True Righteousness - Matthew 5:17-20

Good morning

Go ahead and take out your Bibles and turn to Matthew 5

If we have not met, my name is Stefan, I am one of the pastors here at Harvest

and we are working through the sermon on the mount this Spring as we slowly move through the Gospel of Matthew over the next few years.

And we need to keep in the front of our minds the fact that the Sermon on the mount is an ongoing explanation of what it looks like to repent and to live for the kingdom of God

Jesus is confronting the way we are accustomed to thinking and is correcting our thinking…

Jesus has shown us that we need to change our minds about how we define the good life in v. 1-12

In v. 13-16 last week, he told us that we need to change our minds and stop being a church that looks like the world and instead we must be a distinct church…

And this week he is going to confront our idea of what we think makes us righteous before God.

It is common in our world today to hear that you should be able to do things without other people

We celebrate independence

We say things like “You are enough”

We tell people they can achieve anything they want if they will just be disciplined enough

You get on social media or youtube and you will invariably find videos of a system or a hack that if you do it right, will change your life.

And so we have become conditioned to believe that achieving our dreams and accomplishing our goals and getting things right all depends on me.

And so when we don’t achieve our goals, we then have no one to blame but ourselves for not being disciplined enough or not being strong enough.

[Hook] And I am concerned that this is exactly how we think when it comes to our standing before God

I know that Jesus died for my sins, but it is up to me to get this life right

I know that God loves me, but I still need to earn his favor

I know that there is grace, but I shouldn’t need that.

I should be able to earn God’s approval on my own

And if I don’t, something is wrong with me and it is up to me to fix it.

And you might not say those things, but too often we live like it

When we don’t get it right, we despair and beat ourselves up

When we fall back in to sin, rather than running to God’s grace we get angry at ourselves and just try harder to get it right

And we need to repent of that

We need to change our minds

We need a right view of true righteousness

The righteousness that Jesus gives

That he earned

That we benefit from

So let’s give these words our full attention.

Matthew 5:17–20 ESV

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

These are God’s words for us

Big Idea: By following Jesus, I embrace true righteousness [6:00]

Righteousness, in the biblical usage, is the doing right by God and others.

To be righteous is to embrace God’s way and live accordingly

But the problem we run into is thinking that it is the doing of things that makes us righteous

Because I do the right things, the argument goes, I am a righteous person.

But Jesus is going to show us that in his kingdom, true righteousness actually starts with what he does and our righteousness is something we embrace, not something we produce.

Are you with me?

True righteousness, doing right by God and others, starts with Jesus and we embrace it and then live accordingly

And Jesus is going to show us what it looks like to embrace true righteousness

He does the work, we respond, and as a result, we enjoy true righteousness…

And we are going to see 4 actions that show that you and I have embraced what Jesus has done… 4 indicators that if they are present in our lives, then we know that we are following Jesus and embracing true righteousness…

"Following Jesus means…”

I. Resting in HIS Perfect Righteousness (v. 17) [8:00]

To understand what's going on in this passage we need to define what Jesus means by the law or the prophets

The Law refers to the first 5 books of the Old Testament, often referred to as the Law of Moses or the 5 books of Moses

And the commands contained in those books that God gave to his people through Moses

and the Prophets served to call the people back to obedience when they disobeyed

The prophets didn’t give new commands; they called the people back to the law.

So when Jesus says “The law and the prophets” it is way of referring to the whole Old Testament

The commands God gave and the prophets who called the people to return.

And Jesus says he has not come to abolish it, he has not come to tear it down, to dismantle it.”

Now, why would he say that?

At this point in Israel's history, you have a bunch of different rabbis who are teaching people how to follow the commands of God

And what happened over time is that their teaching started to blur with God’s commands and it became difficult to know where God's command ended and where their traditions began.

And in Jesus’ day you had rabbis who saw their own teaching as equal to God's command and so if you broke the rabbis commands you were guilty of breaking God's command

And Jesus had no interest in that

He cared about what God's word actually said and did not follow the traditions of the elders, in fact multiple times he is confronted by the religious leaders for not following their rules

And so they accused him of seeking to dismantle the old testament by not following their rules

And Jesus is saying "don't think that, because I am not following your rules, I came to abolish the old Testament”

He goes on and says "I have not come to abolish them, to dismantle them, but fulfill them.”

That word fulfill is a word that literally means to fill up

but his use here it's to bring it to completion

Paul actually says something similar about Jesus in Romans chapter 10 where he says that the end of the law is Christ

And the word Paul uses in Rom. 10 is the Greek word for “destination or the purpose”

The idea is that Jesus brings the Old Testament to it’s intended goal.

So, let’s put it together - Jesus is saying “I came to complete the purpose of the Old Testament, not do away with it.”

So what was the purpose of the Old Testament?

