Matthew 5:21-26, October 6, 2024

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So we're continuing on in Matthew 5 this week, but if you recall,
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I took the first couple of sections of this larger passage, this Matthew 5, 21 through 48, and I took it out of order because I felt like there was a reason to do that, a slightly timely reason to do that given some things that had gone on in the world of church that I mentioned last week.
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But the downside of doing something like that to take the passages, to take parts of the
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Sermon on the Mount out of order is that I possibly may have taken a little bit from the strength of the overall message here.
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And it's not because I have some kind of power to weaken the words of Jesus, but I took
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His divinely structured message, the divinely structured argument of the
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Sermon on the Mount out of order. So we started with the issue of adultery and talking about how lust in itself is in some ways the same thing as committing the act of adultery, because it means that your heart is not pure before God.
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And this is something that we'll say multiple times today and probably multiple times in the coming weeks, but God cares ultimately more for the state of your heart than He does the state of your behavior or the state of your works or the state of things that we can look at you and see.
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He cares for the things that we can't see, the things that He can. And note that I'll be referring back to the sixth beatitude a number of times today, or keep the sixth beatitude in mind.
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Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. And while adultery is a concept that everyone can at least grasp, it's probably and hopefully not one that's quite as widespread or just as familiar as the one that Jesus is addressing in our passages today in the verses that we're looking at.
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So if you'll note in your bulletin that we're in Matthew 5, 21 through 26, we'll read those in just a moment.
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But our Lord and Savior chose to open this section of the Sermon on the
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Mount with a discussion of murder, the taking of a human life. And why would
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He do that? Because murder, this idea of killing someone was undoubtedly one of the most familiar of the
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Ten Commandments to His audience, thou shalt not kill. Now let's take just a moment to do a brief history of murder.
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We know for a fact when the first murder occurred. The first murder in history occurred in Genesis 4, chapter 4, verse 8, which says, then
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Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And it happened when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.
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Now since that time, and even just a few verses later, but certainly to our day, murder has only become more common.
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I was looking up statistics and found that there are nearly 60 deaths that are categorized as murder that occur in the
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United States each day. And that number would certainly be higher if suicides were counted in that as well.
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Suicide would be self -murder. And then that 60 murders a day would rise exponentially if abortions were counted as well, because that's nothing less than the murder of an unborn child.
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But the point is, murder is so common to us that it barely even gets our attention now as a society unless there's some kind of novel aspect to it, like a celebrity is involved or a bunch of people are involved.
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Because otherwise, a murder barely makes the local news. Yet we can say that the taking of a human life, any human life in this manner, the manner in which
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Cain killed Abel, is a violation of God's divine law. And everyone knew that.
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Everyone even then knew that. But we see this in Genesis 9, 6. Just to solidify the principle in Scripture, it says, whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed.
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For in the image of God, he made man. So just in this one verse, we have two very significant principles that we can pull out.
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Two concepts that are very useful, very profitable for guiding our lives.
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And I'll just briefly mention these. And the first one is Imago Dei. The concept of Imago Dei, which is that we were created in the image of God.
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That's very clear from this passage. And from that, we also have the concept of the sanctity of life, also spelled out in the passage that we just read.
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That it is wrong to take a human life because humans were created in the image of God.
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Both of these concepts are very important for us, not just in the instance of murder, but in the instance of our everyday life.
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Understand that we talk about a lot of other things when we talk about Imago Dei, or the image of God.
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This affects things like how we look at people who look different from us, right?
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There's been misconceptions that were tragically acted on in the past, that if man was created in the image of God, and I look like this, then someone who does not look like this is not created in the image of God.
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And that is completely false and completely incorrect. And in no way should your impression of how you look dictate how someone else looks, and that they're not created in the image of God.
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Because they are. All races, all colors, both of the only two existent genders.
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But the larger point here is that anyone listening to Jesus would have known that commandment.
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They would understand these concepts. They know the thou shalt not kill commandment.
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And I would dare say that you could walk out just to any random people on the street and ask them if they could name any of the 10 commandments.
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And I don't know if I'd put money on this because I wouldn't want to lose the money, but probably most of the people could at least say thou shalt not kill as one of the commandments.
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But what was going on with the Pharisees is that they were taking these ideas, these commandments, and they were substantially, significantly downgrading the true meaning of what they were.
