Transcript:
Cody H. –
Morning.
Well, at Sunday school, at McCoy, we’ve been going through the Sermon on the Mount and we just finished chapter five, the first chapter there, five, six, and seven of Matthew.
And in five, toward the end, Jesus is really hammering the religious leaders and all of his listeners and reorienting them to what righteousness truly is.
He actually flips the script on what they think that God’s law was and what it was about and what it was for.
Jesus has the phrase where he says, “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you…” and he goes through several things, really, he’s elevating the law. He’s making it more stringent. He’s making it more difficult to meet, live up to, and he doesn’t actually give them the answer.
See, we have the benefit of living 2,000 years after he lived and we have the whole canon of Scripture, but he doesn’t tell them, “I’m the answer. I’m the Messiah, believe in me.”
They’re just, “What? You’ve made the law even more difficult to obey and you don’t give us an answer.”
So, I was at the end of chapter five kind of like, “OK, well, the natural question in my mind is well, if we’re Christ followers, then how do we live? If we know that the law is meant to point out our sin, make it insurmountable, make it obvious and undeniable, then how are we to live righteously? How are we to follow in what righteousness truly is?”
So, the beginning of Matthew six, in the first 18 verses, Jesus lays out his thesis statement.
He says in verse one, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
Then he goes on to give three specific examples of what it looks like to do righteous things in a righteous way.
He uses the examples of giving, praying, and fasting.
I’m going to read the first phrase and you guys can shout out to me, what you think Jesus is implying?
So, here’s the first phrase of each of those categories.
“When you give to the needy…
The second one is, “And when you pray…
The third one is, “When you fast…”
So, my question to you would be, what is Jesus implying when he begins the discussion about each of these three spiritual disciplines?
Any ideas?
That you’re going to be doing it, great, that you’re going to be doing it.
Obviously, we’ve got to be doing righteousness.
He’s not saying, “Oh, you’re righteous before God, and the law doesn’t apply to you in the sense that that you have to meet it to please God, so you don’t have to do these things.”
No, we have to do them.
Then, he speaks with a pattern.
So, the first portion of each of those three actions, giving, praying, and fasting, he says, “Don’t do it this way as the hypocrites do…” and he gives the reason why they do it.
And it’s some form of, “…to be honored by others…”, or “…to be seen by others…” to show others that they’re fasting.
Then he goes on and it’s a pattern again, and the way to do it is described.
So, the way to give is “…do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving may be in secret…”
“…when you pray, go into your room and close the door, pray to your father who’s unseen. He who sees what’s done in secret will reward you.”
And then the last thing, “…when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face.”
So it won’t be obvious to others that you’re fasting. Don’t go in there all gloomy and just dragging. “Oh, I’m fasting today.”
So that tells me that he cares about our motives. As I was mulling this over and thinking about this, I really believe that the motive, now don’t stone me here, the motive appears to be even more important than the action.
The motive appears to be even more important than the action.
So how do I know that?
Well, wonderful, good life-giving things done with the wrong motives are not going to matter at all in the end.
Now you might say, “Whoa. Now, whoa, it’s good to provide clean water for people. It’s good to make sure that people on death row for something they didn’t do, they need to be proclaimed innocent, they need to get out.”
In Matthew 7, Jesus says, “Many will say to me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesized in your name, cast out demons, and done many wonders?’ Then I will declare them, ‘I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.’”
Lawlessness? Wow, that is great deeds like prophesying, casting out demons, doing many wonders. It seems like he’s saying that even those awesome things, done with the wrong motives, done outside of a relationship with Jesus, because that’s the key, a relationship, Jesus calls those things lawless.
So how do we know when our motives are right? Because our hearts are deceitful. We can’t just look at our own hearts and think that we’re going to get an accurate assessment.
We read in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked who can know it.”
But I’d not really noticed the next verse, “I the Lord search the heart. I test the mind.”
So this prompted me to invite God to check my heart, to search my heart, as David did in Psalm 139.
I think it’s good to do that at the beginning of this year, as we launch into this.
David wrote in Psalm 139, ”Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there’s any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”