Paul says in Gal. 3 that the law was meant to instruct us

And James refers to the law as a mirror

It was never meant to save - It was never meant to clean

It was meant to reveal what needed saving… what needed cleaning.

The old testament law and the prophets who called the people back to the law served to show our condition in relation to God’s perfect righteousness.

The law doesn’t make you righteous… It shows that you are not.

The mistake a lot of people make is thinking that salvation could by found by obeying the law

If I do everything right, then God will accept me.

But that was never the purpose of the law - The purpose of the law was to show you that you needed to be saved.

The purpose of a mirror isn’t to clean you - It is to show you what needs to be cleaned!

And Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets, where it shows that we need to be cleansed, he will clean us.

Where is shows that we are unrighteous, he will be righteous for us.

And he does this in two ways:

1. He perfectly obeyed every word that the law commanded

Jesus lived a life of perfect obedience, never being guilty of the sin that you and I are

And because he lived a life of perfect obedience

2. He perfectly atoned for the sin that the law revealed.

In the law, the way to atone for sin was through sacrifice.

The shed blood of a lamb or goat or bull would cover your sin.

But remember - The purpose of the law was to instruct, not to save.

It was not the animal sacrifices that covered sin, but those animal sacrifices pointed to, instructed, the people in the need for a perfect sacrifice

Because Jesus lived perfect obedience, his death was a perfect sacrifice that could cover over all of the sin of God’s people, past, present, and future.

When Jesus said, “It is finished,” it meant that he had perfectly fulfilled all of the law and the prophets and accomplished the salvation that they pointed to

And listen: Because he lived perfect obedience and because his death was a perfect sacrifice for sin, you and I can rest in HIS righteousness.

And this is so important for us because if we have a wrong view of the law and the commands of God…

We will think that God’s approval of us is linked to how well we follow his commands

And we will work and work and work, trying to get it right

condemning ourselves when we get it wrong

Trying to clean our own lives up by doing better

And it will be exhausting

Working and working to fix ourselves through doing

When you think that righteousness comes from trying harder, you get caught in this cycle of:

I see the things that need to change

So I try harder to change them

But I am powerless to actually change myself

And so I fail in trying harder

And in my failure, I see the things that need to change

And on and on the cycle goes.

Is that you today? Have you been trying so hard to finally measure up, just to fail over and over and over?

Are you tired of trying to clean yourself?

This is why Jesus said Matthew 11:28–30 “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Embracing true righteousness doesn’t mean try harder

Embracing true righteousness means following Jesus and resting in HIS righteousness

He lived the life that God demanded, because you and I couldn’t

He died in perfect substitution, because you and I couldn’t

And when you put your faith in Jesus, when you receive his work on your behalf, you not only receive forgiveness for your sins, but you also receive the righteousness that he earned for you.

Hebrews tells us that by his single sacrifices he has perfected us for all time

Paul tells us in 2 Cor. that Jesus took on our sin so that we would become righteous

Nowhere in the Bible was the law ever supposed to save.

It was always supposed to point to Jesus who would fulfill it

He would obey it perfectly

He would be a perfect sacrifice

He would accomplish the righteousness the law required

And he would save us by his work, so we can rest in HIS righteousness.

The law and the prophets teach us, they reveal our need for a savior.

Jesus fulfills it as that savior

And when we follow him by faith, we receive the righteousness that he earned and we can rest.

So that is the first sign that you are embracing true righteousness.

Following Jesus means I rest in HIS righteousness.

Second… Following Jesus means…

II. Trusting in His Unchanging Word (v. 18) [18:00]

There is a common idea in the church today and is taught by some very well-known preachers and it is that the Old Testament is irrelevant for the life of the Christian anymore

And even if it is an explicitly preached that we should let go of the Old Testament, so often in practice we act like it because we neglect the Old Testament in our Bible reading or in the sermons that we preach.

And this is not a new idea

In the early church there was a guy named Marcion who taught that a Christian Bible should not include the Old Testament because he believed that it was irrelevant to the Christian life

And the early church condemned him as a false teacher for saying that the old testament was irrelevant

And anyone who claims the same thing today is equally a false teacher

And for our purposes this morning it is why they condemned him as a heretic that we need to understand

The early church agreed that the Old Testament is completely relevant for the Christian precisely because the same God who inspired the old testament inspired the new testament

And Scripture makes clear in both the old and the new testaments that God is unchanging

And so if God is unchanging then who he is revealed to be in the old Testament is just as relevant for us as Christians as who God is revealed to be in the New Testament

You've heard me say many times that the authors of the New Testament were readers of the Old Testament

In the biblical worldview the old and New Testament are inseparably linked in the singular story and singular truth that they unpack

Because the God of both testaments is an unchanging God

And so the right response is to trust in his unchanging word

Now Jesus makes two statements about the relevance of God's unchanging word for the life of the believer