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So let's take a look at our whole passage today, and then we're going to break it down verse by verse.
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So we are in Matthew chapter 5. We're starting at verse 21. It says,
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And there, remember that your brother has something against you. Leave your offering there before the altar and go.
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First, be reconciled to your brother and then come and present your offering. Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you be thrown into prison.
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Truly, I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last quadrants.
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So we start to see what the Pharisees were doing with these commandments in verse 21.
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So there's two things primarily that are going on in this verse. So the first is that Jesus is laying out the teaching of the moral law.
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So he says this, You have heard that the ancients were told. Now, if you stop and think about that phrasing, it's a little bit of a weird way to say something.
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You have heard that the ancients were told. But if you think back a few weeks ago, how we talked about due to the
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Babylonian captivity, the Jews at the time were now speaking Aramaic. They weren't speaking
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Hebrew, which means they weren't able to read the law of Moses. So they were only able to hear from the teachers of the law, the
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Pharisees, from the scribes. So they say, or Jesus says,
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You have heard that the ancients were told. So they weren't reading it for themselves. And that's what's going on here. Then he proceeds to the commandment, which everyone knows.
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But something you might not notice is how the next phrase in there is, Whoever murders shall be guilty before the court.
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So Jesus is pointing out that they're taking these words,
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You shall not murder. And whoever murders shall be guilty before the court. And what that's functionally doing is reducing murder, which is against God's moral law, against the 10 commandments.
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But it's reducing it to nothing more than an act that's subject to judgment and punishment by the legal system.
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And that's certainly true. And it's true to this day, of course. But as we've talked about before, that idea that murder is wrong, because if you commit it, you'll be punished by the law, misses the whole point of God's moral law.
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The whole point being righteousness from a pure heart. This is why he has given this law to his people.
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In Psalm 24, verses three through four say, Who may ascend into the mountain of Yahweh? And who may rise in his holy place?
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He who has innocent hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to worthlessness and is not sworn deceitfully.
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Now, much like everyone in this room, Jesus's listeners all knew and all agreed that murder was wrong and that murder deserved punishment.
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No one's arguing about that. And like everyone in this room, at least so far as I know, they had never committed a murder.
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And because of that, the people that were listening to Jesus, listening to this sermon, assumed that all was well with them.
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All was well with their life because they hadn't killed anybody. But what
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Jesus is about to do is to destroy, destroy any kind of illusion of self -righteousness that people have related to this issue.
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And that's what starts to happen in verse 22. So again, before we get to 22, what the teachers of the law had done was separate the idea of being created in the image of God and the idea of the sanctity of life from this commandment and made it so that the only thing you judged yourself by was whether or not you had committed this act and were being punished by it.
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Now we get into verse 22. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court.
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And we'll stop there for just a second. And I promise that I won't belabor this concept of the letter versus the spirit of the law again.
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I know that we've mentioned that several times over the last few weeks. And I know that everyone who's been here has grasped the overall principle at this point.
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But still, that's exactly what Jesus is doing here. Again, no doubt, everyone who had heard this commandment or read it over the last 2 ,000 plus years basically just breezes by it every time.
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Because you see that you shouldn't kill somebody. You know that you haven't killed anybody. So you're like, okay, good.
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Well, let's get on to the next one. And furthermore, let's get out of the Old Testament. But this is looking at it by the most commonly accepted human definitions.
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And Jesus tells them something different. Now, as just a brief aside, let's not lose one of the main overall concepts of this gospel, the idea that Jesus is the
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Messiah. Jesus is a deity. Jesus is the one who was prophesied of God.
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And we see this in his words, but I say to you, because what this means is that Jesus is giving an authoritative interpretation based on his deity, based on his messiahship, based on his thorough and eternal knowledge of the law and these principles.
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But then he proceeds to let them know that not committing murder is not the same thing as being righteous before God.
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And the somewhat shocking message of this is that everyone who is or has been angry with his brother, with a fellow believer, is as guilty before the court.
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And at this point, we've obviously shifted to God's court, not the court of law of man.
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And that's the court of judgment that awaits all of us, whether or not we step foot into a court of law, but that truthfully, anger before God is essentially on the same level as the murder of someone else.
