The Key to Unlock the Scriptures

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the fifth chapter.

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Jesus said, You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?

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It's no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the light of the world, a city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

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In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your

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Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

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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.

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Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.

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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 the

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Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. This is the gospel of the

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Lord. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.

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Have you ever seen that channel put out by a guy who calls himself the lock -picking lawyer?

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It's a fascinating channel. I gotta admit, I'm kind of addicted to it at the moment.

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It's this weird little thing that when I'm having insomnia and when his stuff shows up on social media, I sit there and I watch this guy.

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People send him padlocks and different kinds of door locks and locks of all kinds from all over the place, including bike locks.

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He picks them open legitimately. It's actually quite impressive. Locks that are declared to be pick -proof are shown definitively to be not so.

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I would note that there is one thing that I know of that is absolutely pick -proof.

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It's the scriptures. You can't pick them. Nope. There is one key to unlocking the scriptures.

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There is one key to understanding the biblical text, and that is what Paul is talking about in our epistle text when he says,

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I decided to know nothing among you except for Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

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Without that message, without Christ and Him crucified for our sins, you can pick away at the

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Bible all you want and you will never understand it. Now, this is not to say that there are not other topics covered in scripture.

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There are other topics covered in scripture, but think of it this way.

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Without the cross, without Christ and Him crucified, you still can't even properly understand those other topics.

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The Bible remains a locked book and you can't pick it.

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It ain't gonna work. In fact, chat GPS or that AI thing that's out there, if you were to ask it, please explain to me what the

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Bible means and give me a proper understanding of it, it would not sit there and go, it's all about Christ and Him crucified.

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Even AI can't crack it. And you sit there and go, well, I mean, is it really that simple?

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I mean, doesn't the Bible talk about a whole bunch of other stuff? Of course it does. Of course it does.

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But I always like to think back to when I was a Nazarene. And when I was a Nazarene, I studied my

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Bible. I did, in fact, somewhere in the murky recesses of my attic space, in a box that's full of dust and things like this, there are copies of my

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Bibles from when I was in high school. And from time to time, I like to pull them out, blow the dust off of them and just flip through and see what were the texts that I highlighted.

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You know what those texts were? They were all, follow along with me, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

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It was all about the la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, right? It was all about the law.

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And as a young Nazarene, I was devoted to the law. I was, oh man,

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I didn't drink, smoke, chew. And my wife, she definitely didn't do any of that stuff either, you know, but she was my girlfriend at the time, right?

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She didn't dance, drink, smoke, or chew. But then again, I do think about that one thing when we were seniors, our high school senior class rebelled.

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And you see, we weren't even allowed to have a prom. No, that was verboten. You can't do that because, you know, there's dancing involved.

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And so, what our senior class did, you know what we did? Some people, some enterprising parents who had some money, they rented out a hotel ballroom in Huntington Beach, California.

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We had to like go like several counties down. We had to be like nowhere near so that no teacher could raid us and actually see us getting jiggly with Depeche Mode.

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You know, you get the idea here. But as somebody who was dedicated to the law,

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I did not understand the scriptures. And it wasn't too long after my wife and I graduated from high school, we went head long into the latter reign movement.

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And we were under the thumb of a cult leader and a false prophetess.

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And when we came out of that, my wife, she legitimately said, who can we trust?

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What are we supposed to believe? And my response at the time was, I think we can trust the

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Bible, but I'm pretty convinced we don't know what it means. I'm pretty convinced that we don't.

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And the reality is this, we didn't. We didn't understand that. If somebody had come to me at that time and said, listen, the thing you're missing is the one thing, the only thing you need to know nothing except for Christ and Him crucified,

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I would have thought he was nuts. In fact, I know for a fact I would have thought he was nuts because that's exactly when

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I was first confronted with the gospel and somebody who actually believed that there was nothing except for Christ and Him crucified,

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I thought the guy was a complete wingnut and wackerdoodle. I mistook him for a false teacher. It was

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Dr. Rod Rosenblatt. Now, if you know anything about Dr. Rod Rosenblatt, to say he's a man of the earth is a good way to put it.

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He's salty, but salty in the right sense, and I'll explain that in a second.

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Rosenblatt, always in his classes, he would say things like this, if I depended on anything of my own good works for salvation, then

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I'm doomed. And then he would use an inappropriate analogy. He says, if your life is like a roulette table, you've got to bet all the blue chips on Jesus.

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How dare you use gambling metaphors to talk about salvation, Rosenblatt, right? And one time, again,

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I go up to him and I say, Rosenblatt, if what you're saying is true, that we're saved completely by what Christ has done for us, then you're saying

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I can do whatever I want. And he says, of course, Chris. Now that Christ has set you free from slavery to sin, death, and the devil, what do you want to do?

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Christ and him crucified for our sins. I chose to know nothing.

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Think of it this way, without the gospel, the law just becomes a tedium. And at the end of the day, you become exhausted, all right?

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I remember back in the day trying so hard to get my sinful desires under control and felt like I was making some kind of progress.

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But over and again, I would look in the Bible and I would hear the voice of the law, do nothing but condemn me.

