“The Ethics of the Kingdom” - Dr. Gordon Fee, Part 4b

You'll notice the kind of questions that we ask when we're still within the fence. I am regularly asked by people, can

I do this and still be? What can

I do and still, you know, you know what they're asking for? A fence.

They want to know what are the limits to my conduct that I can still do and still be inside?

My stock answer to that question, tongue in cheek is, well, you can get saved and quit asking that pharisaic question.

Yeah. I mean, see, that's not a Christian question. You haven't understood the

Christian faith yet when you ask that kind of question, because that question is saying, where's the law? My life is prescribed by law.

I want the law around my life. Please fence me in. The moment you ask that question, you have removed yourself from a

Christian understanding of ethics back to a pharisaic understanding of ethics. What can I do and still be?

What defines my conduct as by law so that I can know that I belong?

Notice how it comes out all the time in the New Testament. What lack I yet?

Remember, that's what the young man asked Jesus. All these I've kept from my youth. What lack

I yet? Remember, they come and ask the question, or he asked the question earlier, what good thing must

I do in order to inherit? Or Peter asked the question, how many times must

I forgive? Always wanting some quantifiable relationship with God to give us security.

Security lies in our obedience to law. Jesus comes along and takes this blue blanket away from the lionesses of the world and says, you have no security in that.

You've got to trust God. You've got to trust God to accept you.

And out of that trust must overflow a life of gratitude that expresses appreciation for that acceptance.

And that too is going to be my gift to you. Now this is then the point.

Jesus does not say, you've got to have more than they did. He said, your righteousness, and this is now one side of the fence, your righteousness must be a righteousness that goes radically beyond theirs.

Theirs stops at the fence. This is the nice thing about quantifying, you see, if it takes 100 good deeds to cancel out 99 bad ones, and you always keep one ahead, you know, so you make sure you get there.

The moment you quantify like that, then what you're always going to be doing is stopping right at the fence.

If it takes 100 alms giving, then you'll give 100 alms. But not any more.

I mean, why give any more? You've done what you need to do. You've counted. God requires alms giving of you three times a week of so much money.

Well if you know that, that's convenient. Because you'll never give any more than that, and you'll make sure you do it every day, and you'll not do it any other day than the three that are required.

God requires you to pray three times a day. You surely won't pray four. You won't pray less either, but you'll pray three.

Your righteousness will always stop at the fence. How many times must I in order to be?

Now the whole point of the ethics of the kingdom of God is accept your righteousness.

Go beyond that. You have not entered the kingdom of God. Do you understand?

Accept it. Go beyond that. You have not entered the kingdom of God. Let's go back to the rich young man.

He had never stolen from anybody. And, you know, my first response to him was, well, bully, good for you.

I actually never have beaten my wife. Bully good for me.

I mean, you know, so? His problem wasn't that he had never stolen from anybody.

His problem was that he had never cared for anybody. He had never loved anybody. He had not had the decency to love a neighbor.

He had all of this material goods that was his, and he had never once given to anybody.

Or if he had, it was almsgiving. Just enough to make sure that he was making it.

Jesus said, accept your righteousness. Go beyond that. In other words, accept it, be of a totally radically different kind.

You haven't even entered the kingdom. You have not yet captured what it means to be

Christian. You are still operating before God on the wrong basis, on the wrong set of rules, as it were.

Now, if I tell too many stories, I'm going to run out of time, but I'm going to tell another one right at this point because this one is very close to my heart.

When I first came to the seminary nine years ago, I have forgotten your name,

I'm sorry. Leanne, yeah. Those of you who know, she has come, and another is from New Zealand.

She's come here to Switzerland in January. You realize she's given up her summer to do that.

You know, there's special sympathies in my heart for people like that, especially to come to a place like this in the middle of January, okay?

Well, Boston is one of the world's worst winter spots, bitter winters.

We had a young seminarian who came by the call of God to seminary in January.

He began his seminary career in January, and he had come from South Carolina. That's not quite like coming from New Zealand, but it, you know, it's getting in the same ballpark, and I mean he and his wife and little baby really went through some excruciating weeks.

They didn't have any money. They didn't have a place to live. They took immediate sick, and they went through the whole thing.

I mean, it was a really difficult time. He was my advisee, and so I got very close to them.

We were very close in terms of trying to help and do what we could. This, they finally, somewhere in February, were finally able to get a house, and his wife had been certified by the state of Massachusetts by now that she could bring in small children into her home in a program in the

United States that was called a kind of a Head Start program. It was a program in which she could care for the children of working mothers where these working mothers had to have the money, and so the government supplied the money for her to take care of these children for the sake of the family so that the mother could work and make money, and she had several of these, and it was their only means of income.

