Monday Morning Mail, 7th July 2014

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Morning all!

Yesterday, we continued with our series in the Sermon on the Mount with Matthew 5:33-48. As we saw last time, this section is Jesus showing that trying to live by rules, even rules based on God's Law, doesn't work. The Pharisees made lots of rules (and were good at keeping them), but Jesus says they fall a long way short of what is needed for God's kingdom.

Here are some problems with living by rules:

  • If you keep the rules, you end up proud. Being proud is bad, because as we saw in Matthew 5:3, it's the "poor in spirit" - those who recognise that we're spiritually bankrupt – who inherit God's kingdom. Keeping rules leads to pride, not to poverty of spirit.

  • If we keep the rules, we think we've done enough. That was never how the Old Testament Law was meant to be used – it was always meant to reveal what God is like and show God's people some of what it meant to respond to him. That's part of the point of all the laws in Exodus 21 – Deuteronomy – it's showing ways that the values in the 10 Commandments work out in practice. The Pharisees thought they'd done enough when they kept their rules – Jesus shows them that they can never do enough.

  • If we don't keep the rules, we end up thinking we're not good enough. The problem here is that we might think that other people are good enough, but the reality is that none of us are. Only Jesus ever lived up to God's standards perfectly. God doesn't love people because they keep the law – he loves us because he is a loving and a forgiving God who wants to welcome us into his family...

God's standard ultimately is perfection (v48), and we never live up to that. What we need is not rules to keep; what we need is to recognise that we can't live up to God's standards and come to him as people who are spiritually bankrupt and ask for his forgiveness (v3). We need to be people who hunger and thirst for righteousness (v6), knowing that we don't have it, and longing for his.

We come in confidence, knowing that if we confess our sins God is faithful and just – he will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He adopts us as his children and gives us his Holy Spirit to help us to live more and more in a way that honours him.

We never get to God's perfection in this life, but we will one day. And by his grace and his transforming power in our lives, we can get closer to it than we once were!

John Newton wrote this:

"I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am."

So let's praise God, hold onto his forgiveness and don't think ourselves better than others!

God bless,

John

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