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Now, in truth, anger is probably the emotion that is the foundation for most acts of murder.
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There's some kind of anger, there's some kind of tremendously negative feeling there. We see this concept in scripture as well, though.
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Again, reinforcing what Jesus has said. First John 3 .15 tells us that everyone who hates his brother is a murderer.
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And you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. And again,
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I know that on the surface, this doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense. Actually killing someone is way different than just hating someone or holding a grudge against someone or just spending time being angry at someone.
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But think about it this way. Even the most mild -mannered, seemingly law -abiding person can harbor the exact same feelings as a murderer in their heart.
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And in some cases, the only difference between these two people is opportunity or the person who hadn't committed murder is just too much of a coward to do it, no matter how much they want to do it.
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But the feeling in the heart, the emotions that drive this are the same.
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So while this person hasn't actually committed the act of murder, they're still a murderer according to God's definition.
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Now, as we look at this verse in particular, 22, John MacArthur points out this, that the divine definition of murder has three components to it.
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One is anger, one is saying raka, which we'll talk about in just a second, and the third is calling someone a fool.
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So let's start with anger because at this point, we do have to differentiate between the kind of anger that Jesus is talking about and righteous anger.
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After all, the first thing that somebody will say is didn't Jesus get mad? Didn't Jesus get angry?
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He absolutely did. The cleansing of the temple is a perfect example of that. And what we're looking at in the case of Jesus is righteous anger, anger that God is not being honored.
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And in fact, there are things in our society that as Christians, we should be angry about.
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And we can make a whole list here, but one that I think is most important right now, particularly, although not exclusively, is where children in our society are concerned.
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And obviously, we should be angry about the just aggressive promotion of murder of babies through abortion.
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That is something that Christians should be angry about. But even after they are born, even when the kids are born, they're subject to this really strange mental and emotional manipulation.
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Feeding into the idea that a boy who thinks he's a girl is in fact a girl, which is ridiculous.
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And that is something, anybody who promotes that with a child in any direction, we should be angry at.
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And we should be angry at the so -called medical professionals who stand ready to make life -altering changes to these children who have been mentally and emotionally manipulated to give them hormone treatments.
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Or to give them irreversible surgeries when they're even as low as single digits.
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Euphemistically, we might call that gender reassignment surgery.
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But as Christians, you should call it what it is, which is physical mutilation. Don't give in to cultural euphemisms when it comes to something that is clearly against the word of God.
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Those are the kind of things that Christians should be angry about. But the anger that Jesus is talking about in this passage, what he's talking about here, it comes down to something very different.
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This is insults, real or perceived, slights, disagreements, anything that might result in you holding a grudge against another person, a perceived wrong that has been done to you, that you are now completely set against your fellow believer over.
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This is the kind of anger that renders you guilty before God. So that's the first portion of this is anger.
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Now there's this word in here, rachah. And that word has no
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English equivalent. So again, this is one that has been transliterated to this word.
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And that makes it a little bit difficult for us because we have to understand what this concept is.
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Now some older translations or some commentators translate this as worthless fellow, as blockhead, which is one of my favorites, like Charlie Brown.
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But basically what this is, is it comes down to the idea of slandering another person, of talking badly about a fellow believer because of something that they have possibly done that you're not happy about.
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And now we're talking about the slander of another individual who's been created in the image of God.
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And this is equivalent to slandering God. And this ultimately comes from an issue of the heart, as we know.
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And the cure for this issue is the third beatitude, which is about being lowly or about being meek.
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Because if you recall, someone who is meek as a result of realizing their true state before God, is not going to seek after every single right and privilege that they believe that they're entitled to.
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But they'll seek rather to love other believers. They'll seek reconciliation. And we'll talk about that in a little bit as well.
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So that's raka. And then the third component of this was calling someone a fool.
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Now this is more familiar to us, obviously. But even the term fool as translated here in the
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LSB comes from a Greek word. A Greek word that also gives us our term, moron.
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But this has a deeper meaning in the Greek, which is why sometimes we have to go back to the original languages, or at least attempt to understand the original languages because our words don't always carry the same level of meaning.
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But the meaning here of this term is to be both stupid and godless.
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Now, is it possible for someone to be a fool? Yes, it is possible for someone to be a fool.
