The Christian's Righteousness

I wonder how many of you know the name Fiorello LaGuardia. Raise your hand if you do.

For most of you, if you have heard this name, it is probably in connection with an airport in New York City.

That airport was named after the beloved mayor who led that city through most of the Great Depression and all of WWII.

What’s funny about that is that if you’ve ever been through that airport, you might wonder how they could have been thought that it would honor LaGuardia to give that terrible airport his name.

But New Yorkers did, indeed, love Fiorello LaGuardia. They called him Little Flower, because he was only 5’4”, and he always wore a carnation in his lapel.

“He was a colorful character who used to ride the New York City fire trucks, raid speakeasies with the police department, take entire orphanages to baseball games, and whenever the New York newspapers were on strike, he would go on the radio and read the Sunday funnies to the kids.

“One bitterly cold night in January of 1935, the mayor turned up at a night court that served the poorest ward of the city. LaGuardia dismissed the judge for the evening and took over the bench himself.

“Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. She told LaGuardia that her daughter's husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving.

“But the shopkeeper, from whom the bread was stolen, refused to drop the charges. ‘It's a real bad neighborhood, your Honor,’ the man told the mayor. ‘She's got to be punished to teach other people around here a lesson.’

“LaGuardia sighed. He turned to the woman and said ‘I've got to punish you. The law makes no exceptions--ten dollars or ten days in jail.’

“But even as he pronounced sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket. He extracted a bill and tossed it into his famous [hat], saying: ‘Here is the ten dollar fine which I now remit; and furthermore I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat. Mr. Baliff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.’”

“So the following day the New York City newspapers reported that $47.50 was turned over to a bewildered old lady who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren.

“[F}ifty cents of that amount [was] contributed by the red-faced grocery store owner, while some seventy petty criminals, people with traffic violations, and New York City policemen, each of whom had just paid fifty cents for the privilege of doing so, gave the mayor a standing ovation.” [Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Embracing the Unconditional Love of God, (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah Press, 1990], 91-92]

What a beautiful picture of grace!

So often, we New Testament Christians want to set grace against the Law. We like to say that Jesus fulfilled the Law and that it has now been set aside by grace.

And, in fact, Jesus Himself said the first part of that statement, but He never said the second part. In fact, what He said, as we shall see in a few moments as we read from Matthew 5:17-20, was just the opposite of the last part of that statement.

He didn’t come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.

Just as LaGuardia understood that the law against stealing was a good thing and that it was on the books for a purpose, Jesus knew that the law that had been given through Moses to the people of Israel was a good thing and had been given to them for a good purpose.

So, as He preached to His disciples this radical message that we know as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus rightly understood that He needed to contend with the questions that likely were already developing in their minds.

Remember that Jesus had started this sermon with a series of blessing statements that called for His followers to be completely different than the world around them.

They would be blessed by admitting their spiritual poverty. They would be blessed by mourning over their sin. They would be blessed in their complete submission to God’s will for their lives. They would be blessed by having a an unquenchable craving for things to be right in this world.

They would be blessed by being merciful, by being genuine and by being makers of peace. And they would be blessed because of the negative way the lost world would respond to these counter-cultural and even subversive traits that they demonstrated in their interactions with those outside of the Kingdom of Heaven.

But even in the face of persecution, He reminded the disciples that they would influence the world through their Christlikeness, through both their confrontation of evil in the world and their demonstration of good. He called them — and He calls us — to be both salt and light.

But so much of this message was already going against the grain of what the religious leaders in Jerusalem had been teaching that Jesus must have anticipated the objections that were forming in the minds of His followers.

And it’s likely that He already had heard some rumblings from those religious leaders themselves.

Here was a man who was teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven, telling His listeners that the Kingdom had come, and He was performing the very miracles that the prophets had taught were to be expected when the Messiah came.

What’s more, He was teaching with an authority that went beyond anything the religious leaders of that time could claim.

But why had He not mentioned the Law? After all, the Law was God’s good gift to the people of Israel. And the Law, at least from the perspective of the scribes and Pharisees, the great legal men and the great legalists, was the means of salvation.

So why hadn’t Jesus mentioned the Law? Maybe this popular new teacher in Jerusalem intended to say the Law didn’t matter anymore.

And here’s where we will pick up in our study of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:17.

Matthew 5:17–20 NASB95

“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. “For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. “Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now, I’ll tell you right up front that this is a tricky passage for Bible scholars.

