Beyond Ritual

Tonight we’re continuing our five week series where we are going through Jesus’s teachings in Matthew chapters five through seven. This teaching is known throughout scripture and known throughout the church as the sermon on the mount. Now this sermon, like we talked about last week, is Jesus’s inauguration speech. It launches the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry to the Israelites and into the world.

Here Jesus is proclaiming who he is and what he is going to do.

Last week we saw that Jesus started his teaching off by addressing them on a mountain side, saying blessed are those, In a section called the beatitudes. We see there that Jesus is setting the tone and setting the narrative of how we are supposed to live and how he will change you in your life and how he will use you in this world.

Jesus is calling those people on the mount and now He is calling us and declaring that there is a new way to live. That we live in a world full of…

hate

selfishness

and brokenness

…but that now, through Him we can live in communities of…

wholeheartedness

love

and respect.

The word that Jesus uses for this is righteousness.

A righteous person is someone who consistently does right by God and right by others.

And Jesus says that those who live with righteousness will enter the Kingdom of God. Then He goes on to say that because of that, you are now a witness or a representative of who God is and what He has done and what He can do so go out share that light and in while you are doing that you have to actively preserve your witness.

That means that everything you do is on display for the world to see. So the question is who is that leading others to?

This week we are going to pick up where we left off in Matthew 5:17 and because we are taking the 11 sections of this teaching and I said we were bringing that number down to 5 sections we were supposed to finish out chapter 5 this evening, however I was not able to get all of the rest of chapter 5 in this message so we will only be getting to verse 32

Movie Analogy

How many of y’all have seen the original ‘Karate Kid’ movie?

Mr. Miyagi, Danielson, it’s a great classic movie, it’s a must-watch for sure.

What is the movie about?

Danielson or Daniel Russo moves to a new town and through your normal high school jealousy and drama Daniel finds himself a bully. Not just one bully but multiple bullies. All of these guys that are picking and beating on Daniel just happen to be some great fighters because they attend the best karate dojo in town.

Cobra Kai. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy.

One night Daniel sees an opportunity to get back at good ole Johnny Lawerence by hanging a water hose over his head while he’s sitting in a bathroom stall. Now Johnny didn’t like that vey much so he and his buddies began chasing Daniel. When they finally caught up to him they started beating him up. Then comes Mr. Miyagi who kicks their butt.

Then through a series of events Mr. Miyagi begins to train Daniel in karate for a tournament coming up. Now Daniel thought he was gonna start fighting and hitting people and things and breaking boards or whatever it is you do, but he didn’t do exactly what he was expecting.

What was it that he did? A bunch of chores

Wax on. Wax off.

Paint the fence. Upppp. Downnnn.

Sanded the deck. Just what no one would would ever classify as karate or training or anything other than this guys chores.

PLAY CLIP

What ended up happening? Mr. Miyagi attacked him.

Then what happened? Daniel defended him.

Somehow.

Through no real training.

Daniel was now able to fight and defend himself against Mr. Miyagi in that moment. This was because there was something that became engrained into him as a person as he was doing those things over and over again that made him able to react rightly.

Something inside of Daniel was able to determine how he acted and reacted, and ultimately it would help define him later in life.

Daniel realized in that moment where he was being attacked by this small old man what the purpose of all that stuff was.

What a weird eye opening experience, getting attacked by a real life Yoda.

I share this very loosely related example to try and help you understand how the Israelites became to see the law of Moses.

When YHWH, which is the personal name of God the creator, spoke to Moses in Leviticus 19:2 He told him to tell the Israelites “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

This was God’s purpose for the law.

To make His people holy.

It was how they were called to live right by God and how to do it with His wisdom. They found this wisdom by meditating on their scriptures called the Torah and Prophets. Torah means teaching in Hebrew but in our bible it is translated as The Law.

It’s called the Mosaic Law because the commands are given to Moses on Mt. Siani.

Can anyone tell me what we know these commands as? The 10 commandments.

After the Torah comes The Prophets.

These Prophets continue the story by showing how Israel failed to live by Gods commands but they also write poetry about how the failure was not the end of the story but that God was going to bring the covenant or the partnership to it’s fulfillment.

For the Israelite people God’s wisdom is revealed to anyone who will meditate on the scripture day and night.

There became trouble whenever Israel no longer had their own land. After they were taken over by the Roman Empire they could not follow every one of the 613 laws that they had.

So what did they do?

Here is where the scribes and Pharisees came into play. They would fill in the gaps by discerning God’s wisdom underneath the laws and apply it to other areas of life.

One example of this was the sabbath, or the one day a week they were commanded to not work. There was never anything that explicitly defined what was work and what was not. SO the Scribes and Pharisees would study the scriptures and tell the people what was considered work and what was not.

They would apply God’s wisdom to everyday life in order to display righteousness before God and others. We see Jesus sometimes agrees but at other times heavily disagrees with the religious leaders like the Pharisees at times.

This brought concern to the Pharisees that Jesus was trying to get rid of or that He didn’t take the law seriously. Which is why Jesus addressed this concern in Matthew 5:17-20

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.

Jesus came to fulfill the law. He didn’t come to dismantle or take it apart but to fill it full.

Jesus fulfilled 300 Old Testament Prophecies of the coming Messiah.

Through this statement Jesus is claiming that He is taking the story forward and He is showing how to be righteous and live by God’s wisdom. He is also saying that His vision of righteousness is more aligned with God’s wisdom than anyone else even the religious leaders.

Jesus said “UNLESS your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, who were THE religious leaders of the time, you will never enter into the kingdom of heaven.

What was Jesus saying here?

That you had to be more righteous than the most righteous men in Jerusalem? The most righteous men of the faith?

