Legalism, License, and Liberty // Sermon on the Mount

Explore the essence of worship and its role in our spiritual journey with this enlightening video. Understand how worship extends beyond words to become a full-bodied response to God's call. Discover the importance of recognizing God's disruptive presence in our lives, urging us to rise to new challenges and perspectives. Delve into the scriptures with us to uncover the living connection between the law, the prophets, and the heart of God. Learn how Jesus' life and teachings fulfill the Old Testament and redefine righteousness, steering us away from the pitfalls of legalism and license. Embrace the freedom of being governed by love and the lordship of Christ. Engage with this video to deepen your understanding of God's story and find your place in His eternal purposes.

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Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast. Church of the Lookout is in Boulder, Colorado, and our vision is Jesus, abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love. Visit us online at thelookout.church. One of my mentors, his name is Ray Hughes. He said, Some things are so true, you can't just say them with words, you have to do them with the perform them with your bodies or through color or through music. And it's so true. What they we just experienced there was a truth that nobody can quite put into words. So let's take a moment and just in our hearts thank the Lord, respond to him. Just close your eyes with me across the room. Jesus, we thank you. We thank you for life, God. We thank you that even in places of death, Lord God, you call us out of our graves. And you call us to take off our grave clothes and to rise with you, God. And I thank you for a rising that is even happening today. And as we witness with our eyes, Lord Jesus, the beauty of what it looks like to move with you, to dance with you, the movement of the Spirit, Lord God, I thank you that that would be true in this body here. We thank you, God, for a rising up. And I believe, Lord Jesus, it's a season even of that. That was a picture of what you're doing in the season you've calling us to leave where we were to rise up with you into a new place. I thank you that it is a call up season. And you're saying to your body in this season, I'm going to disrupt where you are in the status quo of where you are, so that you can follow me into a brand new place. And so I got, I say, may it be so in our lives, in this body, and in this region, Lord Jesus, let us rise with you to see things from your perspective. Resurrectional life. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Come on, let's thank Jesus together. Thank Jesus together. Hey, um, a couple things before we hop into the message here today. First of all, if we haven't met yet, my name is Luke. So good to see you. You're here. I'm here. It's a good day. We got 91 degrees waiting for us after the service. It's going to be awesome. All right. It's a good day. A couple things, though, before we jump straight in. After the service, we get to pray for Pastor Jeanette, who is leaving for the UK for about 14 days or so. And she's going to be doing some ministry over there, doing some prophetic ministry with churches and leaders. A whole team out of Tulsa is going to be going. And so if you want to pray for her after the service, we're going to meet right up here after the service. And she can tell you more about the trip and you can find out other ways to pray for her and support her. But we're going to send her out and blessing from this house. Do you guys love Pastor Jeanette? So awesome. Secondly, and in a couple weeks, our youth are going up the mountain as well. And they're going to be going to summer camp, I believe, up in Camp Como. Any all the youth, they all the other you guys are still no, they all left. They all left. Okay. Just like we have a couple here. But um they're the junior high and the high school are back in the theater. So uh but they're going up. I was talking to Gary, uh our fearless youth leader, and he uh he informed me that they still have a gap in in what they're needing to cover the rest of the cost for summer camp. And so if you go to the uh uh the lookout.church slash give, if you if you do that um online or however you give, um you can look on the drop-down menu. You should see an option for youth summer camp. If you give there, we're looking to raise an extra $2,500 in the next week or so. Um, and so if you want to make an additional contribution to that, that would be huge. A lot of incoming sixth graders that are gonna be going to camp for the first time. So it's awesome. I'm excited. It's gonna be a monumental time. So let's send our kids to camp. Does that sound like a plan? Boom. Everybody stand up for a moment. I want you to find somebody around you you know or you don't know. Welcome them to church today. Introduce yourself, and uh, we'll get going here in just a second. All right, let's take a seat. We're gonna jump in. If you have your Bibles with you, uh you can turn to Matthew chapter five. If you don't have your Bibles, we'll have the scriptures on the screen here today. Always love the paper Bibles, it's a good thing. It's a good thing to have your Bible with you. Any any actual Bible readers in the room here today? Come on, come on. We're so much better than everybody else. I'm joking. I'm joking. Um, so uh this last week, uh a friend of I, a friend of mine, Andy, and I, we uh we were able to go hike up in Boulder, and we're doing this thing where for seven seven