He makes a statement about the extent of the relevance of God's unchanging word

And he makes a statement about the timeframe of the relevance of God's unchanging word

So let's look at what he says about the extent of the relevance of God's unchanging word

He says ”not an iota, not a dot, will pass away from the law until all is accomplished”

Depending on your translation it might say something a little different there

If you have a KJV, it says “jot or tittle”

If you have an NIV or NASB, it says “the least stork of a pen”

Regardless, the idea behind the Greek phrase that is translated in these various ways is that not the slightest, smallest mark is irrelevant for those who follow Jesus

Every word of Scripture is necessary for us to follow Jesus and embrace true righteousness.

This is why Paul says in second Timothy 3:16-17 where he says that all scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable, is a beneficial for teaching for proof for correction and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete equipped for every good work.

Every word - Inspired

Every word - Beneficial for us

Every word is necessary

And Jesus is saying that he will fulfill every single word of Scripture

You won’t need to change even one letter of the Old Testament for Jesus to perfectly fulfill it.

So if your version of Jesus requires reinterpretation and manipulation of the old Testament to make it make sense, he is not the true Jesus

If your version of Jesus requires you to do away with entire parts of the old Testament he is not the true Jesus

The true Jesus, the one who we must follow to embrace true righteousness, is the Jesus that all of the Old Testament points to and who perfectly fulfills every letter.

So that is the extent of the relevance of God’s unchanging word.

Now what does Jesus say about the timeframe of the relevance of his unchanging word?

He says "until heaven and earth pass away”

This is not a statement about the end of the world, though at first glance that is what it seems like.

Jesus is making a statement about the relevance of God's word in relation to the timeframe of the heavens and the Earth

You can see it in the simple construction of this sentence

“until heaven and earth pass away, not a word will pass away…”

Remember: The best interpretation of Scripture is Scripture…

So what do other passages in scripture say about the relationship between the word of God and the heavens and the Earth

Well if we go back to the opening sentence of the Bible to see that the oldest thing that God created was the heavens and the earth

So in the beginning, there was God and the heavens and the earth…

And since God created them, that means he preexists them.

Are you with me?

God existed before the heavens in the Earth existed

And how is it that God created the heavens in the Earth?

By his word.

Hebrews 11:3 “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God.”

Psalm 33:6 “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host… For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.”

So God created the heavens and the earth by his word and his word existed before they were made

Are you tracking with me?

So… this means that were they to ever pass away, were the heavens and the earth to ever vanish… God’s eternal, unchanging word would remain.

The psalmist says in Psalm 148:5–6 “Let them praise the name of the Lord! For he commanded and they were created. And he established them forever and ever; he gave a decree, and it shall not pass away.”

God says through Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”

And Jesus himself says in Matthew 24:35 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

The most eternal thing that exists is not the world, it is the word of God that created and sustains the world

Therefore, it is. Eternally relevant for the believer who follows Jesus

So, following Jesus means trusting his unchanging word because every word is relevant and it is relevant for all time.

And trusting his word means seeing all of it as relevant

And it means seeing it as relevant for all time.

The question that we need to answer is: How is the Old Testament, the law and the prophets, relevant for the Christ-follower since Jesus fulfilled it?

If Jesus brought the law and the prophets to completion, brought it to its intended purpose… How should we read it?

Which leads us to our third point…

Following Jesus means…

III. Submitting to His Absolute Authority (v. 19) [28:00]

I want you to imagine a boss or an owner of a company who sends an email to his employees

That email carries with it the intended meaning of the one who sent it, the desired outcomes of the one who sent it, and the authority of the one who sent it

Now imagine you read the email from your boss and you think, “I don’t think these parts apply to me, so i am just not going to worry about them…”

“…I’m not going to ask… I just don’t think it applies to me.”

How is that gonna go?

Not well…

No the right response would be for the employee to labor over finding all of the ways that that email did apply to them

Why? Because to disregard the content would be to disregard the authority of the one who sent it

In the same way Jesus says that it is equally foolish to discard or disregard even the least of the commandments of God.

Matthew 5:19 “Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Now he says “least of these commandments”

I want to make sure that we understand what this doesn't mean so that it makes sense what it does mean

Here's what it doesn't mean: it does not mean that there are less important commands and more important commands

Because Jesus just said that every word of the Lord is essential for how he will fulfill all that it says

When Jesus uses language of greater and lesser referring to commandments, greater commandments are those big commandments that serve as summary or umbrella over others

Think “The 10 commandments”

The 10 commandments summarize the entire law. If you take the 613 commands in the Mosaic law, you can categorize all of them under the 10 commandments

Lesser commandments are those granular, very specific commandments

They are examples of specific instances of how to follow the great, categorical commandments.

