June 17, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are going to spend the next two weeks together as a church reading Jesus\u2019 teachings in the Sermon on the Mount! The Sermon on the Mount is the first of Jesus\u2019 major teachings recorded in the gospel of Matthew. In it, Jesus explains the ethics and values of the kingdom of Heaven as opposed to the ethics and values of the world. The values and principles that are to govern our lives as followers of Jesus and citizens of the kingdom of Heaven are wildly different from those that govern the various cultures of our world, including the culture in which we live. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the next two weeks, allow the words of the Lord Jesus to challenge the way you think, expose the worldly and idolatrous values and desires of your heart, and transform you to live in the new way that He has laid before us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In these verses Jesus confronts some misunderstandings concerning His teaching ahead of time and sets up some of what He will be teaching about for the remainder of His sermon. He says that He has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets (i.e. the Old Testament Scriptures), but to fulfill them! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is important because, as we will see over the next few days in Matthew 5, at a cursory glance it seems as though Jesus is redefining the Law and the Prophets to mean something else! Jesus is reassuring His audience, and us, that He is not reinterpreting the commands of the Old Testament Scriptures; He is rather explaining their original intent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In verse 20 we see the crux of what Jesus is talking about: the scribes and the Pharisees were the most outwardly pious, religious observers of the Law. They followed the commands of Moses to the extreme, yet Jesus says that, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, our righteousness must exceed even theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the next few sections of this chapter, we will come to understand what Jesus means by this: our obedience to God must not be merely outward, but inward, from the heart. Our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees when we obey God not out of a desire to appear moral or religious, but from a truly transformed heart which seeks and honors and treasures and worships Him above all!<\/p>\n\n\n\n