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And how could they be a fool? If we look at Psalm 14, one and Psalm 53, one, they both say the same thing.
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They both say, the wicked fool says in his heart, there is no God. So this is where we see the idea of being stupid or foolish and godless.
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But let's say that someone does truly qualify as a fool in this way.
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Let's go back to this beatitude idea. And again, we're sort of jumping back and forth between our application and our definition here.
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But it's appropriate to warn somebody that they're being foolish. You wouldn't be doing your part if you didn't.
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But don't mistake it. Warning someone that they're being foolish is different from calling someone a fool.
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If someone's being foolish, help them, or at least attempt to help them. A true fool will not want your help, but that's okay.
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But essentially, calling someone a fool is telling them that they are going to hell. And Jesus tells us that if we're directing that kind of insult at a brother or at a fellow believer, that is enough to condemn us before God.
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Because again, think about where this desire, think about where the drive to do this comes from.
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It comes from your heart. Now, if we turn back to Leviticus, and to Leviticus 19, we see these principles in some of our oldest scripture.
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So again, we have to be careful about how we use some of these concepts. We can't just pick and choose.
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And we have to differentiate between the moral law that's still applicable and the ceremonial and judicial law or mosaic law that has been fulfilled by Christ.
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But we can clearly say that if Jesus is taking a concept from here and bringing it forward, it certainly applies to us.
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Now, if we look at Leviticus 19, verses 15 through 18, we see this. You shall do no injustice in judgment.
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You shall not be partial to the poor, nor defer to the great, but you shall judge your neighbor in righteousness.
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You shall not go about as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand against the life of your neighbor.
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I am Yahweh. You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You may surely reprove your neighbor and so not bear sin because of him.
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And you shall not take vengeance, and you shall not keep your anger against the sons of your people.
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You shall not keep your anger against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
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I am Yahweh. So we see the word of God in Leviticus, and these principles have very clearly been around for a long time.
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So Jesus is not bringing up anything new, but what he's doing is, as we've said, is he's pointing back.
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He's bringing them back around to the true meaning of the law, not the simple meaning of the law that we can easily fulfill through our own effort.
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So the theme here is that God views anger as a sin, not simply committing a physical murder.
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And not committing a physical murder, it doesn't mean that you're off the hook as far as God goes. But Jesus has more to say about this.
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Particularly, he talks about how the state of your heart impacts your worship.
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So let's look at verses 23 and 24. Therefore, if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go.
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First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering. Now, at the risk of being repetitive here, everything that we're talking about comes back to the true condition of your heart.
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And it comes back to the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law. Now, the true condition of your heart is something that only you know, and something that only
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God knows. I don't know it. The people that are sitting next to you don't know the true condition of your heart either.
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But let's think about worship for just a minute. So worship was a huge part of the Pharisees' lives.
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Everything they did revolved around the temple. And everything they did revolved around their role at the temple.
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They loved the honor that came along with it. They loved the fancy clothes. They loved being called rabbi, as Jesus says later.
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But what Jesus is telling them is that even this, even the outward things that they do is impacted by their inner life.
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It's impacted by what's truly going on in their heart. Because worshiping with an impure heart ultimately is the work of the flesh.
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It's not spiritual. Another significant part of the worship or the worship of the
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Jews at this time was the idea of sacrifices. So the
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Jews were aware of sin. They were aware of the concept of sin. They were aware of certain sins that they committed because the sacrifices that they made were a way to bring them back into a right relationship with God.
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So that was the whole purpose of this. So they knew when they had done something because they were actively going to try to take care of it.
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But while they were aware of certain sins, the legalistic nature of the teaching that they were being given by the
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Pharisees meant that they weren't counting inner things as sin.
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They weren't counting things that you couldn't see as a sin. So in their mind, if you couldn't look at it and see that it's a sin, well, then it didn't matter.
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We don't need a sacrifice for that. We don't have to worry about that. We did the sacrifice for the things that we actually did.
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But now Jesus is coming in and he's telling them that if they remember that their brother has something against them, they should leave their sacrifice right there and go reconcile with that person before they present the offering.
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Now, there's an aspect of this idea that Jesus is using as sort of an absurdity or an exaggeration to really drive the point home.
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Because for a lot of worshipers, the temple wasn't close by.
