What do the concept of sharing and rules have in common? Would you agree that they are very good things… for everyone else to do. Sharing is great – for other people to do with me. Rules are great – for other people to follow. When it comes to me sharing or keeping rules, though – that’s a different story. So when they apply to me, I am not as crazy about them.
That’s because our primary view of God’s law is to see it as a list of restrictions and prohibitions. In his law, God spells out the things we are to avoid and the behavior we should avoid carrying out so that we don’t sin. In that sense then, God’s laws will always serve to accuse, convict, and condemn, for when addressed to fallen sinners, they can only serve that purpose. My guess is that you feel that sting as you read the verses from our Savior’s sermon in Matthew 5.
So God’s law makes it abundantly clear that his demand for perfection is not one that can ever be attained by us. Whenever we slip into the pharisaical false sense of security, God’s law sets us straight. It uncovers another nuance of our inherent sinfulness that we didn’t even know was there until the law exposed it. The words of Jesus this morning fall into that category of God’s law. Jesus addressed some pretty standard sins, but then took it a step further.
Regarding murder, he took it to another level by pointing out that murder itself was only a symptom of the real culprit – a hating heart. So one does not even need to be guilty of ending another’s life to be under the same judgment! Regarding sexual immorality, one does not even need to remove a single article of clothing to be guilty – his eyes permit the heart to be lured into lust. Regarding your word, no official oath or contract or signed document is needed as proof against you – if you simply go against the very yes or no that you spoke to someone, you have broken your word and are an untrustworthy liar. Jesus’ words before us today do not at all leave us brimming with confidence! Quite the opposite – they knock us clean off any personal pedestal on which we may have imagined ourselves standing.
Moreover, Jesus’ sermon provides perhaps one of the starkest cautions against sin that we find anywhere in verses 29-30. “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.” We miss the point if we too hastily presume that Jesus is speaking in hyperbole and conclude that he wasn’t serious about gouging out eyes or lopping off limbs. The point Jesus is making is that we had better take sin seriously because it is not a thing to be trifled with.
Sin is not a plaything that we can pick up on occasion to entertain ourselves and then put back down at will when it has served its purpose. It is not content to be relegated to such a role! Rather, it seeks to ensnare and master anyone who willingly gives it the time of day. Sin will never be content sharing a soul with the Savior – it wants all of us, and so to treat it lightly or innocently ignores the damage it seeks to inflict. Sin longs to inflict irreparable harm on our relationship with Jesus. It seeks to turn us against him at every opportunity it gets. So what will happen if we warmly welcome it into our lives? What will happen when, instead of confessing it, we become comfortable with it? What will happen when we deceive ourselves into letting it “harmlessly” hang around? Shouldn’t we have learned this lesson early on with Cain and Abel?
See how the Lord described it to Cain in Genesis, following Cain’s less-than-pleasing offering before God. The Lord said, “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). Sin is not and will not remain an innocent bystander! Sadly, the need for the Lord’s urgent warning was validated as the very next verse records for us the first murder in the Bible. Cain disregarded the Lord’s words and murdered his brother, Abel. With different words, Jesus is reiterating the same potentially devastating impact sin can still have in our lives today when left unchecked. So yes, the law exposes our sin and makes clear the very real damage – even eternal damage – that sin can inflict. We do well to take Jesus’ warnings seriously.
However, is that enough? To this point, have you read anything new? Did you not already know about the ways we could sin that Jesus mentions in these verses? Did you not already know that sin is bad? Did you not already know that the danger of hell that Jesus warns about is very real? Assuming you knew all these things, then why don’t you stop doing them? Why don’t we stop doing them? We know God doesn’t want it. We know it’s bad for us. We know hell is real and not someplace we want to be! So why don’t we take Jesus seriously and just stop doing what he says to stop doing?
Because the law cannot empower us to. It cannot equip us to. It can only show us what we are to do and sadly, by extension, what we have not done. It has no power or ability to enable us to stay on its path.