consecutive weeks in Wednesday mornings, we're gonna go to a different high place in Boulder, hike up, and just pray the blessings of God over Boulder County, and it's awesome. And as we were hiking this last week, I I was picturing this, I was picturing what Jesus was doing in the Sermon on the Mount. We've been in the Sermon on the Mount for the last several weeks. We're in this journey entering back into this seminal vision that Jesus announces to his disciples and the crowds that are looking in of what the kingdom of heaven will be like, right? And so as I was coming up the mountain uh with my buddy, we were praying as we were going up to royal arch and we were coming up, and I was just picturing Jesus calling us up, just like we were talking about being rising with Jesus, being called up, he calls us disciples up. And in the Sermon on the Mount, it's a similar thing. He calls us up to the mountain. He's and it says that the Sermon on the Mount starts with that Jesus went up to the mountain and the and and his disciples came to him and sat with him, and there he began to teach him. And so as we enter in today, just imagine yourself coming up the mountain of the Lord. What we're doing is we're leaving where we're at and we're going into a new place and we're sitting before Jesus as he teaches us a new way to live, a new way to think, a new way to posture ourselves before him, okay? And in this particular passage, he's still setting up this larger teaching. The Sermon on the Mount is a huge collective of teachings of Jesus. And um, you know, it's easy for us in the church to get so familiar with this passage of scripture we forget how revolutionary it actually is. And so it's so radical that before he even really gets started, he has to lay some foundations. Otherwise, what he's going to say will be written off by some in the crowd. Okay? That's my setup today. Let's stand for the reading of the words here this morning. Matthew 5, 17. Jesus says this, 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 on 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 God. Turn to your neighbor and say, My, my, my. Take a seat, take a seat. Woo, Jesus! Starting with the heavy guns. Have you ever been in the middle of a group conversation that was slightly controvers controversial? Where you're surrounded by people who share vastly mixed opinions on the topic at hand. For instance, Thanksgiving dinner, and all of a sudden Aunt Susan turns to you and says, So where do you land on the vaccines, right? Or you pick any other topic, right? You know what, and you're thinking through the question, and you're thinking through no matter what I say, however I respond to this particular question, it's going to get me in trouble. No matter how thoughtful, how deliberate, how well informed, or whatever, how impassioned you are, even though I know I should say what I believe and this kind of thing, I know that it's gonna potentially cause some other problems in the room, right? Anybody been in a conversation like that? Yes, welcome to 2024. All right? This is every conversation uh that we get into as a culture around dinner tables or wherever we go. There's a lot of uh landmines everywhere we go. And it's it's not much different for Jesus as he's coming into his sermon. He has to set a few foundations and kind of clarify where he's coming from and where he's not. And in this particular case, the club the crowd was split. He's surrounded by a crowd of people, and there's he knows who he's talking to, okay? So they were used to, at this point, they were used to rabbis and teachers coming from all over with a new teaching. All right, this is not a new thing for a rabbi to say, hey, come gather around me. I want to show you my way, my yoke or my uh approach, my interpretation of the law and the prophets, okay? Um, and so as he comes and he says, I have something to say, immediately, as soon as he stands to speak, everyone is trying to size him up. And he knows it. And so part of the crowd, so just so you can kind of uh enter into this, part of the crowd that's sitting with them, the reason they're so captivated and attracted to Jesus, because everything he says is so fresh and so different. It's revolutionary. In fact, in other parts of the scripture, they say it. They said, you know, your words have so much more authority than the scribes and the Pharisees. And they would be filled with wonder. And so they're he was drawing a crowd because there was something so unique, so different, so otherworldly, so different than what they were used to. They're like, oh man, we want more of this, right? Give us the good stuff. We're done with uh the old, tired teachings that are just kind of lead to to you know to oppression. We we we want something new, we need something new. So they loved the revolutionary part of Jesus, that that fresh, captivating part. But there was also others in the crowd who were uh what we'd call extremely faithful to the traditions. And they wanted to know that Jesus was not just a renegade revolutionary, you know, he wasn't just a random dude starting his own YouTube channel, right? And you know, trying to like just just call this whole new following, just out of nowhere. He was, he was, you know, was he one that was in alignment with everything that Israel had hoped for and believed for? Was he in alignment with the law and the prophets? And so Jesus knew he's he's stepping into this really interesting spot where he had to kind of establish himself both as this isn't just everything you you've ever heard before, and also this is in