They paid the rent and lived off what she made taking care of these children. The house they lived in was one of these large old wood frame

New England houses, and the owner of the house, the landlord of the house, was a deacon in a local

Baptist church, an evangelical Christian, but there was no law in the state of Massachusetts at that time that required people who had, who did this kind of thing, required them to have lead -free paint on their, on their woodwork, and the whole house is painted because it's one of these old wooden houses, and paint chipped off, and of course, because it's got lead in it, it's full of poisons, and they were concerned, and they went to the landlord and asked the landlord if he would be so kind as, if not to repaint the house, give him the, you know, the wherewithal so he could repaint it with a water -based paint, and the landlord refused to do it, and the reason he refused to do it is because the law didn't require it of him, and because the law didn't require it of him, that was all that was necessary for him.

He was within his rights. Now friends,

I hope without getting upset again, I can tell you how desperately evil that man was, desperately evil.

He went to church, did all the things that a Christian should do. He, he, he obeyed all the rules, but he wasn't good.

He cared more about his house than he did about the lives of those children. He didn't care at all about those children.

As far as he's concerned, they could take him out, as long as he got his money. He was right, but desperately wrong, and desperately evil at that point.

Now, please don't hear by that that I'm kicking him out of the kingdom. I'm just talking about at this point, he was a desperately evil man.

He had, he had not come to a kingdom righteousness that says, accept your righteousness, go beyond that.

They're not in the kingdom. Something's desperately wrong, because the righteousness of the new age is not defined by not doing certain things.

It is defined by actively doing all kinds of things that end up reflecting a selfless, non -acquisitive, but giving lifestyle.

A radical new way of looking at life. So radical, in fact, that it's described in the rest of this

Sermon on the Mount. Now, I am just totally running out of time for this hour.

Probably we'll go over like we did a couple of other nights. I'm just now, you know, trying to figure out in my own head what we're going to do in terms of touching base.

I want to always say some things about 6 and 7, chapter 6 and 7. We'll come back and very quickly touch on some things that have to do with personal relationships.

But what this, what this new righteousness does, first of all, Jesus touches on personal, interpersonal relationships, if you will, in chapter 5, 21 to the end.

Then in chapter 6, verses 1 to 18, he deals with a new righteousness in terms of a new piety.

New, a new righteousness in terms of our relationship to God. And then in verses 17 to the end of chapter 6, he deals with a new righteousness in terms of our relationship to material possessions.

Now, let me just touch on only one of those. You've already heard in some place in our last 25 hours or whatever, where the poor fit in.

I mean, the rich fit in and, you know, material possessions. I think I said somewhere along the way the other night that, or the other day, you don't own anything anyway, you know.

In the kingdom of God, the one thing that I can say about your material possessions is that you don't have any. None. I mean, you might have some legal document that says you have some, but forget it.

God has everything. Everything is his. So you don't pay him tithe.

Not in the new age. It's all his, and you are now accountable as a steward to everything.

And besides that, you are freed up from the need to possess. You understand? The problem with possessions is that they invariably do the possessing.

And that's why Jesus, you see, Jesus wasn't against wealth per se. He never said a word against wealth or riches as such.

His problem was always what it did to the people who had it and the poor who wanted it. The poor who wanted it had greedy spirits because they wanted to be like the rich, and the rich who had it didn't have it, it had them.

If you don't think, if you don't think possessions possess the possessor, just watch what happens to a perfectly decent human being who goes to the local supermarket, whatever that would be in your culture, and drives into that parking lot, and somebody scratches the door of his $15 ,000 toy called an automobile, and see what he does.

And I can assure you in that moment, you'll find out whether his possession or the human being is more important. Just watch and see how he responds to the human being who scratched that paint on his door.

And you can see in a hurry whether his car is more important than the human being. And I can assure you, 99 times out of 100, the car is always the more important thing.

That is his possession. But what happens is it's not a possession at all, it possesses him.

And you can tell it possesses him by what happens when it gets scratched by somebody else's negligence. Now, I don't like my car scratched either, you understand.

I'm talking about the fact that I know very well where I speak, that possessions possess us. That's why

Jesus was against it. Because God possessed, you can't serve God and mammon, that's Jesus' word, that's out of the

Sermon on the Mount. You can't serve God and mammon, one or the other. And the moment you start getting too much mammon, you start serving mammon.

So, put your treasure where your heart is. Well, in fact, to hear it in Jesus' word, where your treasure is, there your heart is.

That's the more damning word, if you will. I mean, the moment you get too much, that becomes your treasure and that's where your heart is.

I just think of my own historical context in the Assemblies of God in America, a Pentecostal movement that was born and raised across the tracks, as it were.