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And I got angry at God. What is it going to take for you to love me? What do

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I have to do? And you'll note, by thinking this way, I was missing the key.

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And the key is Christ and him crucified for our sins. Now, it's absolutely true that the law tells us that we are to not do certain things and we are to do certain things.

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We are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, strength. How's that working out for you, by the way?

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All, all means all, by the way. I looked it up in the Hebrew, all means all, right? The whole thing, the whole kit and caboodle, every ounce of your fiber in being.

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And you'll note, the Bible also commands us to honor our parents and honor those in authority over us, forbids us from murdering.

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And you sit there and go, well, thank God, I've never done that. Oh, yes, you have. Yes, you have.

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Next week's gospel text will put that to rest definitively. You're going to hear Jesus talk about even having hatred inside of your heart.

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You've already murdered a person, even if you haven't plunged a knife into their chest.

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And what about that adultery bit? Oh, well, yeah, I've never physically committed adultery on my spouse.

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Well, good on you, but does that mean you're not an adulterer? Not even close. Because Jesus says, if you look at somebody lustfully, you know, whoo, look at her, ha, you know, or, you know, are the women talking about Brad Pitt's, you know, six, you know, six -pack and his washboard abs?

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Whoo, honey, right? Oh, you've already committed adultery with that person, right? And you'll note that the law condemns us all, but does the law give us even an ounce of power to obey its commands and its precepts?

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No, not at all. So what are we to make of this? Well, without the cross, without Christ and Him crucified for our sins, the law is a drudgery because we are under the mistaken belief that we are saved by our good works when, in fact, we are not.

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You'll note when the Apostle Paul, opposing the Judaizers, refused to compromise what?

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The gospel. He refused to compromise and give in even an inch to the legalists.

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So Christ and Him crucified for our sins is the only way of understanding

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Scripture and every single doctrine within the biblical texts.

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A good way to think about it is that Christ and Him crucified for our sins is like the sun, and all of the other doctrines revealed in Scripture, they orbit it.

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If you were to study them apart from their orbit around the sun, you will not understand those doctrines at all.

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Let me give you some examples. From our gospel text, by the way, did you notice there was a supreme lack of gospel in our gospel text today?

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That happens from time to time. But here's what Jesus says to those who are His disciples, you are the salt of the earth.

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But if the salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?

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It's no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.

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I remember as a Nazarene hearing text sermons about this particular text and saying that the salt means that our good works have to be the thing that the world sees.

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That's not really what's going on here because if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense. And I remember one of my

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Nazarene pastors telling the story, telling the story of a man who lived just a few doors down and his house caught fire.

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And when his house caught fire, this is the days before they had cell phones and things like this, okay, he needed help.

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And he knew that the only person he can come to for help was the pastor who lived a few doors down and the reason why is because he knew that he hadn't been drinking that night and that he'd be sober enough to help out.

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And so that was an example of being the salt of the earth. No, it's not.

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It's not. So it's this idea that you don't drink lest you, well, in a pinch when you're called upon to help your neighbor, you are unable to do so because you are not of a sound mind to be able to help them.

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That's not what this text means. Let me explain. Salt is a interesting thing when you study it out in Scripture.

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In the book of Leviticus, and if you've ever read Leviticus, we did Leviticus for years, didn't we?

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It took a long time to work through Leviticus. When we worked through Leviticus, we noted that there were all kinds of sacrifices that were required.

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Different, you know, sheep and goat and bulls and rams and different animal sacrifices and food sacrifices and every sacrifice, right?

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It was, well, interesting in detail. But there's one passage in the book of Leviticus, and I'll have you

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Google it, look it up. One little text that if you miss it, you're going to miss the whole thing.

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And this little sentence in the Old Testament in the book of Leviticus says that every sacrifice must be offered with salt.

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Oh, maybe saltiness has something to do with, you know, Christ and Him crucified for our sins.

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Paul meant what he said, I chose to know nothing among you except for Christ and Him crucified for our sins.

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Have you ever been punched in the mouth or maybe accidentally bit your cheek?

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Oh, man, is that painful. Okay, there you are. Minding your own business, enjoying a nice meal, and all of a sudden, your mouth doesn't work and you chomp down on your cheek and, right?

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And you can feel the blood flowing. What's it taste like? Salt. Have you ever noticed how salty blood tastes?

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You see, to be the salt of the earth really legitimately means those who understand the mercy and the grace of Christ, the forgiveness of our sins.

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You see, if you're going to do the law and do the law and do the law, there is no mercy or grace for you.

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In fact, there's no hope for you at all. But with Christ and Him crucified for our sins, we recognize that Jesus has taken upon Himself our transgressions, has taken upon Himself our guilt, and He is the one who, although He kept the law perfectly, all of my lack of perfect law -keeping is placed upon Him.

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And your imperfect law -keeping is placed upon Him, and He bleeds and dies in your place, and He gives you salvation fully as a gift.

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Have you ever heard the scriptures talk about how it's God's wrath and His malice and hatred that's going to lead us to repentance?

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No. What is it that leads us to repentance? God's kindness, His mercy,

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His forgiveness, and His love. And so, to be salty Christians is not to put out spicy memes on the internet.