What did Jesus mean when He said He had come to fulfill the Law? How are we to interpret His statement in verse 18, which seems to say that the Mosaic Law is still in effect — all of the 10 Commandments and the more than 600 other statutes and ordinances from the Old Testament books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy?

How do we reconcile that with other New Testament passages that clearly state that Christians are no longer subject to the Law?

What did Jesus mean when He said that “not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished”?

And how could anyone hope to enter the Kingdom of Heaven if the requirement to do so was that their righteousness surpass that of the scribes and the Pharisees, who were so well known for being so rigorous in keeping all those commandments?

All these questions have caused great debate among biblical scholars for centuries, and the answers they have come up with have been all over the map.

But I think the key to understanding what Jesus was saying in these four verses — the key to understanding the Christian’s righteousness, is found in verse 20.

Matthew 5:20 NASB95

“For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Remember just how righteous the scribes and Pharisees thought they were. They were so exacting in their obedience to the Law that they even tithed of their spices — their mint, and their dill, and their cummin. If the scribes and Pharisees were so careful in keeping the Law, how could anyone expect to be more righteous than them?

There are two answers to that question, really. One of them has to do with outward obedience versus obedience of the heart, and we’ll start talking about that next week. But the other answer is found right in this passage today.

Matthew 5:17 NASB95

“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.

When Fiorello LaGuardia was faced with the puzzle of how to fulfill the requirements of the law in the case of the grandmother who stole bread to feed her grandchildren, He upheld the Law AND he showed grace and mercy to the woman.

And I think that’s what’s going on in this passage, too.

Jesus knew that the Law was good. He is, after all the Word of God, and all the words that we have in Scripture, whether they are printed in red in your Bibles or not, are His words.

All of those 613 or so commandments to the people of Israel were given to them by the Holy Spirit, through the prophet Moses, to help them know how to be a people set apart to God.

Jesus wasn’t coming along to tell them that what Moses had written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit was now somehow null and void.

In fact, as we’ll see next week, what He told them was that their religious leaders had interpreted those commandments too narrowly. And what He said in today’s passage was that the Law would not pass away until heaven and earth pass away.

That might have sounded like bad news to a people who had demonstrated from the very beginning that they were all-but incapable of keeping the commandments.

But Jesus said He had come to fulfill the law. And here is where I think the illustration of Fiorello LaGuardia is so helpful.

LaGuardia saw that the woman in the courtroom was in an untenable position, but he could not simply brush that good law against stealing aside, either.

So he fulfilled the law by issuing the $10 fine, and then he showed grace by paying the fine himself and collecting money for her from all who were in the courtroom.

And I think that what Jesus is saying here is that He had come to do something similar. He knew the people could not keep the Law themselves — they could never become more righteous than the scribes and the Pharisees, and so they could never enter the Kingdom of Heaven on their own merits.

Remember that first beatitude? “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” In other words, blessed are those who admit that they are spiritually bankrupt, those who realize that there is no amount of self-righteousness that will merit them a place in God’s Kingdom.

The only way that such people could be blessed would be by an act of grace from the King of kings and Lord of lords, an act by which He stoops down to we who are unworthy of even His attention and blesses us.

And the way that Jesus would do that is by fulfilling the Law Himself.

We who have followed Jesus Christ in faith tend to think of the negative way in which He represented us.

He took our sins. He paid the price for our rebellion on the cross at Calvary, where He suffered the physical torment of that torture and death and also the spiritual torment of being separated for the first time in eternity from the love of His Father in heaven, with whom He had existed eternally in perfect love and community.

In those three hours of darkness as Jesus hung on the cross, He was alone for the first time ever, and when we think about that, we can understand why He cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

And this negative way in which Jesus represented us is, of course, vitally important.

We who have rebelled against God in our sins — and that’s every one of us here today — could never repay the debt that our sins piled upon us. No acts of righteousness — no amount of good deeds — could ever close the gap between us and a perfect and holy God that is created by just one act of sin.

Sin creates a separation from God that we could never bridge. It creates a debt that we could never repay. But Jesus paid that debt at the cross, and the cross has become our bridge.

We can enter the Kingdom of Heaven — we can be adopted as sons and daughters of God Himself — through faith in Jesus and the sufficiency of his sacrifice on our behalf at the cross.

If you will admit that you are a sinner and completely unable to save yourself from the just punishment for your sins, if you will believe that Jesus is who He said He is and that He will do what He said He will do, and if you will confess Him as your Savior and Lord, then you will be saved. You will become part of the Kingdom of Heaven, adopted as a son or daughter of God.