I’ll give you an example: God says “you shall not murder” and then there is a command about building a railing on your roof to make sure no one falls off of your roof on accident and dies.

The greater command is “You shall not murder”

The lesser command, the more specific command, is “build a railing around your house to keep everyone safe.”

It tells you how to follow that greater, broader command.

And listen: It would be really easy to think that those specific command in their application don’t matter…

We might be tempted to relax them, to discard them, because they seem so small…

To think, “Eh, that has nothing to do with me.”

And Jesus says, “That approach makes you least in the kingdom of heaven.”

And why is it that doing so would make you least in the kingdom?

Remember what Jesus has said elsewhere, that if you make yourself great, you will be least in the kingdom and if you humble yourself you will be great in the kingdom.

To discard any of God’s commands is to see yourself as the authority over what does and doesn’t apply

It is to have too high a view of yourself in relation to Scripture

The right response is to desire to honor all of God’s commands, because they carry his authority.

But this begs the question: If Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets, how should we view those commands that he fulfilled?

So then how should we view commands in the Old Testament when Jesus himself fulfilled all of the righteous requirements of the law?

Rather than asking "does this command apply anymore?”

We should ask, "how did Jesus fulfill this command? And so how by following him do we submit to this command?”

Ceremonial laws for cleanliness - Purified form the inside

Jesus fulfilled those laws, so that form changed, but the function never went away.

Purity still matters.

There are laws about things they should not do shaving the tops of their heads

It would be tempting to discard that as if it doesn’t apply anymore.

Command #2 - Worship God the way he says - Shaving head = false worship

Jesus fulfilled the law, so worship is about my heart more than it is my outward appearance

The form changes, but the function remains the same.

Worshiping God rightly still matters

Plus, there are moral laws that tell us things about God.

The imperatives form God are based in the indicatives about God

Murder - Life

Adultery - Faithfulness

Lies - Truth

Theft - Provision/Dependence

So what we must not do is discard the old testament commands simply because Jesus fulfilled them.

Instead, because he fulfilled them, we should ask what the full meaning of them is and seek to live in that

Not to earn righteousness, but to embrace true righteousness by following Jesus

Submitting to his absolute authority and valuing every word of the Lord.

IV. Embracing His Complete Transformation (v. 20) [36:00]

Jesus concludes by saying something that would be absolutely shocking to his immediate audience

He says Matthew 5:20 “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The scribes were the experts in the law. They knew it better than anybody else did and they could interpret it more accurately than anybody else could

The Pharisees were incredibly zealous for following gods command to the very letter

So much so that they didn't just from their money they tied from their spices as well

The average listener would have thought it impossible to even MATCH their righteousness, let alone EXCEED it.

But his statement makes sense when we take him into account what he said about them in other places

Matthew 23 he describes the righteousness of describes and Pharisees as being white tombs, which on the outside are beautiful to look at but on the inside are full of death

Imagine a house with a cracked foundation and all of the studs in the walls have been consumed by termites and there is mold growing on the walls… But you put a fresh coat of paint on outside and landscape the yard.

It would be beautiful to look at as you passed by, but when you actually looked inside you would realize that it needed to be condemned.

That is the claim that he is making about the external righteousness of describes and Pharisees

What you could see on the outside looks great

But what was going on on the inside was anything but righteousness

In fact the only kind of righteousness that you would find is self righteousness

And if we're going to embrace true righteousness, it will not be first and foremost measured by what we look like on the outside but it will be measured by what we look like on the inside.

Because Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets

He usher in the new covenant, the one that God promised through Jeremiah, a relationship with God where God changes us from the inside out because we are powerless to change ourselves.

And listen to what God says about this new covenant:

Jeremiah 31:31–34 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

And through the prophet Ezekiel he says Ezekiel 36:26–27 “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

And when we follow Jesus by faith, when we rest in HIS perfect righteousness, he doesn’t just save us, he transforms us to look more like him

He places his spirit within us change us

When I follow Jesus, I embrace true righteousness because it is a righteousness that is from the inside out, it is a righteousness that changes me

Which is true righteousness.

[CONCLUSION]

The fact of the matter is that God demands righteousness. Jesus says, “without this righteousness, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

But thanks be to God that it is not a righteousness that we must earn by doing the right things.

It is a righteousness that Jesus earned on our behalf, and that by placing our faith in him, by depending on him for the forgiveness of our sins and the transformation of our lives, we become the recipients and benefactors of that righteousness.

Resting in his perfect righteousness

Trusting in his unchanging word

Submitting to his absolute authority

Embracing his complete transformation

By following Jesus, we embrace true righteousness.

[COMMUNION]

Remembrance

Open communion

Don’t mock the cross

Conflict with God

Conflict with others

Ushers, flow, GLUTEN FREE