Several weeks ago I preached on around this point and I wanted to share just one except from my message. Of course if I learned anything from my Mercer education it is to give credit to my sources. I heard Pastor Judah Smith, from the City Church in Seattle, on his podcast touch on this and it really struck me to unpack it a little more.

In Matthew 5 Jesus is giving his famous “Sermon on the Mount”. If you grew up in church, like I did, you’ve heard it many times. And perhaps, like me, you missed verse 20 as well. After a litany of whom shall be blessed in the Kingdom and an example of how to pray Jesus warns that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees’ you have no chance of entering the Kingdom of God. Jesus then goes into the very familiar revision to the law. Jesus tells the people the law says don’t kill but anger is the same as murder. The law says don’t commit adultery but to think it is the same thing. And then if the bar had not been set high enough he rounds out chapter 5 by saying it after all this just be perfect and you should be set to.  

Now I know I may be breaking news to some of you but I struggle with a lack of perfection. I know, its hard to believe. But what is Jesus playing at setting the standard so high as to equate a thought with adultery. He sounds like a parent who is tired of disciplining a child, “No, don’t touch your sister…don’t even look at her!!!” or “Don’t even think about taking one of those cookies!”

Jesus set the standard, the starting point, at perfection. And in addition to expanding the expectations of the law he also said that our righteousness had to exceed that of the Pharisees’. Now the Pharisees often get a bad rep, and perhaps deservedly so, but they were if nothing righteous in the eyes of the law. That was their whole deal. Their life was all about following the rules. They literally made a career out of following the rules and Jesus said their righteousness was insufficient. If they weren’t righteous enough I see little hope for the rest of us.

I read one commentator who said Jesus was condemning the Pharisees’ false righteousness and we had to be genuine in our faith. Maybe that’s it but I think its something more. I don’t believe Jesus was giving us more rules to follow. It wasn’t a matter of how well we could behave. Jesus was trying to totally shift our perspective.

You see, when we focus on our righteousness coming from the law it makes our righteousness about what we can do. The Pharisees considered themselves righteous because they followed all the rules. From that perspective we should be praised when we succeed (which I believe if we were keeping score would be rare).

When Jesus said our righteousness should exceed that of the Pharisees he wasn’t referring to our behavior, but rather the actual righteousness we relay should be different. The righteousness Jesus referred to was not a word used to describe us; instead the righteousness was itself the subject of the lesson.

The Pharisees’ righteousness was insufficient because it was law focused and thus self focused. Where the law brings us back to the self, a righteousness based on grace points all the glory to the one who provided the grace. Jesus was showing us that our efforts were insufficient but that Jesus as God made flesh would provide an all sufficient righteousness based on a grace that all the glory to the Lord.

It is after all the difference between insisting on repairing your own car when you know nothing about cars and someone offering you a new car. Focusing on a law based righteousness makes us judgmental and worried about messing up. But when our righteousness is found on grace it makes us relive that we are no more worthy of grace than anyone else and we welcome in other to share in the grace we have found.

Where have you found your righteousness?

God is Everywhere.

I know everyone thinks they have the smartest kid in the world. I don’t know about that but I do know that I have a kid much smarter than me. Let me tell you what happened a few nights ago.

Everyone had gone to bed and I’m up just relaxing when I hear my wife get up and go to Cee’s room. Not that it is that unusual to have to check on a 3 year old in the night, but after a few minutes Tiff comes out to get me. Apparently our poor little girl is laying in bed covering her ears because “the bees are getting in her ears”. So like a good parent I go in there to try and calm her down and assure her there are no bees. I failed. The best results I got were she let me cover her ears.

So since compassion came up short I decided to go with the next best thing…bold face lies. I asked Cee if she’d like some medicine to help get rid of the bees. She was very pleased with my suggestion and seemed to wonder why it took me so long to come to what should have been an obvious solution. So I went out to get the “medicine”. What I got her was some water in a medicine spoon, that just between us.

*On a side note I told this story to my mom and her response was that she would have just given me real Tylenol assuming it would help if something was hurting and help me go back to sleep. I thought it was good to know how liberally the meds were whipped around when I was growing up. Just kidding mom…I love you!*

When I got back Cee was happy to see her “medicine”. She took it and shot me a skeptical look asking, “Is that water?” So I was faced with a dilemma…I’ve just been called out by a half asleep 3 year old…what do I do? I assured her it would keep the bees away and she could go back to sleep. Then I got out of there as quick as I could before she started asking any other questions. Next time she wakes up in the middle of the night I’m going straight to the NyQuil (for both of us) to avoid any of these awkward moments. Just kidding.

 

God is Everywhere.