That’s the message of the gospel, and it is, indeed, a negative message.

It’s negative in at least two ways. First, it’s negative, because we must admit the bad news that we are sinners deserving punishment before we get the good news that we can be saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus. And second, it’s negative, because it required Jesus to take the punishment that we deserve for our sins.

But we often forget that Jesus represented us positively, as well. He fulfilled the Law on our behalf. Knowing that we could never achieve the righteousness of God, He achieved it for us.

Knowing that we could never be the made-in-His-image people whom God created us to be, Jesus, whom Scripture calls the image of the invisible God, lived the sinless and perfectly righteous life that none of us could ever live.

The Law and the Prophets — that was a Jewish way of describing the entirety of the Old Testament during that time — came to complete fruition in Jesus, and He fulfilled them entirely.

He kept all of God’s commandments, both outwardly and in His heart, and He lived in complete submission to God, setting aside His own will for God’s will.

He did what we never could do. But for the Christian — for the one who has followed Jesus in faith — there is a real sense in which we, because we are now “in Christ” — have fulfilled the law and in which our righteousness now surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees.

The Apostle Paul put it this way in 2 Corinthians:

2 Corinthians 5:21 NASB95

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Because Jesus took on our sins, we who follow Him in faith now take on His righteousness.

Because we could never fulfill the Law on our own, He fulfilled it for us.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we should just go on as if the commandments do not matter.

Matthew 5:18–19 NASB95

“For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. “Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

As followers of Christ, we are called to keep the commandments of Christ, and He summed them all up in two statements: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength, soul, and mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.

That’s how He responded when the lawyer asked Him what was the greatest commandment. “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

In other words, that’s what the Old Testament was about in a nutshell. It was about teaching us how to love God and how to love our neighbors and showing us how wrong things can go when we fail to do these things.

As followers of Jesus, then, we should understand that these commandments still apply, and as we will see next week, the WAY we apply them isn’t to be in some external display of our own righteousness, but rather in a wholehearted effort to show our love for God by our love for others.

That’s what yesterday was about, by the way. Someone said to me how wonderful it would be if we were to gain new members of our fellowship as a result of our Family Fun Day. And, I must admit that it would be wonderful if that were to happen.

But the truth is that I didn’t approach this outreach with that in mind, and I don’t approach any of the things we do in the community with this in mind. I simply want to show God how much I love Him by showing love to those He loves, and I want to teach the church to do the same.

Yesterday was a brilliant example of the Church keeping and teaching God’s commandments, and I believe it brought glory and honor to His name.

But there will come a day when these commandments DO pass away. We see that in Jesus’ statements in verse 18. “UNTIL heaven and earth pass away” and “until all is accomplished” the law remains.

This is a reference to the eternal kingdom in the new heavens and the new earth that will come to pass after the Great Tribulation and the Millennial Kingdom and the great day of judgment.

At that time, we who have followed Jesus in faith will have received our glorified bodies. We will no longer have the taint of sin upon us; we will no longer experience even the temptation toward sin.

And so, there will no longer be any need for the commandments, because there will be no sin for the Law to expose. All will be as God intended it to be from the beginning; loving God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves will be as natural to us in that day as breathing is to us today.

But that is the not-yet Kingdom. We still live in the already Kingdom, and while we do so, we need to be clothed in the righteousness of Christ and not in our own righteousness.

That is the way your righteousness will surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees.

BE who you ARE in Christ.

The Christian’s influence is salt and light in this tasteless and dark world, and it is a function of the Christian’s righteousness. And the Christian’s righteousness is the righteousness of Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being.

BE who you are.

Now, if you have followed Jesus Christ in faith, I want to invite you to join us this morning as we participate in the Lord’s Supper.

This is one of two ordinances given by Jesus to believers. The other is baptism. Neither the Lord’s Supper nor baptism have the power to save you — we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

But both baptism and the Lord’s Supper were commanded by Jesus as acts of obedience to Him and as ways of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him.

So, if you have made the decision to follow the risen Christ in faith that He is the Son of God and Redeemer of your soul, then I hope you will join us as we participate in this sacramental meal that dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.

Go ahead and open your communion packets — and I want to again thank Amy Ford for putting these together for us.

If you are a Christian watching at home, feel free to join us with bread and juice or water — the early church used both as part of its communion observance.

The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today, but the significance was the same as it is today.

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus} we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle and join hands, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”