Matthew 5:27-37, How Different Is It?, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Matthew chapter 5 verse 27 and 37. Hear the word of the Lord. 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 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.

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.

Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the

Lord what you have sworn. But I say to you, do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king.

And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black.

Let what you say be simply yes or no. Anything more than this comes from evil.

May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. Well, if you're originally from somewhere else, like a lot of us here, or you have lived somewhere else for a while, how different is it here than elsewhere?

Or maybe I should say, how different is elsewhere than here? I think one of the biggest lessons

I learned from living elsewhere was how different things can be. I mean, like all kinds of things.

The way people talk, they eat. I don't talk, I don't just mean different languages, there's that too. But just even in the same language, in English, or dress, or eat, or drive.

When I moved to California right after college, I thought, this place is so different.

I'm sure that the flag is the same, the money is the same, the language was kind of the same.

But so many other things were different. In fact, I felt so different there, I virtually considered myself a foreign student.

And so I contacted the Office for International Students at the seminary, where I got to know Mary's roommate, who was from Brazil.

And I figure, hey, she's from South America. I'm from the South of America. So we're similar.

We're both different from here. That's what we had in common. Well, then I moved to Singapore and really found out how radically different things can be.

Things are different which you didn't even know could be different. Even before you arrive, as you're coming in to land on the plane, they give you an immigration card to fill out.

And it says at the top, this quaint Chinese -looking font. It's in English, but it says,

Welcome to Singapore. Nice and inviting from the tourist bureau, I guess. And then directly below that, in all caps and red ink,

DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS. Whoa, this is different. Laws are enforced not just with fining in prison or death, but also with caning, which is basically corporal punishment for adults.

Whereas we're obsessed with sports here in America, Singaporeans are amazed that we have whole radio stations that don't do anything but talk about sports.

Here, parents are told to attend their kids' athletic events to show support for them. In Singapore, two schools can be playing a soccer game against each other, and not one parent will be in the stand.

I'm not joking. I saw the game. That's not one parent in the stands watching the kids play.

But when the exam scores come out, oh man, they're all over that. I mean, they're involved in their kids' tutoring and their lessons and all that.

And then the exam scores come out. The highest scorer is on the front page of the newspaper. He's interviewed for the

TV news. He or she gets their 15 minutes of fame. They're all over it. They're involved in their students' academics.

Americans will take pictures of their pets and put them on Facebook. Asians will take pictures of their food and put it on Facebook, which

I guess means, what, Koreans can do both at the same time, I guess. Americans and other Westerners eat with a fork and knife.

In Singapore, they always say fork and spoon. I kept, no, it's fork and knife. But of course, for Asian food, you don't need a knife because the chef does all the slicing, cutting.

Asians will use, of course, chopsticks. Americans and other Westerners don't usually take their shoes off until their own bedrooms, putting them in the closet or maybe under their bed.

Asians, of course, take their shoes off at the door to keep from bringing any dirt in from the world. Americans will usually take their shower in the morning before going out to the world.

Asians will usually take their shower after coming home from work so they're clean from that dirty world that they were in.

Everything can be different. Now, often those differences are neither right or wrong.

They're just different. Chopsticks aren't right and forks aren't wrong. But some things are right or wrong.

Once in Singapore at a lunchtime Bible study for these professional people at an office building, I gave a little

Bible lesson on justice, like from the prophets, that justice rolled down like waters. And I described some of the ways that black people in the

South had been treated, the slavery and the segregation, different water fountains, inferior schools, sitting in the back of the bus, all these legalized forms of humiliation that they were subject to.

And this young Chinese lady looks up at me with the most quizzical and pained look and asks, how could they do that?

I don't remember what I said. With that look on her face, I realized there was no sufficient answer.

There's no way to explain it so you can go, oh, yeah, that makes sense. This is different. No, there's no way to do that.

All the talk about being both just different culture or you have to understand the times. It doesn't excuse it.

Some things are just evil. Things can be entirely different and we see that here in three major parts about sex, divorce, and commitments.

Things are different in the kingdom of God. And this is, remember, the gospel of the kingdom. And the kingdom means the rule.