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You know, it was as much as a day's walk. And these sacrifices that they were taking, either they figured out a way to cart these animals there or they purchased them with their own money at the temple when they got there.
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And now what Jesus is saying to them is that if you've gone all this way, you know, you've walked an entire day to get to the temple to do your sacrifice so that you can be right with God.
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And then all of a sudden, you realize that there's something wrong with one of your relationships.
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You have to take that sacrifice and leave it right there. Now, some other Jew is probably gonna take your sacrifice and burn it for their own sins.
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Now you're out that money and you're out that journey, but you're to leave that sacrifice there and make the journey back home and reconcile with the person who has something against you.
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And the reason for this, again, it's all about the heart, is because it is hypocritical to come before God with an offering to ask for forgiveness when you're aware of something in your life or in your relationships that's not right, somewhere where you're unrepentant or you're unforgiving or you need forgiveness for what you've done.
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God doesn't want that sacrifice. And we see this in several places in Scripture.
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In Isaiah 1, God rejects the sacrifices.
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He rejects the offering of the people of Israel. Isaiah 1, verses 16 through 17, he says, wash yourselves, purify yourselves, remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes.
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Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, reprove the ruthless, execute justice for the orphan, plead for the widow.
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So he's saying cleanse yourselves, wash yourselves, purify yourselves. And Jeremiah 7, verses 9 and 10 is also powerful.
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God says this, will you steal, murder, and commit adultery and swear while lying and burn incense to Baal and walk after other gods that you have not known?
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Then come and stand before me in this house which is called by my name and say, we are delivered that you may do all these abominations.
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The sacrifices to take away external sins don't take away the sin that's existing in your heart.
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This is true for them, it's true for us as well. You can't be right with God if you refuse to be right with other believers.
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Now there's something else interesting in this phrase, the way it's put here.
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And that is your brother has something against you. So what that says to us is that it doesn't matter who's at fault.
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We all have bumps in relationships. We all have times where things aren't going the way they're supposed to go or somebody gets mad at us or we get mad at somebody.
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But you have a responsibility to attempt reconciliation with that person, whether they caused it or whether you caused it.
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Though admittedly, some people won't allow it. Some people may not be willing to reconcile with you.
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That is an issue of their heart. But are you able to claim before God, not before anyone here, but before God purity in your heart where this is concerned?
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Do you know and can you say before God that you truly wanted to make this better?
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There's some several verses obviously that deal with issues related to this. 2
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Timothy 2 .22, Paul tells Timothy, now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace with those who call on the
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Lord from a pure heart. We see purity of heart all the time. 1 Timothy 1 .5, the goal of our command is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and an unhypocritical faith.
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And then Hebrews 12 .14 tells us just straight out, pursue peace with all men and the sanctification without which no one will see the
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Lord. Pursue peace with all men and the sanctification without which no one will see the
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Lord. John MacArthur says, when there is animosity or sin of any sort in your heart, there cannot be integrity in your worship.
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And this is reinforced in plenty of scripture that long predates the Sermon on the Mount. Hundreds of years before that,
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David writes in Psalm 66 .18, if I see wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear.
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And even before that, 1 Samuel 15 .22 says, has
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Yahweh as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of Yahweh?
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Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice and to heed than the fat of rams.
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It's better to have your heart right with God than to show up with anger or sin in your heart and pretend that you're worshiping
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Him truly. Now we move on to verse 25 and 26.
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Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you be thrown into prison.
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Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last quadrants. And this is a similar concept, but this one is a little more focused on the person who sinned in a way that's against someone else.
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And while the legal metaphor is used here again, the deeper meaning is very much related to the judgment of God.
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We're not talking about the court of man here. We're talking about God's court. In fact, all of this, though it ostensibly involves other people or apparently involves other people, what it ultimately does is it truly revolves around and affects our relationship with God.
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And the greater idea here is that putting off this reconciliation that you know is necessary puts you at risk of facing judgment before you're able to make things right.
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He's telling you, you have to fix this. Don't risk waiting and facing the judgment of God because as he goes on to say, if it gets to the court and it gets to the judge, you have no say over the outcome.
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There's a chance that you can influence something of the outcome of this before it gets to the end.
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And even in that case, you might have to give up something. In the metaphorical case here, you might have to give up some pride.
