do, yet it is so simple as just to 'believe' it! The hardest, because it is the last thing the 'ego' wants to do is to submit to an authority greater than itself. The simplest because "you can if you will". I think the deception is that we cannot perceive ourselves in someone else's GOODNESS. We have a 'faulty' paradigm that has been formed by previous experiences mixed with self centeredness. This combination results in a hard heart that is incapable of perceiving God for who He really is and by the same token, the hard heart cannot experience goodness as a gift because of the blindness of pride.