A kingdom was where a king rules. And Singapore, on the most popular and opulent shopping area called

Orchard Road, is the embassy of Thailand, which is theoretically ruled by a king.

It's called the kingdom of Thailand. Once you step from Orchard Road through the gates of that embassy, you have stepped out of the

Republic of Singapore, subject to its laws and government, into the kingdom of Thailand.

Now, you're subject to the rule of the king of Thailand. The gospel of the kingdom is the good news that the rule of God has now come on earth.

Like that embassy, it came on Orchard Road. It was right here. And if you're going to step into it, you're going to find everything's different.

And for those who are in that kingdom, they've stepped out of the world where sin and self and Satan rule into God's realm where he is in charge.

And it is very different. Jesus said in verse 20 that if you are to live in that kingdom, you must have a different life, have a superior righteousness than even these very religious people in Jesus's day, the scribes and the

Pharisees. And that introduces these six cases that he mentions starting in verse 21.

Six different examples. First, starting with hate and anger being murder.

And then here in verse 27 with lust being adultery. You have heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery.

Now, Jesus's audience believed that that law was just about external behavior. It's just about what your body does.

No matter what they did with their mind all day long, that didn't matter. They thought, as we heard last week, there's only one organ with which you can commit adultery.

But Jesus shows them how different the kingdom of God, the rule of God is, beginning with who has authority.

He says in verse 28, I say to you, notice the I. In God's kingdom,

I'm king, Jesus is saying. And my word is law. I don't care what you heard.

Jesus is saying, I say to you. And he doesn't contradict the law here. Don't get me wrong.

He's not contradicting the Torah, the law of Moses. He's not even really teaching anything new. The 10th commandment said you shall not covet your neighbor's wife.

And you were probably not. The men probably weren't coveting their neighbor's wife for her cooking skills or her fine conversation.

Okay, so God was always looking at the heart even before. And Jesus comes to restore that.

But their traditions and their scholars had forgotten that. And so Jesus comes and says, I say to you, and he speaks with authority because he is the king.

The king in God's kingdom. He's God in human flesh and he tells us, this is different.

Everyone, notice this, everyone. There's no exceptions. Who looks at a woman with lustful intent, that is looks in order to lust.

You can look for different reasons. Some people like doctors and nurses. They have to look at naked people even to the opposite sex.

And that's okay. They're not doing it with lustful intent. They're doing it, whatever, for their job to make you well. It's the intent that matters.

Everyone, anyone who looks intending to lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Notice the already. Already with the intention before committing the act of looking.

Even before the looking, but it's the intention that matters. Even if you never commit the act of adultery, when you intend to click on that porn site or watch that porn show on TV, it's then with that intention that you've committed adultery already.

That's a very different way of looking at things. It's very different than their culture then, a lot different than today.

When we have a culture now, it's just soaked in pornography. Pornography is media of whatever type.

It could be pictures. It could be also writing. It could be a novel or something like that. It's media of whatever type that is for inducing lust.

That's the definition of pornography. It's media intended to produce lust.

Just like a horror movie intends to produce fear, pornography intends to produce lust. Now in our culture, around 60 to 70 percent of American adults consume pornography regularly.

And that distorts, it just messes up their minds. It distorts their expectations.

It leads them to treat people as objects to be consumed. It cripples their ability to relate normally, especially to someone of the opposite sex.

And thus, ironically, it makes them less able to get what now they're always lusting after.

Today, the frequency at which people have sex is lessened. It's gone down by a great deal, especially since about the year 2000.

They've charted this out. Since about the year 2000, it's been declining. And it's declined a lot by now.

And about the year 2000 is when internet porn started to become commonly available. So in other words, with all our porn, we have less sex.

And that's not because there's been an outbreak of morality. There hasn't been. You know, because people were just, there hasn't been.

The consumers of porn are incapacitated from having normal relationships.

They become desensitized and so insensitive and so unattractive.

In other words, that's the kind of person you just want to be around. And because they're unattractive, they're disabled from now getting what they want.

And so they get frustrated, they become miserable, they're lonely, and they're often angry.