alignment with everything that you've ever hoped for and believed in. You guys with me? And so he has two challenges. He has to both subvert their way of thinking and then call them up into a new way of thinking. All right, he needed to do that in a way that didn't fall into the same old traps. And then everything that follows on the Sermon on the Mount would be an extension of this, okay? So he starts off this particular passage. He's he starts off the Sermon on the Mount with the beatitudes and the blessings and the types of people where his blessings would be with, where his blessings would be. He moves into that where Jeanette took us last week and talking about this this radical new vision of his people, the followers of God being salt and light, actually being sown into the world as good news in the world. And so he takes it a little bit further before he really starts turning everything upside down. He has to talk about what he means about the law and the prophets, okay? You guys hanging with me? So let's talk about the law and the prophets. If you're newer um, you know, to to the scripture in the Bible, that that all sounds a little bizarre, okay? But here's what when Jesus is talking about the law and the prophets, he's talking about the Old Testament scriptures, the history of the Jews and the people of the children of Israel. The law, which is given through Moses, um, consisted of about 613 laws that were both ceremonial, civic, and moral. What do those three mean? So some of the laws were ceremonial, meaning these are the types of things that you need to do to come and worship, just to come into the temple and to be clean and holy. These are the things that you need to do to come and worship. And some of that had to do with the way that you came in and sacrifice, cleanliness, um, things that you would eat or not eat, those kinds of things. Civic laws, which were laws about how you're to conduct yourself as a people, as a nation, all right? And so this is how you treat the poor, this is how you treat your how you treat foreigners, this is this is how you are to operate in relationship with each other, okay? And then there were moral laws. These were like the Ten Commandments. These are laws that that never quite change, they're eternal. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, right? That didn't change from time to time. Those are just eternal laws. A lot of the sexual ethics in the Old Testament also kind of uh came through as moral laws. And here's the purpose of the law, the reason why the law was so important, because God gave the law to the people for a few different reasons. One was to be distinct as a people, to be set apart as a nation, unlike the other nations that had given themselves to other gods and other ways. Okay. One was to be able to approach God and worship. He was giving them a way to actually come before them. He actually longs for his people to come before him and worship. And the only way that they could come before him was for their sins to be atoned for and for and for a very specific way to approach his presence. Okay, so those were the ceremonial laws. And then also the law was given, though, just as a way to manage their sin. It was kind of a sin management. It was both to expose their sin and then really to set them on edge so that they would anticipate a new and a better way, that they would know that this wasn't the only way that God wanted to relate to them for all of time. And and Paul gets into that in the book of Galatians and how the law was really uh you know set up to set us up for the Messiah. So those those were the um those were the laws, 613 laws, okay? Now, those are the laws, but he also talked about the prophets, and the prophets um are there's about 16 prophets in the Old Testament, four major prophets, 12 minor prophets. The prophets were given to call God's people back into his covenant. When they had lost their way, the prophets were given. They were sent to the people to basically expose any errors in their way, call them back into the love of God. And maybe it had to do with the way they were treating the poor, maybe it had to do with walking away from uh from the ways of God, idol worship. There's a lot of different things, and the prophets were given to call them back into the heartbeat of God, and also to prepare the way, to envision them for a day where one was going to come who was going to actually set this right. Okay? And so that's why the law and the prophets were so important. They were such a foundation, because it was God's way of initiating relationship with his people and keeping them on track. Okay? Now, hang with me. In this crowd are two particular types of people. We call the Pharisees and the scribes. Now the scribes had the law memorized as they would meticulously copy the law of Moses, and they would, that's what they were known for, as they would scribe the law, they would actually memorize. So they had much of these, 613, and just the whole Torah, the first five books of the Bible, they would have much of this just completely put to heart, right? Even much of the prophets as well. I believe Jesus had, I believe Jesus had the entire book of Isaiah memorized. It was hidden in his heart, which is why it would just come out time and time again, even in the Sermon on the Mount. So the scribes, they had it, they had it in their memory. Now the Pharisees, probably in a similar way, had much committed to memory, but they had such a high regard. Now listen, we give the Pharisees such a hard time in the church, all right? Like I've never