That’s why Jesus had to come. Do you get it? If Jesus came to be another lawgiver in the same way that Moses first codified God’s law as he came down from Mt. Sinai, then we didn’t need Jesus for that! We don’t need Jesus for that. We need him for another reason, a reason that he laid out in his sermon in the words just prior to our verses this morning. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (v.17). What does it mean that Jesus came, not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it? It means that everything that Jesus listed in this section of the Savior’s Sermon that we’re hearing today was carried out. It was completed. It was done perfectly. Everything that Jesus commands in these words was carried out. And by whom? By the very individual who spoke them. Jesus commanded them… and it was Jesus who kept them.
One of the knocks people have against Christian preachers and Christians, in general, is that they are hypocrites. They preach one thing and do another. They point out the moral failures or shortcomings of others but are guilty of those very same things themselves. By that standard, if only those able to perfectly keep the law are the ones permitted to point out the law to others, then no one but Jesus could ever speak. Everyone else would be hypocrites. Jesus is the sole individual who could never be labeled a hypocrite. He’s the one about whom it can legitimately be said that he practiced what he preached.
But do you know why he kept everything he commanded? Not for his own sake. He had nothing to prove. He was already holy when he left heaven. No, he kept what he commanded for our sake. His perfection was to benefit us. By his perfect life, we have been made holy. By faith, his obedience serves in place of our disobedience. His sanctification stands in place of our sin. How can this be? Did God just decide that our sin suddenly didn’t count against us?
You know the answer to that. In addition to his obedience, or rather, as yet one more example of it, Jesus paid for our sin with his life. When he died, the blood he shed was the payment price for our sin. So he took our sin on himself and placed his perfection on us.
So now, you are free. What do we do with this freedom? There is no burden of law. There is no picture of God keeping tabs on our disobedience, tracking each transgression in order to formulate a proper punishment that fits our crimes and exact that punishment on us when we die. There is only freedom.
So if God doesn’t need your perfection, which he already has in Christ, if God doesn’t need your obedience, for he already has Christ’s, then why does Jesus call us to live such holy lives as he describes? Because while God doesn’t need our holiness, your neighbor does. Your holy lives are a blessing to your neighbor. As you thank and honor God with your holy living, what you are really doing is loving and serving your neighbor with your holy living. Consider three benefits of your holy living: it shows love to God, it serves your neighbor, and… it feels good!
The Bible is very repetitive with the first one. How do we show love for God? We keep his commands. “This is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome…” (1 John 5:3). A husband and wife express their love for each other with words. But blessed is the marriage in which that love is carried out through acts of service for each other. Love is not just spoken, but shown. In the same way, it is one thing to say we love God – anyone can do that. But holy living shows it.
And what we’re doing in that same process is also serving our neighbor. You are protecting their marriage. You are keeping your word to them. In contrast to a fly-off-the-handle world, you show them patient kindness that keeps anger in check. You are doing for them exactly what Jesus encouraged previously in his sermon: making their world better and brighter as you are salt and light in your holy living.
Will your neighbor always acknowledge it? Not necessarily. Will she always appreciate it? Don’t count on it. Will your neighbor become a believer through your holy living? Never through that on its own, although it very well might provide the first step in that process.
Finally – it feels good to live holy lives! Think of the alternative. When is the last time that you were well aware of a sin that you had just committed? None of us has to go way back on the mental surveillance tapes. I want you to remember how you felt when you reflected on your sin. I believe I know the answer. Not great. That may be an understatement. And don’t mix up the sin itself with the guilt over that sin I’m referring to. Even if the sin itself may have felt good at the time, when you become acutely aware of it, it doesn’t feel good.
But you know what does feel good? Doing the right thing. I don’t know if we give as much attention to this as we ought to. If feels good to do the right thing. And we don’t need to feel bad about feeling good! That’s OK – in fact, it’s one of the blessings attached to doing the right thing – it feels good. Consider how the psalms speak of it again and again. The pictures associated with righteousness and doing the right thing are pleasant pictures, pleasing feelings – it feels good!
Too often when we set out to do the right thing, what derails us is that we zero in on every single time we fail. We let the failures crowd out the successes. We hardly ever celebrate the successes, because we linger in the guilt too long to remember them! Live holy lives because it feels good to do the right thing.
Live holy lives. Jesus kept his own commands so that you could. So do it. And love doing it. And love God and your neighbor in the process.