We're a culture that surrendered to lust. And now, as the Rolling Stones predicted, we can't get no satisfaction.

The kingdom of God is the exact opposite of that. There's no use for porn. Sex was never supposed to be a spectator event.

If you're not married, you shouldn't be having sex in the first place. And so there's no reason to be fueling your desires with porn.

No reason for that. If you are married, your spouse is supposed to be satisfied in your sexual desires, as Paul wrote in 1

Corinthians chapter 7 verse 5. Do not deprive one another with exceptions. So that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self -control.

So in the kingdom of God, on this earth today, we can get satisfaction.

But the kingdom of God is so different. Be willing to take dramatic and determined action to get in it.

If you don't, he says in verse 29, your whole body will be thrown into hell.

The Lord Jesus tells us that a heart that is consumed by lust that will not submit to the rule of God, even if it will reluctantly keep the rules out, you know, the external rules with the body.

You might reluctantly do that because it's afraid of punishment, it's afraid of hell or that. But if the heart won't submit to the rule of God, and so it's full of lust, that person will be cast into hell.

That's why our attitude toward this sin should be one of abhorrence. The culture says it's okay.

The culture says, well, porn. It's just freedom of speech, they'll say. And so lust, it doesn't hurt anybody, even though we now know that it does.

But in the kingdom of God, we hate it so much that if it's necessary, that if we had to, that if our eye or if our hand leads us into that sin, we gouge it out, we cut it off.

And even then, after we gouge it out and cut it off, we throw it away. Notice that in verse 29 and 30.

It's not enough just to tear out the eye, cut off the hand. So radical is our disgust at anything that will drag us into hell.

Once we gouge out that eye or that cut off that hand, we cast it as far away from us as we can get.

Of course, it's not the eye or the hand that causes us to sin.

So there's no use in gouging an eye out or cutting off the hand because that's not what causes you to sin. It's our heart that's not been made different.

It's not been made a new creation. So if you find yourself drawn to internet porn, find a covenant partner, perhaps your spouse if you're married, to hold you accountable.

You can use a program called Covenant Eyes that will send periodically a record of your internet use, your internet sites to that person via email.

And hopefully just the knowledge that you'll be found out if you visit those sites will be enough to keep you from doing it. So cut it off.

You have some premium channels, you know, like HBO or Showtime that occasionally have porn on them and you know that if you're left yourself late some night watching

TV by yourself that you're likely to take a look. Then cut it off.

Cut off your subscriptions. You have a smartphone that you use to look at porn. Cut it off.

Get a dumb phone or an old flip phone if you have to. Just cut it off. If you have a relationship that will lead you into immorality, cut it off.

If you're not married and you have a relationship that is leading you to sin or that could do so, either get married and soon so that the sex isn't sinful anymore or break it up.

Ghost the other person if you have to. Stop playing with it. Cut it off.

If you are married, you should have absolutely no relationships that can possibly become immoral.

Cut it off or you say here's my wife or husband. Be friends with her or him.

Not with me. All right, meeting someone out there on the internet. I want to relate with you.

Get to know her. You don't need to know me. Don't carry on an even possibly flirtatious relationship either in person or online.

Cut it off. And then have such an abhorrence of that thing that drew you into sin or attempted you with possible sin that you throw it away.

You get it as far from you as you possibly can. You don't go where you might see the person.

You delete the contact from your phone. You block the Facebook profile. It's not enough to just gouge it out or chop it off.

You throw it away. Because at the end of verse 30, it's better for you to lose a contact, a

Facebook friend, an in real life friend, a smartphone, internet access, a streaming service.

It's far better that you lose any of that than that your whole body go to hell.

Now sure people in the world will say well, that's just that's just being obsessed. That's unhealthy.

That's kind of weird. It's uptight they say. To be like that. The Billy Graham rule they call it.

About not being alone with a member of the opposite sex. That's just weird. That's just bizarre. It's strange to them and we say yeah.

We're different. The kingdom of God is so different. We're willing to do whatever it takes to stay in it.

Second, divorce. How different is the kingdom of God? It's a lot different when it comes to divorce.

Even different from what had been allowed by God's law in the kingdom of Israel.