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You might have to give up what you think that you're entitled to, but in order to reconcile before God's judgment, that's worth it.
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And if we take it again, back to the Beatitudes, if we take it again back to being lowly, this becomes easy because you're empowered by the
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Holy Spirit, not because it's easy, not because you wanna do it, not because it's something that you can force yourself to do because again, as we've mentioned many times, it doesn't work that way.
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So in this set of verses, once again, we see the presence of this overarching theme and that is that there is so much difference between following the letter of the law, following the commandment as it is written to make sure that you don't face a legal judgment and following the spirit of the law, following what it was that God gave this to his people and gave this to us to accomplish.
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And we also see some applications here. So that letter of the law, spirit of the law is a big concept.
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It's an overarching, nonspecific concept and we take it down to the level of application with these examples that Jesus gives.
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And we can even drill down a little further here. We can get a little more focused, a little more specific. So related to this larger idea of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, there's another principle and that is this.
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So the commandments not only state a positive action or they, okay, let me start back over.
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The commandments not only state something negative as in don't do this, they also imply a positive action as in do this.
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And what this means is that not only should you not kill your brother, very clear, everyone agrees, but in addition to that, you have to proactively seek to make things right with people and to keep things right with people, especially other believers.
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Now, let me just say that, especially in verse 25 and 26, that doesn't talk about believers at all.
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The implication being you have to reconcile to people that aren't believers as well. This is not exclusively to Christians.
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You can't be a Christian and go set yourself against somebody as an enemy personally.
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They might be an enemy of God, but what have we said before? Such were some of you, other than the grace of the
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Holy Spirit, you have a responsibility to help them see the truth of God, not to hate them and dismiss them because they disagree with you.
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Now again, they're not all gonna come along and that's fine, but you can't be hating a person, believer or not.
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So just put that there. So again, not only do you not kill physically, you don't kill in your heart either.
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You proactively seek reconciliation because it's not possible for you to harbor hatred in your heart for other people, especially other
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Christians, and consider yourself a Christian. First John 2 .9 says this, the one who says he is in the light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now.
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And just to get even more explicit a little bit later, First John 4 .8, the one who does not love does not know
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God because God is love. The one who does not love, and that's interesting because that doesn't even say hate.
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It doesn't say the one who hates does not know God, it says the one that does not love does not know God. That even gives that a little bit of an extra dimension of something to be considering in your own life.
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And this is important here again, again, because the implication is that you cannot be in a right relationship with God if your life is just a minefield of other broken relationships with Christians that you haven't tried to reconcile.
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And another important point that we can take away, another one, this is not new, I know
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I've said it, I know I've repeated it, and I'm repeating it again, God values the condition of your heart above all other things.
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You cannot outwork the condition of your heart before God. This is why
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Proverbs 4 .23 says, guard your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.
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And if we wanna take it to the New Testament, to the red letters, Matthew 15 .19
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says, for out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adultery, sexual immoralities, thefts, false witnesses, and slander.
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So again, the condition of your heart is so important. But this is why you can also fool a bunch of people in church.
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For a little while, you might be able to fool them for your whole life. Because by all outward appearances, you can do the right things.
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You can say the right things. Yet in your heart, you have all these grudges, angers, maybe you even have hatred and murderous desires for somebody.
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Yet far from being saved by your outward activities, God is going to judge you by the state of your heart.
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God is not gonna judge you by what the person in the pew next to you said about you at your funeral.
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Those things in your heart will send you to hell the same way they'll send the unrepentant murderer to hell.
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Let's take that idea one step further. As hard as this might be to process, the truly repentant murderer is in a better place before God than you are.
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Talked about abortion a couple of times. The doctor who murdered thousands of babies yet was convicted of that, truly repented of that, and turned to Jesus, that person's in a better place than the
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Christian who comes to church every single week but still hates some other believer because 15 years ago they did something to him at a committee meeting.
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Chew on that for just a minute. And think about the fact, too, that the repentant sinner, they know what they did.
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And the Holy Spirit has graciously granted them the realization that true forgiveness only comes through repentance and faith in the work of Jesus.
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And no matter how bad you think a person is, if they're that unbeliever that you hate, watch out because that position could be flipped anytime.