heard anybody go easy on the Pharisees, all right? I'm not saying you should. I'm just saying they I believe what motivated the Pharisees, they had such a high regard for keeping the law of God. I believe initially that they just they feared God. They wanted to do what was right. However, they took these 613 laws and they wanted to foolproof it to make it so we don't even get close to breaking any of these 613 laws. So we're gonna invent some more laws so we don't break those laws. All right? So they would be called like sub-laws or fence laws. Like, we don't even want to get in the general area. Like, so imagine they said, like, you know, do not drink alcohol. They'd be like, you know, don't even go to a party, don't even watch a single commercial with the corona can in it. Don't even put it in your memory, all right? Don't put, don't even put it in your imagination. That's what they would do. They would they would start to create these boundaries that were so much beyond what the original intention was that it created an entire system in itself. Let me give you a couple examples. Exodus 20 verse 10 says, to not work on the Sabbath day, right? And that was a commandment of God. It was for our good. That God created the Sabbath for man, that we would be able to rest with him, rest from our work, and enjoy his work. It's a beautiful law. I believe it still matters an incredible amount in 2024. Yet they took this one thing and they started adding all of their own kind of sub-laws to it. So 39 types of prohibited work so no one would break the law. Here's a few examples. You could not spit on the Sabbath because it would disturb the dirt and you would be guilty of plowing. You could not swat a fly on the Sabbath because you would be guilty of hunting. I kind of take comfort in that because I can tell people I'm a hunter now. A woman could not look at her reflection because she might see a gray hair and pluck it out, which would be doing work. Okay. Now, that was those are the kinds of things that they would do. They would go so such extremes. Like, who could do this? But it did that didn't disappear. Like if you go to New York City right now, um, it's probably a lot of different cities, but I've seen this in New York, they have Sabbath elevators. We'll have it on the screen here in a second. Sabbath elevators. And on in a Sabbath elevator, it's a day where you you're not allowed to push the button in the elevator because doing this is too much work. And so on the Sabbath elevator, it stops at every single floor from top to bottom. And I just imagine what would be going through my wife's head if she had to go through every single floor, top to bottom. But if you can imagine like every single floor because of that. So that would be an example of like this, would be an extreme example of we have such a high regard for one thing, but over time we want to almost outdo God and his giving of the law to prove to him that we're not going to come anywhere near it, and it puts the righteousness back on us, not on God's intention to call us into his covenant love. You guys with me? And so this is the kind of thinking that Jesus is disrupting. They had the law, but they had completely missed the point of it. Have you ever been so obsessed with getting things right that you miss the heart of it? Have you been so obsessed with what you want for your kids and keeping them from trouble, keeping them from harm that you miss the heart of it? Have you been so obsessed with what you're trying to accomplish in your work that you forgot why you even do the work and what God's purpose is in the work for you? This we this could apply to so many different things, but in church world and in in in religious structures, what happens when our lives start to be ordered around the keeping of laws and rules and just doing things right? In church world, we we can call this a form of legalism, all right? Of you have heard that word, legalism. And many of you grew up in a church that was strict, bounded. It was really what was celebrated and not celebrated was uh around a list of do's and don'ts. And over time, what happens here is your desire for holiness turns into mathematical formula that actually sucks the life out of your bones. And it's a it's a real thing. And uh and some of you know what that's like to grow up in a culture that has no heart and all of the to-dos and all of the tasks. But the thing is that's that's usually short-lived because you can't survive that long in that kind of culture, at least if you're honest. Because what happens is it starts to suffocate you. And so here's what you here's what we see. So if a culture of legalism is ruled by law, what happens, and I this is almost like 99% of the time, anytime you grow up in a culture that is strict and prohibitive of just like what you can do or not do, as soon as you cut the cords of legalism, it's gonna swing straight over into another kind of culture. We can call license, all right? And license just basically means freedom. I'm I'm gonna do what I want. Now, when you when you step out of a very restrictive, suffocating, limiting kind of culture, um, immediately, this happens for a lot of youth after they graduate high school, immediately they go off to college, they go somewhere, and they do the complete opposite of whatever they grew up with. And or if you grew up in a church culture that was tight like that, we can you can swing way over. And what happens is you actually start to um find freedom and being able to be let out of the noose of legalism. And it actually, for a time, it's