Jesus says in verse 21, it was also said and also indicating that this this one on divorce is attached to the previous one about avoiding adultery.

Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate to divorce. Quoting Deuteronomy 24. Now for the kingdom of Israel, Moses gave laws to regulate divorce that were because of their hardness of heart.

Jesus explains in Matthew chapter 19 verse 8. Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

In other words, the law allowing divorce was an accommodation for the people and for the times of the nation of Israel.

It's like the food laws. From the beginning in Genesis 9, all foods were allowed. Even the pork, the pigs, the shrimp, whatever.

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you from Genesis 9. That's God's original law.

In other words, you can eat anything originally. But then Moses, with Moses, God regulated what they could eat.

Temporarily to teach them about holiness. And then when Jesus comes with the kingdom of God and the kingdom of God is going to take us back to what

God intended before sin. Back to paradise. So all foods are clean again.

So again, we can now we can have the pork again. So with divorce, same principle is happening. From the beginning, the two are one flesh.

What God has joined together, let not man separate, Jesus said. But then with Moses, God regulated their divorces.

He allowed them, allowed divorce with a formal certificate. You had to write it out. At least you have to think through what you're doing.

Don't just cast her out. And the Jews debated about what are the grounds for divorce? Why could you divorce? And there are different schools of thought about that.

But divorces were allowed, Jesus says, because of their hard -heartedness.

Because they were hard -hearted. As we are too. It's not just them. It's us too. Then many of them did exactly what

Jesus said the least in the kingdom of God do. That is they loosened the law of divorce by allowing it for pretty much any reason.

You know, you wanted a new wife. You're going through a midlife crisis. Not feeling as satisfied with your previous wife, your first wife.

I'll just, you know, do like you do with a car. Just trade her in for a new model. Something new and exciting.

Maybe she burned the toast. Right? I divorce you. Send her away. Pretty much for anything. And if they had done all this properly, legally, written the certificate, they felt they had fulfilled the law and they felt they were free.

Then Jesus says in verse 31, but I say to you, again, he's the king in the kingdom of God, that everyone who divorces his wife, and notice again, everyone, there's no exceptions, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Notice divorce, even if it's legal, with their certificate. Certificate. In other words, you have the official disillusion of marriage certificate in your hand, signed by the judge, official court stamp on it, in your hands.

Jesus says that's still not recognized by God. You get a divorce and you go on to have sex with someone else, even if you're legally married first.

You get married, then you go on. You have still, Jesus says, committed adultery. Legal divorce still does not excuse it.

And that's radically different from their culture then, and of course ours today. Now, there is one exception, except on the ground of sexual immorality, and the word translated sexual immorality is pornea in Greek, where it's where we get the word porn from.

It means any kind of sex out of marriage. All sex outside of marriage is pornea, sexual immorality.

So if your spouse commits sexual immorality, adultery, you can possibly divorce him or her, and I think legitimately remarry.

But Jesus also taught forgiveness, as we'll see soon in the very next chapter. If you forgive others, their transgression, your heavenly father will forgive you.

So if your spouse commits adultery and they are repentant, and repentant means they're stopping the sin, and they ask you for forgiveness, then you should forgive, you must forgive, and you cannot divorce then.

So the exception, except for sexual immorality, only applies to ongoing, unrepentant adultery.

It's like the spouse abandoning you and then going and living with someone else, or carrying on continually this adulterous relationship.

Now, I also think there's ongoing abuse that is proper for them to separate, for the woman to separate for her own protection, should subject herself to danger.

But in the kingdom of God, the reason for divorce is very rare. And the

Lord Jesus says that there's only one reason to break a marriage covenant, and that's when the covenant has already been broken by the other spouse in ongoing, unrepentant adultery.

Now, if you don't do that, just break it up for any reason you feel like it, irreconcilable differences, they call it today.

Talking to the men here in verse 32, because in their day only the men could get divorced. Now, it's a lot more complicated now, because now women can get divorced.

So it's, it adds complexity to it. But in their day, only the men could get divorced. That's why he's only speaking to them here.