That;’s exactly what He was saying. The only difference is that He knew that what they were doing on the outside had nothing to do with what was going on on the inside.

They displayed holiness and righteousness to gain favor in the eyes of the people not in the eyes of God. They took pride in their outward conformity despite what was going in their impure hearts. Jesus said in Matthew 23:27-28

Matthew 23:27–28 NLT

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

These people are not righteous. They are deceitful.

They are the ones that are doing the things that are known to us as ‘christian things’.

They’re going to the youth nights, bible studies, and all the camps.

They’re walking the halls with their bibles in their backpacks and a cross around their neck

Maybe even their social media is covered with scripture.

BUT

They’re making fun of the kid that sits alone because he smells bad because he can’t afford deodorant

They’re talking behind her back about what guy she’s dating or what she’s wearing

They’re the ones that are throwing the parties on the weekend and picking fights in the locker room.

They’re the ones who think they are everything and make everyone else feel like they are nothing.

These are the hearts that are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Righteousness. True righteousness. Kingdom righteousness works from the inside out because it first produces changed hearts and new motivations SO THAT the actual conduct of Jesus’s followers does in fact exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. Rom 6:17

Romans 6:17 ESV

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,

Authentic and real discipleship is characterized not only by obedience to rules but by a transformed heart that actively pursues love and justice in every aspect of life.

When you pursue Jesus first “following the rules” is not even a thought. It will become what you do and who you are. You do not even have to know them because they will be written on your heart and apart of who you are.

Jesus goes on to address the law. He is not just addressing thew law but He is actually addressing the misinterpretations and applications by the religious leaders.

It’s good for you to know that just because someone stands in front of you with a title in front of their name and a bible in their hand does not mean they are right. You are called to challenge everything to the Word of God as the authority.

So Jesus addresses and corrects not the Old Testament but the misinterpretations of the Old Testament.

Matthew 5:21–26 ESV

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Your anger makes you liable to the same judgement that of a murderer.

Jesus is saying that anger and name calling is equal to murder.

How does that make sense?

Murdering someone is way worse than getting angry and calling someone a name.

Jesus’s point is not that murder is the same as getting mad and calling names but it all comes back to a deeper root issue. Whether it’s murder, anger, or verbal abuse what you are doing is revealing how much you value, or rather how much you don’t value someones existence.

When an individual commits the act of murder they are saying that their life is not valued and is not worth the time on this earth.

So in the same way that losing your temper or belittling someone is. The wisdom of this command is not to murder or not to get angry but that you are to treat all life as valuable. Any time you devalue someone it is a failure to do right by them.

Jesus’s definition of righteousness is treating everyone as a fellow image of God.

He also says that when you do this you must reconcile with those you have wronged. Not those who have wronged you but those that YOU have wronged.

Jesus puts such an emphasis on this. He says that you should drop your offering at the altar before you offer it as a gift. This offering was an act of worship for the Israelite people.

Jesus commands that before you worship you need to go and reconcile with those that you have wronged so that you may come and worship with a pure heart and a clean spirit.

As Jesus moves into more Old Testament commands He takes that same principle — that righteousness starts in the heart — and applies it to purity.

Matthew 5:27–30 ESV

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

Adultery was not something to take lightly then and it is not something to take lightly now. When one committed adultery they were not only violating another person but they broke the marriage covenant. The same covenant that was a reflection of the relationship between God and His people.

Adultery does not happen on the outside without starting on the inside.

Lust begins in the heart, the center of a persons identity and will. It’s not about finding someone attractive but it goes back to that same principle of valuing another how God values them.

It is not enough to maintain physical purity. It’s not enough to say no to your boyfriend or girlfriend, but you have to say no and win the war in your mind. You must guard yourself and be faithful and pure in your own mind and in your own heart because when you don’t you have already lost that purity in the eyes of God.

That is why it is better to rid yourself of the sin.

Cut off your hand

Gouge out your eye

Unfollow the account

Delete the app

Leave the lunch table

Find a new friend group

Break up with that boyfriend or girlfriend

The stakes are high when it comes to honoring the image of God.

Matthew 5:31–32 ESV

“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

This addressed a highly talked about debate during this time about what the law said about the grounds for a divorce. Men were using divorce and the grounds for it as a reason to abuse the women of the time.

Here Jesus is settling that argument.

He says that if a man divorces his wife for any reason other than sexual immorality then the covenant of Marriage is still intact. This brings accountability to the men on how they were treating women like objects and twisting the scriptures for their own selfish purposes.

Jesus is bringing back the meaning of the marriage covenant and how the covenant is supposed to create dependance and mutual respect so that the two can reflect God’s image as one.

This also brings us back to the main point of all three of these teachings. Jesus is teaching that God’s wisdom in these three commands is aimed at our core desires and motivations and that is what affects how we treat people.

Someone could follow all these rules about murder adultery and divorce but still dishonor and objectify people in other ways.

Real righteousness and real wisdom means treating every human like they have ultimate value. If we value others the way that Jesus is calling us to imagine the world we could create but there are too many people who are chasing the same righteousness that the Pharisees seek.

The kind of righteousness that shows purity to the public, BUT in private.

You’ll be like we talked about last week, you’ll be like the salt that has lost it’s saltiness. There is nothing to preserve because you are so focused on being righteous in the eyes of your peers, parents, or whoever that you have completely forgot that you are supposed to be righteous in the eyes of God.

That means conforming to His definition of righteousness.

How He has called you to be righteous. That in you and in your heart you can form a kingdom righteousness that works from the inside out because you are filled with new motivations and new desires.

That you desire to be holy because the Lord your God is holy.

Matthew 5:48 ESV

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Are you trying to be perfect like the Pharisees. Are you focused on an outward perfection for all to see or do you strive to be perfect and holy and allow God to change you inwardly.