very freeing. You can actually breathe again. And uh and it's and and and that feels refreshing, that feels um full of life, um because that weight has been lifted off your shoulders. You start to surround yourself with people that feel the same. And so you start to create a community of people who refuse to judge you. And uh, and and a lot of the language that comes out when you swing over into a licensed culture, we're gonna do what we want, is like, listen, God loves us no matter what. So uh we're not gonna be judgy, we're not gonna be judgy kinds of people. This is a judge-free environment, right? And so, this is some of the language that you you start to hear. And uh, and and so people in this either have left the church altogether or they're trying to find a church where pretty much anything goes. And the danger here is this is that when we swing over into a culture of license, we mistake freedom as permission to live however we want and believe that somehow God is just okay with that. Crickets. But here's the deal Jesus didn't free you from religion only for you to be enslaved by your flesh. He loves you too much. The flesh is not a better master than religion. So when I say flesh, I'm talking about our own desire, our own carnal desires, is what the New Testament would talk about, just the unredeemed, unsanctified part of who we are, where our desires are misplaced. And we think we know what's best, we think we know what we want, we think we know what will lead to life. But the flesh is just as bad of a liar. And when you follow your flesh, it leads to death. So Jesus didn't free us from religion only for us to become our own masters. And so this is why Jesus said, do not think that I have come to abolish the law of the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but but to fulfill them. He said, Don't do the thing where you just need a new way. So you abolish everything before. I'm just gonna throw that all out and go into a new way. He's like, that's not what I'm doing. I'm coming to fulfill the law and the prophets. I have a better way forward. And that way is the way of liberty. It's the way of liberty where we are ruled by love. Because here's the truth: all of us will be ruled by someone or something. All of us. If you think you're not, you that's part of the problem. All of us will be ruled. Some of us will be ruled by laws, some of us will be ruled by ourselves. But when we come in to follow Jesus, we enter into his loving lordship and rulership over life. Where our lives are now governed by love. Where our when I wake up every day, I'm not thinking, I wonder how I can do whatever the heck I want to do today and get away with it. And it's not, I wonder how I can just nail it today so that I can be worthy and deserving of God's love. No, it's I wake up today and God, I thank you that you have loved me, and I know the evidence of your love is the fact that you died for me and you sent your spirit to live inside of me. You've adopted me into your love through the Father, through through the spirit of adoption given by the Father. I have now been loved. And so now, today, my day, I give you permission to order according to your love. What do you want me to do today, God? You're my master, you're my Lord, you're my king. And so within the bounds of love, we have liberty. This is why Jesus would later say, all of the law and the prophets can be summed up in two commandments, which is what? Love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And number two, love your neighbor as yourself. So Jesus said, I'm gonna make this very simple for you. Everything that you're trying to order your life around really needs to, you need to be reconnected to the heartbeat. And the heartbeat is this do everything you can to love God and love others. If you do those two things, you will fulfill all of the law and the prophets. That's good news. So within the it's an it's a gracious boundary. So that's the thing. If we have liberty within that boundary, do whatever you want, do whatever you want, basically, as long as your lives are ordered in the love of God and the love of your neighbor. And so we're ruled by love. And so this is why Jesus, when he was talking and he's setting this, I mean, people are wondering how does he actually read the scriptures? What does he do with the Old Testament? He had to show them that his yoke, which means his teaching, his way, was both ancient and revolutionary. He didn't do one or the other. It was both ancient and revolutionary. He wasn't scrapping the past just because the scribes and the Pharisees got it wrong. He was calling them back into the heart of it. He was moving them from exterior righteousness to interior righteousness. And that's what happened time and time again. He would draw people back into what is the point of all of this? And this is what the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, he he starts to speak unto the way of living that would actually fulfill the law. Now, that word fulfill is really interesting. He came to fulfill, he came to fill it up. And that's that's what the word fulfill means, to fill something up. Imagine a container being filled up or or to be filled up like to fill in, like to color in. Um, if you've ever had had to fill out like a color by number sheet or something like that, you you color it in. That's what I've always had a lot of respect for uh for painters, specifically one who you might know, named Bob Ross. Any Bob Ross fans out there? I mean, just for a moment, can we just give honor where honor's due? I mean, you for