That's an American idiom for being the poor and the out -of -it types, you know, the people that don't count in a society.

We didn't have anything materially. We were an eschatological people. We believed God was going to, Jesus was going to come back in our lifetime.

I mean, in our lifetime before I was born, they believed that. But after World War II, all of us grew up and became affluent.

We used to sing eschatological songs all the time in my movement, all the time. We sang all the time about the return of the

Lord. We sang, this world is not my home, I'm just passing through. My treasure is laid up somewhere beyond the blue.

May not be a very good song, but we used to sing that kind of stuff all the time. Changed in the twinkling of an eye, you know, all that marvelous stuff.

We don't sing that anymore. You know why? Because our treasure isn't laid up somewhere beyond the blue.

It's laid up right here on planet Earth and we don't want Jesus to come back too soon because we like it right here very well.

I have to say things like that by God's grace in our churches because that's where we are. You can't serve

God in mammon. It isn't because God's against mammon, it's just that He knows what happens.

You can't do it. Well, the same thing with regard to piety. Jesus says, when you give alms, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

So that when you give alms, don't let anybody know. Do it in secret. Your father who is in secret will reward you.

It doesn't say reward you openly. That was added to the text in the fourth century. Somebody else didn't like Jesus either and so they sort of add to his words now and then to sort of help him out.

See, reward openly is the absolutely contradictory to the point of the text. The father doesn't say will reward you openly, it just says he'll reward you.

It's okay, it's in his case. But you know, that's a threatening idea. What if I were to give some of you some money to go on the field trip and I didn't tell anybody who it was?

God may not tell anybody either. That's terribly threatening.

I mean, what if God doesn't tell somebody? What's the use of giving if God isn't going to tell somebody?

So we have ways of doing it. We do it in prayer. Father, you know when

I was talking to so -and -so the other day and they're hurting so badly and you helped me to encourage them in prayer and giving some money.

Oh, thank you, Lord. And now everybody knows and you have your reward.

Everybody knows. But the God's rule has come and freed you from that.

You don't have that need anymore. If you need to be known as one of the alms givers and one of the prayers, oh, we have lots of sneaky ways to get at it.

When I was praying yesterday morning at 5 .30, oh, man, that always scores.

I mean, who cares it was 5 .30? But when you say 5 .30, immediately that scores points.

5 .30, wow. Well, you have your reward.

You've let it be known and you have your reward. Jesus says, it's okay, you're free.

You don't have to do that anymore. The Father knows. It's okay. Now, that is kind of threatening, isn't it?

Honestly, I mean, isn't that honestly just a little bit threatening? But it's all right. It's freeing. That's the real point.

It's freeing. You don't have to be known as one of the pious ones anymore. Oh, boy, there's great freedom in that.

Well, then it gets to personal relationships. Back in chapter five, Jesus said, you have heard it said to the men of old, you shall not kill.

But I say to you, no anger. I say, you've got to be kidding.

I'm not going to hit him, mind you. But bless your hearts.

If you're going to take away from me the privilege of at least hitting the little so -and -so, I'm not so sure

I want to be in the kingdom. I get a great deal of pleasure out of hating that guy's guts.

Oh, we would never say that. We just do it. You know, we're very careful about not letting people in on our private vices.

Anger, you understand, is not always expressed openly. Anger is many times held internally, and it destroys both you and the other person.

It's a disease. You can't kill, so you won't.

And as long as you don't kill, God loves you. Now Jesus said, accept your righteousness, go beyond not killing to no anger.

Now, why are you angry with somebody, anybody, ever? One reason.

Only one. In some way or another, they have some kind of control over you and your little kingdom, and you can't tolerate it.

Anger comes out of somebody else's having some kind of control over your life that you don't like.

But you don't have a kingdom to protect anymore, so you've been freed up now to treat that other person the way

God treated you. And how was that? By loving you to death.

His death, and now yours. So, when

Jesus says no anger, he isn't trying to take something away from us that's our right. Now, I know there are feelings of anger.

The Bible says, be angry and sin not. And there's a kind of anger, apparently, that doesn't have a sinful expression to it.

But anger is that personal venting or feeling toward another human being that is an action toward another human being that would eventually destroy that person, if possible.

You understand that that's not a privilege anymore, because God loves the person you're angry with just as much as he loves you.

That's the cruncher. Of course, I know we don't want God to love that person as much as he loves us. I said the other day, who wants a

God that's going to love his enemies as much as he loves oneself, you know? But that's not a privilege anymore. In the rule of God, that has been taken care of by God himself.

And what he wants you to do is to express yourself toward that person the way God has expressed himself toward you when you were his enemy.