If you divorce for a lesser reason, just because you feel like it, irreconcilable differences,

I just want someone new, whatever, then the woman in that culture is probably going to be desperate to remarry. But for her protection, you need a man around to protect you.

And in those days, right, there's no police. You can't call to come keep you safe. And for a provision.

And so by divorcing her, you make her commit adultery. That is, you put her in a situation that she feels she has to marry again, and that is committing adultery.

Because the divorce is invalid. So she's committing adultery and you put her up to it. Because she is, in God's eyes, still married to you.

And you are responsible for the adultery. Because you made her do it. You put her in that situation that made her desperate to go through with it.

Now, I also think she's responsible too, but you, the man, are responsible for what you put her through, and basically made her do just for her own survival.

Divorce, for any other reason than ongoing, unrepentant adultery, is, in God's eyes, it's invalid.

You're still married no matter what the court says. And if you remarry, you're committing adultery no matter what the court says.

So marriage, Jesus is saying, is permanent. It's for this life. God has joined them together.

You're one flesh. So as long as both your fleshes, your bodies, are still alive, so is the marriage.

Except for sexual immorality, all that. And that's entirely different than our ethic today, when people marry and when they don't feel the magic anymore.

Just not feeling it anymore. Maybe we're not right for each other. Try someone else. And they get a divorce.

Then they're still friends. And they're happy that their ex has found someone else who makes them happy.

Blah, blah, blah. When you marry, you become one flesh, and you either stay married, or one or both of you become adulterers.

That's what it's like in the kingdom of God. Third, commitments.

How different is the kingdom of God when it comes to commitments? In the world, when people make a promise, you know, we all, we know it's kind of, it's probably worthless.

Sometimes we don't even pay it any attention. If a salesman says, you know, this is a good car, I promise. If a contractor assures you, you know,

I'm going to be there nine in the morning, sharp. If an abuser declares, I'll never do it again, honey,

I'll change. We know that all might be worthless. People would look at us like we're children if we complained, you know, you told me the clunker was a good car.

Or it's 10 a .m. You're still not here. What's going on? And it was the same in their day, even in Israel.

Even though the law had said in Numbers chapter 30, verse 2, If a man vows a vow to the Lord, he swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge.

He shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth.

Ah, but the Pharisees and the scribes, they had their traditions that did exactly what

Jesus said the least in the kingdom of God do, that loosened and effectively abolished the law.

They said like Jesus in verse 33, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.

That's what they were told of old. Now they had nice kind of impressing sounding theological traditions that relaxed the law that said, sure, if you vowed to the

Lord in the name of the Lord, well, then you had to keep your word. But if you just promised people in the name of whatever, something else, well, that's no problem.

There's some oaths were more binding than others depending on what you swore on. Their tradition said in verses 34 to verse 36, that if you swear by heaven,

I swear by heaven, this is a pound of flour. It's really only 12 ounces.

I swear by the earth that I'll bring back your cloak before dark. But you don't.

Or I promise on Jerusalem that I haven't rolled back the odometer in the car.

When you actually rolled it back by 100 ,000 miles. I make an oath on my head that I'll repay the money by the end of the week.

But you don't. They said, nah, that's all okay. Because you didn't really swear by anything that matters, that's really holy.

It's like crossing your fingers when you make a promise. I promise I'll pay you back. You're not gonna really do it. It doesn't count, you think.

Jesus said in the kingdom of God, it's different than that. Others thought that they had kept the law if they had kept every vow they made, official kind of vow, they made in the name of the

Lord. And if they told the truth when they were under oath, you know, they raise their hand, you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I do. Okay, then they told the truth. Well, they think that's fine. I kept the law. Oh, but the rest of the time they were lying like a dog.

But if they kept their formal vows, they hadn't committed perjury, they thought that's fine. I've kept the law.

God's good with me. But here the Lord Jesus shows that in the kingdom of God, we need to tell the truth all the time.

We need to keep our commitments all the time. And so Jesus says in verse 34, don't swear by anything.

And I don't think he's saying you can't raise your hand and swear under oath. Doesn't mean that.

He means you don't have to. You don't need to. Because you tell the truth all the time in the kingdom of God, because we're different.