a white dude, you can't get a t a fro tighter than that, all right? Well kept. Well done, Bob. And uh I don't know about you, but when I like when I used to watch Bob Ross and he would start his painting, and uh he'd just get some broad brush strokes to start, right? And he's filling in some color, he's filling, but you have no idea where he's going with it. And you're thinking, Bob, what are you doing with this thing, right? Like, like this doesn't look like anything. But it just like almost like in an instant, he starts to paint his happy little trees, right? He just a few strokes, and then all of a sudden it starts to fill in. You're like, oh my gosh, Bob, how did you do that, right? Bob, I didn't we had no idea where you were taking this. All right. It starts with the basics, it starts with the structure, it starts with the outline. But that didn't give you enough. You can't quite fill it in. You're trying to fill it in with your imagination, you can't quite do it, but then Bob has to just take you there, right? He has to take you to the moment of revelation. Thank you, Bob. So, in a similar way, though, the Old Testament was like a sketch. It was a sketch of what God was doing. It was the starting point, it was the broad brushstrokes, it was the shape, it was the boundaries, but it was not the fulfillment, it was not the color and the texture, it was not the vision of what God was doing. And so Jesus was saying that well, this is very important. Jesus is saying, like, listen, all of that that you know that is hidden in your heart, that is hidden in your mind, everything that you based your lives around, it's just the starting point. But if you follow me, I'm going to bring it to life. I'm going to breathe life into everything that you've ever believed, everything you've organized your life around, and it's going to be better than you've ever dreamed of. I'm going to invite you back into God's original purposes and intent for humankind. And this is the good news here. Listen, Jesus is saying, in saying this, he was saying that God had not abandoned his original purposes or promises for the world he loves, but he was bringing it to completion. And I think we've already said it today during our time of worship. It's already been prayed. I do believe this is a word for somebody here today that I just want to remind you that God has not abandoned his promises towards you. It might be really hard right now in this season of life to see the forest through the trees, so to speak. It might be really hard to see what God's doing, but God, God's plan for you, God's plan for us is not to abandon our lives or not to not to waste any of our failures, not to waste any of our pain, but to bring it to redemption and to completion. God wastes nothing. And he will bring your story into completion. He's not about just separating you from your past, he's about redeeming your past and let it be used as a weapon against the enemy for the rest of your life. And listen, it can be very disorienting, like Michael was sharing earlier. It can be very disorienting to be praying prayers and not see any completion. But I'm telling you, the word of God is eternal and it will not return void. It won't. We don't always see where it's going. Sometimes it looks like a lot of broad brush strokes, and it's been there for a long time. I'm telling you, Jesus is faithful. He's faithful to you. This is why he's worth following. And what he's saying to these guys is like, listen, I have not abandoned a single dot. Iota. Whatever that means, right? It's the smallest, it's actually the smallest character within like the Hebrew alphabet. Other translations say uh jots and tittles. Which sounds like a serial or something like that. Jots and tittles. I haven't abandoned any jots and tittles. And he means it. And this is why he says, this is why he says, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass away from the law until all is accomplished. Now, what is he saying there? Some people look at that as like some kind of end times thing. Oh, heaven and earth is gonna pass away, and then all of this will go. That's not that's not how he's like the language that he's using, that's not what he's doing. Much of Jesus' language, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, is hyperbolic, which means he is he exaggerates points in order to make a point. He goes way beyond in order to say something very simple. So later on you'll hear him say stuff about plucking your eyes out or cutting your hand off, those kinds of things, which he doesn't actually mean, but he has to kind of take it just below your mind for a second to get to the heart of something. He's doing the same thing here. What is more enduring than the earth and the sky? Not much. And so he's saying, until all of this disappears, nothing will disappear from the word of God. Nothing. And what he's saying by that is that he's showing them there's nothing more enduring and internal than the word that has come from the mouth of God and his plans and his purposes. It will not return void. And he continues, he says, Whoever relaxes one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Ouch! But whoever does not do them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Okay, so he immediately clarifies again that he's not doing away with the law, but let's just pause it there for a second. That's a little funny because just shortly he seems to go really relaxed on the law. Because in in the following passages, he's gonna say things like, You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth, but