Well, then it goes on. Jesus says, what is next? You've heard say, oh yes, no adultery.

But I say to you, no lust. Now, let me quickly say to you that you cannot possibly commit adultery and love a person at the same time.

That is not a possibility. Now, you might have eros, you might have sexual pleasure, but you can't love.

Neither can you lust after a person, because to lust after another person means to make an object out of a human being.

And when you make an object out of a human being, that is to destroy the other person as a human being.

Adultery and lust are activities in which somebody else is being used for one's own pleasure.

And you cannot use another person and love that person at the same time. You cannot love and lust.

And the reason Jesus says no lust is because not only are we not to use another person, but we are to actively seek that other person's good.

Love begins when someone else's need is more important than your own.

And lust and adultery are invariably self -centered actions.

Every time there is no possibility to commit adultery that is not self -centered. It is using someone else for one's own pleasure.

That is destructive to both people. Jesus goes on, no divorce.

You know why Jesus said no divorce? Because he also said love your enemies.

It's all right, we'll come back to that one. I mean, I know. Divorce is not an option, not because it's some kind of law, but precisely because Christian man and wife, husband and wife, are a different kind of thing than merely husband and wife.

Ninety -nine percent of all divorces are predicated on selfishness. How do

I get out of this bad situation that I don't like myself to be in anymore? And sometimes it's not even a bad situation.

We're currently using such language as incompatibility. And we mean by that,

I like squash and she doesn't. You know, I mean, we're quite incompatible.

Anything goes on in the name of incompatibility. What we're saying is just flat -out selfishness. Where, in fact, one of the great diseases that's making us round in American Christianity today is a thing that's actually been come out in a book, you are entitled to your own happiness.

That is absolutely from the pit of hell. The moment you start talking about being entitled to your own happiness, you are on the way to self -destruction.

You have rights to nothing, you understand, in the kingdom of God, not even your own happiness. And you're going to experience joy and happiness precisely in doing

God's will and not in getting your own way. Now, let me just say a word about Christian marriage.

The reason that a man and woman who are Christians cannot express or think of themselves in terms of divorce is very simple.

Because a Christian man and a Christian woman who are married are, first of all, brother and sister in Christ before they are husband and wife.

That is the first relationship. Now, it's not the only relationship. My wife is my sweetheart and my lover.

She is my lifetime companion. She is a thousand more things than just my sister.

But she is, first of all, my sister in Jesus Christ.

And precisely because she's my sister in Jesus Christ, I am not given the right of the intimacy of our relationship to abuse her in a way that I would not treat any other sister in the body of Christ.

And it is precisely because of the familiarity, the commonness, the intimacy.

I mean, my wife knows me better than I know myself. We have been together 27 years nearly.

We keep track by the month. We have anniversary every month. 231 months.

I'm sorry, 321 months this past, whenever it was, the 23rd.

It's okay. We're still a little giddy and crazy. She knows me better than I know myself.

And you understand when you get into that kind of intimate knowing of one another, it is easy to abuse by neglect, by carelessness, by a thousand other things.

We love one another too much in Christ to even imagine the divorce would be an option, let alone to treat one another the way that we wouldn't treat any other brother and sister in Christ.

I want you to know I've learned about forgiveness from my wife. I think she's learned about that from me too.

It came to me one day that she must have forgiven me a thousand thousand times during our marriage and hasn't always told me that.

You don't understand? She has simply forgiven me again and again and again and again.

And you know why she does that? Not because I'm perfect, but because she loves me.

And she loves me enough to forgive me. Trusting that forgiveness will have a way of penetrating my life and making me grow in Christ.

Now friends, when you start thinking in those terms, divorce is not one of the options.

You don't start thinking in terms of how do I get... I mean, look, we have some differences, all right?

Sure we do. But I can honestly say that in 27 years nearly of marriage, we have never ever had a fight.

Now I know that sounds ideal. That doesn't mean that we've always got along and seen eye to eye. But we love to each other too much to carry that kind of disagreement into some kind of thing that's going to be destructive.

We've had long silent periods. That's better than fighting.

And then we come at the end of those silent periods and talk to one another and ask forgiveness.

The reason Jesus said no divorce is because my wife is my sister in Christ Jesus.

She's an extra special sister. Oh, let me assure you of that. But she's my sister.

And God has never given us the privilege of treating husband and wife differently from any of the other brothers and sisters in the family of God.

Well, now our time on this tape is up and the one that I want to speak to most strongly

I have not yet touched. So I'm going to just have to excuse myself with regard to the tape and go on to the next one, which is the one that I just want to spend our closing time.

And that's verse 38. You have heard it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

But I say unto you, no retaliation at all.