After all, the truth is bigger than you. The earth is God's creation. It's his footstool. It still belongs to God.

If you swear by it, you should still keep your word. Jerusalem is the city of David, the city where the anointed one, the Christ, has come.

You swear by it, you should still keep your word. Don't even swear by your head, because you can't control that either. God controls your head, even the color of your hair.

So you still got to keep your word or you swear by it. The point here is that you shouldn't, you should be so different from the world that you tell the truth, you keep your promises, even if you haven't sworn by anything.

The Lord Jesus is saying that citizens of the kingdom are to be truth -tellers, they're to be reliable, people of integrity, your word is your bond.

In every situation, all you have to do is say yes or no. Yes, I'll pay the money back.

And you will. Because you keep your word. Swearing by something, even in the name of the Lord, does not increase the likelihood that you'll keep your word.

Because you always keep your word. You do it 100 % of the time, no matter what you swear on. Let every statement you make be as if you were under oath in a court of law, and every commitment you make be as if you had put your signature on a contract.

Yes, it's a pound of flour, and it is. Yes, I'll bring your cloak back by dark, and you do. No, I haven't rolled back the odometer on the car, and you haven't.

Yes, I'll repay the money by the end of the week, and you do. In the last few months,

Mary did some favors for a young poor woman around here, buying groceries for her, taking her to Food Lion, and then taking her back home.

And the woman would always respond by saying, I'll pay you back. But never did. Finally, after helping her recently with her store her things away, because she's getting evicted from her apartment, and then taking her to her new home where she could stay, the woman was promising over and over again,

I'll pay you back. And finally, Mary replied, just stop it. You're not going to pay me back, and stop promising that you will.

Okay, people today, and people then in Jesus's time, think words are things that you use to get the result you want, to create the feeling you want.

You want people to like you, so you tell them what you they want to hear. They'll like you if they think they're going to get their money back, so you say that.

You don't actually intend on doing it. You just say it to make them sound better. You're not actually bound by what you say.

They thought integrity, and they still think integrity and honesty were just optional, or beside the point.

That if you really had to be honest, well, then you would take an oath. But normally, you could lie, you could break your commitments, if you wanted, if you need to do, if it helped you advance your cause.

Their culture, like ours, believed that there were times when it was okay to promise things that you're not going to do.

You know how many times that I've been told by somebody, well, I'm going to be a church front and center.

Or we're going to start coming to church regularly now. And they never come. And then

I think, why did you tell me that? Now I trust you less.

I respect you less. And if you never told me what I wanted to hear, in the world, we take it for granted that people are like that.

That they'll tell you what they want to hear. And you know, you can't really depend on them. And so we have oaths, you know, to prove that now, now under oath,

I'm going to keep my word, now I'm telling the truth. Because if I don't, I could get fined by the court or put in prison for perjury.

I'm binding myself to do whatever I'll say. So I'll sign a contract so that now I can get sued if I don't keep my commitment.

The vow or the contract says, I'll really keep this commitment. Unlike all those other things

I say all the time, which are meaningless. I'll really keep my marriage vow. But that promise

I made to go to church, that's just something I said to make you feel better. Some people look surprised when you tell them that they're expected to keep their word.

You know, are you telling me? I gotta keep this thing I said, this commitment, this promise I made, that's as binding as my wedding vows.

Now don't be surprised if such people don't keep their wedding vows either. There are no degrees of commitments in the kingdom of God.

There's not the kind you keep and the kind you can ignore. There's not. It's different than the world.

There are no breakable commitments. You keep them all. If you say yes, you keep them.

If you say no, you didn't agree to it, but you don't have to keep it. Now many people find this strange.

This is all this whole thing. So bizarre. We're talking about reinventing the way we do everything.

Taking every word, every thought, every action so seriously. But that's how different the kingdom of God is from this world.

And if we're not that different, if we do not have, at the beginning of this passage in verse 20, a righteousness that is different from and exceeds the most religious people, then we will never enter the kingdom of God.

We must be essentially different. The question is then, how can we possibly be that different How can we possibly be that different?

Well, we must be born again, regenerated, made new creatures.

And only God can do that. So has he made you different?