I say to you. And so he starts to reinterpret things one after the other. Not only that, but he's the guy who gets in trouble for picking wheat on the Sabbath day. He's the guy that gets in trouble for touching a woman with a blood condition that would make him unclean. So he's the kind of guy that started to do the types of things that looked pretty relaxed. It looked pretty relaxed. But what he was doing in this, he's not saying that, he's not saying that we should still be following the Old Testament law to a T. He was saying that every single part of the law must be fulfilled, and there must be one to fulfill them, and that he he was setting himself up to say, I am the one who is going to perfectly execute every part of the law so that it will come into full fulfillment. So now you're not just following a law, you're following a new Lord, you're following me into the into a life of love. You guys with me? That's good. That's a good news. So that being said, today we have to remember, can we just remind ourselves that the scriptures matter a whole lot? And I can't underestimate, I can't underemphasize this enough. The scriptures matter, even the uncomfortable parts, even the parts that are confusing and you don't understand, even the parts that you gotta spend some time with and rustle down for a little bit. Because when we come to the scriptures and interpret the scriptures through the lens of Christ, all of a sudden the world is now filled with color and texture and shape and flavor and seasoning. Because Jesus is all in this from start to finish, and he is not abandoning any word of this, he's fulfilling much of it. He's completing what he started so that at the end of the day, when we get to see him face to face, we look into his eyes and we see everything we've ever given our lives to. It'll all be summed up in him. Thank you, Jesus. And this is why even Jesus, this is why even Jesus, when he was walking with his disciples, he wasn't just giving them new ideas, he was connecting it back with the scriptures. In Luke 24, the men who were walking away from the death side of Jesus as they were walking on the road to Emmaus, he catches up with them on the side of the road, and they're very disappointed, extremely disappointed, because they had no idea what was happening, they had no context for why the Son of God would have to die. But it says as he caught up with them on the road, he began to walk them through all the law and the prophets and the scriptures to show them why everything that had happened needed to happen in order to fulfill what God was doing. In other words, he wanted to show them that even he was entering into the storyline of God. God doesn't just enter into our stories, we're entering into his story, church. And I just want to remind you today if you're ordering your life just upon just trying to get God to show up in your life, I'm saying a much better life is when you show up to the story of God and you say, God, show me my place and your eternal story and help me to live into that because I want to be a part of something that is eternal and that matters. Are you guys with me? It's a much better option. Much better, much less disappointing. And uh, and you start to realize that our lives are just really small at the end of the day. Incredibly significant, but so small, guys. We are just like just small players in the eternal purposes of God, but what a better life to live, to give ourselves into everything that God is doing and to see God bring it to life in our day and our time. We are seeing things being brought to life in our day and our time. His purposes on earth, I believe, and we don't have time to get into any of that, but it's happening if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. You can enter into the story of God by his grace, by his mercy. Your life matters. Your life matters when it comes into the story of God, because that's how he made you, that's how he designed you to enter into his life and his love and his leadership. Woo! Come on, I'll just keep going, guys. I'm preaching to myself right now. I don't even care about you, I'm preaching to myself. You guys can leave. I'm just gonna keep going. And the apostles did the same thing. Stephen has rocks being thrown at him as he has a revelation of Jesus, and he's standing before Jesus, this open revelation, the first martyr, the first one to give his life. What an amazing privilege to be the first person to give your life as a martyr for Jesus. And as he is facing these crowds that are just up-ended, rocks about to be thrown at him, all he can do is just trace back the scriptures and how Jesus was the fulfillment of everything they had ever hoped and dreamed. Stephen was not living for himself, he was living in a story. And Jesus invites us into what he is fulfilling in his story. The whole story is God's story, nothing will be wasted. Philippians 1 6, he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion. Some of you, that's a word for you. He who began a good work will carry it on to completion. And then he ends this passage, and we'll wrap up here in just a second, so just hang with me. He ends this passage with the punchline. He brings, he just, it's just a whole one-to-punch, and he ends with like the big enchilada right here. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God. Now, as soon as he said this, Jaws dropped. Because what righteousness can level up to the scribes or the Pharisees? They got it all memorized for Pete's sake, right? They have laws for laws. And everyone's like, well, how is the righteousness going to exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees? And and again, he ties it back into there's a new way, and it's the law, not of it's it's you're not being ruled by laws, you're being ruled by love. It's the way of love and covenant faithfulness. It's a different way of living into covenant faithfulness. It's not based on your own righteousness, it's based on righteousness that is given to you as a gift. And so this is where Jesus begins to hint at there is another kind of righteousness. It's not external, it's from the inside out. It's from the inside out. And unless you have a righteousness that is from the inside out, you have no righteousness at all. And the only way that you'll be able to enter into a righteousness is by believing and living into and trusting the work that He is fulfilling right before their eyes. You need a new way forward. Righteousness, right standing, if you it's it's it's an interesting word. It's kind of hard to know what it means. It just means right standing with God, who wants to be in right standing with God, and right standing with men and women, right standing with your neighbor. It's it's peaceful relationships with your neighbors. It's a peaceful relationship with God. The only way into that is by trusting in the full story of God culminating in the very giving of his life, his body and his blood given for us that we, that his righteousness could become our righteousness. Somebody thank Jesus in this place. Oh, I'm so thankful. This isn't based on my own righteousness. Anybody else? Oh man, we'd be in so much trouble. But he's given us his righteousness. Close your eyes. God, we thank you. We thank you for your scriptures, God. We thank you for your story and your plan and your this unfolding saga. And God, I confess that I have a hard time making sense of it most days. But I thank you, Jesus. That as we share this space together, what we're celebrating is that you've included us in all you're doing. I thank you that God that you have given us your enduring word. And I thank you that you're committed to every word you speak and every promise that comes out of your mouth. Not one will return void. It will last longer than the heavens and the earth. So this morning we pray that your word is hidden in our hearts. I pray for my brothers and sisters, Lord God, those who have had a hard time seeing, God, the storyline, have a hard time seeing that you plan to complete the story even in their lives, God. I I God, we we hold before you even these disruptions in our lives, these things that we that blindsided us, these things that came from different angles that we did not expect, that maybe even derailed our lives. I thank you, God, that even with those things, God, your plan and intention, Lord Jesus, is to redeem and to complete and to fulfill. God, you color in our lives. So we thank you, God, for the peace that comes from trusting in you. We thank you for the righteousness given on the cross. And so we stand before you, Lord God, those as we as we confess your name. And if you have not confessed the name of Jesus this morning as your Lord and Savior, I invite you to do that. You can just say, Jesus, I receive you. Jesus, I I need you, and I give myself to you. That's all you have to say. And as you do, his righteousness becomes your righteousness. We thank you, God. This is who we are. Thank you, God. Can you just tell him? Can you bring glory to his name? Let's just together thank Jesus, give glory to his name in this place. We thank you for who you are, God. You are worthy of our praise. You're worthy of our worship, God. We thank you, Father. We thank you that you've called us sons and daughters. We thank you, Holy Spirit, that you've been given to us. It's the power of God alive on this earth. We thank you for your way, which is higher than the world's ways. We thank you for the power to stay in step with the Spirit today as we go. I just want to invite you this morning. Listen, some of you need some prayer in your life. Maybe you've had some personal crises, some sickness, some illness, some things happening in your life that are very real. You feel like they're distracting you, they're derailing you. You need someone to pray with you today. We're gonna have our prayer team up front. You're gonna see a purple badge around their neck. They want to pray with you, okay? And I want to encourage you, don't minimize what you're going through of I got it. It's just going to be okay. No, this is why the body is given the body. We are here to pray for one another. All right. So if you're going through anything in your life, a relational discord or any kind of thing that you just need some extra prayer support, come up forward after the service, get some prayer. Let's be together as the church body. And listen, Pastor Jeanette's gonna be here after the service, um, over here on the side. Let's come over and pray for her. Um, for anybody willing to lay hands on her, pray for her. There's gonna be a graduation party on the back side of the building. So I was told to let you know that everybody's invited to Addie Keppen's uh graduation party because you're all part of the family. So if you didn't get an invitation, you're still invited. Um that's gonna be back in the theater after the service. And uh that being said, I just want to bless you to go in the full identity of who God has called you to be. Amen. So may the Lord bless you and keep you. May He make His face to shine upon you, may He be gracious to you and give you peace. Go in the name of Jesus. Love you guys.