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To be salty Christians means to be those who, well, continue to preach and know nothing except for Christ and Him crucified for our sins.

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Well, what about the next portion of the gospel, Pastor Rose, where it talks about being the light of the world, and that we're supposed to let our lights shine, right?

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Do you guys know how passive verbs work? You know how passive things... Isn't Jesus the light of the world?

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I seem to remember during the time of Christmas, right, that we read in the beginning of the

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Gospel of John that the true light of the world was coming into the world, and though the world was made through Him, well, the world didn't recognize

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Him because men loved the darkness instead. This is absolutely true, right? So, the light of Christ has come into the world, and Christ says, you are the light of the world.

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Is that because that by some substantive process, I have now begun shining before people?

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Uh -uh. This only works because of the gospel. Again, Paul chose to know nothing except for Christ and Him crucified for our sins.

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We would be wise to adopt what the scriptures say here. And then Jesus says, a city that's set on a hill can't be hidden, that's true, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all that are in the house.

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In the same way, listen to the words, let your light shine.

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It doesn't say, shine your light, active, passive.

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Let your light, that assumes the gospel.

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It assumes that you are forgiven. It assumes that Jesus is your light, and that He is the one shining through you, and He is the one who has taken you out of darkness into the dominion of His kingdom, which is described as the kingdom of light, right?

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So, in other words, being a Christian is all about being what Christ has made you to be, and that is a reality given to you in the waters of baptism, when you are buried with Christ, and raised with Christ, and seated with Christ in heavenly places.

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Christ is our light, and when we let our light shine, even in our good works, it is

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Christ who is doing the shining. Again, the passive nature of the verbs prove this out.

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If you think this is all about you actively, actively shining your light, you've missed the whole point, and you don't know how passive verbs work.

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So, Paul says, I chose to know nothing except for Christ and Him crucified for our sins.

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And then came a passage of Scripture in our gospel text that when I was in Nazarene, I could not understand.

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It couldn't crack it at all. In fact, it sent me on basically kind of a New Year's Eve bender that lasted for a long, long period of time.

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And what I mean by that is by making these resolutions that I've got to fulfill. And here's what

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Jesus said, I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

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Doesn't that preach works? Righteousness, Pastor Roseborough, not at all, quite the opposite.

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But when I read this as a Nazarene, remember, my mindset as a Nazarene was, I heard the gospel long time ago when

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I made the decision to go down to the altar and ask Jesus into my heart. I don't need to hear the gospel over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

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I need to be busy obeying Christ. I need to mature and move on to more important things.

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But note that Paul was talking to Christians in 1 Corinthians 2. He wrote that to us who are

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Christians. I chose to know nothing except for Christ and Him crucified for our sins. So how are we to understand this?

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Well, we can only understand it through the cross. Because, you see, God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin so that you might be the righteousness of God.

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Paul in Philippians 3 talks about not having a righteousness of his own that comes through the law, but the righteousness of God that is given through faith.

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So here's the thing. Back in the day, Jesus' listeners would have heard this and go, whoa, how is somebody supposed to be more righteous than the

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Pharisees? You'll note back in the day, if your daughter was dating a Pharisee, you'd think that that would be a good thing because those

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Pharisees, they were righteous dudes, man. They tithed all the way down to the herbs in their garden.

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These were guys who were very attentive to the law. And Jesus says, it's not enough.

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In fact, they were so attentive to the law that they took the law of God kind of bundled up into an inner package and then built a big fence of other laws around it with the idea, you keep our laws and you'll never break the laws in the center.

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That was their thinking, right? And Jesus says, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God.

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Well, then how are we to have righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees?

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Well, I chose to know nothing except Christ and Him crucified for our sins, Paul says. Even this statement of Christ, you cannot pick it, you cannot unlock it without the key of the cross.

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The key of the cross will unlock this and you will recognize that in the gospel, a righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith for those who believe.

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And this is a righteousness given by God and so each and every single Christian is clothed with the righteousness of Christ because He was clothed in your sin and iniquity on the cross.

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So I can say to each and every one of you that your righteousness, because Christ is your righteousness, exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.

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In fact, your righteousness is faultless and perfect in the eyes of God because you are clothed with the very righteousness of God given by faith and that's

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Jesus' righteousness. So is it true? Is it true that we should know nothing except for Christ and Him crucified for our sins?

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Yes, it's absolutely true. And so we always interpret every other doctrine of scripture through the light of the cross.

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So let us repent of all the ways in which we've thought that we can study out the scriptures apart from the cross.

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That we think that we can pick it open without a proper understanding of the cross. Or say that this doctrine has nothing to do with the cross.

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You're wrong. Every passage of scripture has to do with the cross and you cannot understand the text otherwise.

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So put your picks away. You're never gonna open this. This is the only thing on planet Earth that is unpickable and not even a lock picking attorney, the lock picking lawyer can open up the scriptures without the proper key.

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And the key is Christ and Him crucified for our sins. In the name of Jesus, amen.

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If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota. 56744. And again, that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota. 56744. We thank you for your support.

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