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And even worse, if it's not flipped, you both might be in the same spot. And that's important as well.
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But it brings us to another point. All of these ideas that Jesus is sharing should lead us to realize something.
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Should lead us to realize that we will not and cannot keep the true spirit of the law perfectly.
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We can know this in our brain and still get really mad at somebody.
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And it happens to all of us. And we have to recognize that the true spirit of the law, which would render us completely without hope, except for the fact that Jesus himself became that sin on our behalf so that we would become righteousness before God in him, not because of what we did, because of what
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Jesus has done. But something truly has to happen before we can reach this point.
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And let's go again all the way back to the Beatitudes just for a minute. We have to recognize that only the
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Holy Spirit can make this change in our heart. We cannot make it. We can ask for it, we can desire it, but it is a gift of the
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Holy Spirit. And that is him opening our eyes to the truths that Jesus preached in the
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Beatitudes. There's a reason the Sermon on the Mount was given in the order that it was because it follows a necessary set of steps.
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You can't put something later before another step because it really builds on each other.
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But we have to be humble and recognize something. And the vast majority of us are incapable of humbling ourselves enough to seek that kind of reconciliation.
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The vast majority of us have a significant problem being lowly enough to not fight for everything that we think we should be getting.
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But humility comes from the recognition that we're hopeless sinners. It comes from the recognition of who we are before God, not who we are before somebody that we're standing next to or standing in front of.
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And somehow, inexplicably, we've been given the opportunity for new life through Christ, even if we didn't deserve it.
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And again, if I had to pick one Beatitude now, it would be Matthew 5, 5, blessed are the lowly for they shall inherit the earth.
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And while all of the Beatitudes are essential, this one, meekness, is the one that will allow us to do two things here that are very important.
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It's the one that will allow us to stand for what is righteous, only the things of God, yet at the same time, it will allow us to show the grace that we need to show, to avoid the hate, to avoid the grudges, to avoid the murder in our hearts.
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Blessed are the lowly for they shall inherit the earth. Now, commenting on this section,
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Charles Spurgeon said this, what a sweeping law is this. My conscience might have been easy as to the command thou shalt not kill.
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But if anger without just cause be murder, how shall I answer for it?
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Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation. And this is the same thing that we should all say.
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This is the same thing that we should all say about all of these ideas that Jesus is giving us.
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So I'll leave you with this. Whatever this idea has brought into your mind, allow it to take you first to reconciliation with this person that you know that you're mad at, that you know that you might even hate a little bit.
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Allow this idea, allow the Holy Spirit to move you to reconciliation wherever it's necessary in your life.
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But beyond that, allow this to take you straight to the cross of Jesus.
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Pray for the Holy Spirit to do one of two things. Pray for the
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Holy Spirit to grant you the salvation that you need to make the beatitudes a reality in your life.
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Or pray for the Holy Spirit to remind you of the humility that you need to remind you of all that you have been given so that you can reconcile, rest in the work of Jesus and have the ability to worship with a pure heart before God.
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Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, thank you for your word.
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We recognize all the ways that we have taken your commandments and twisted them to fit our own desires and misinterpreted them so that we could have a clear conscience about the things that we've done.
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God, we pray that the Holy Spirit would open our eyes, would open our hearts to the recognition that what we should be seeking is not obedience to a code of conduct, but righteousness before you.
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And while we know that we will never achieve perfect righteousness, God, help us to walk every day in sanctification.
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Help us to grow in the knowledge of you and grow in the knowledge of your son and be influenced by the
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Holy Spirit so that we would live a life that is increasingly pleasing to you, that is more sanctified day by day, that allows us to grow in holiness.
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Help us to love one another. Help us to forgive our brothers and our sisters in Christ, because it's only in that way that we'll be able to love you properly and that we'll be able to present worship that's pleasing to you.
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And worship that's pleasing to you is the only thing that we should be coming and gathering for on a weekly basis.
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God, it's amazing that you sent your son to die for us. It's amazing when we think about the ways that we offend other people that you've given us a way to make that right with you.
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We thank you for that. We thank you for the immense amount of love, grace, and mercy that you've shown us through Jesus, Lord.
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I pray that each and every person would have the opportunity to experience and remember that love.
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We thank you for these things, and it's in your son's name we pray. Jesus, amen.