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“A
New Righteousness”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Matthew 5:13-20
“For I tell you, unless your
righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never
enter the kingdom of heaven.”
DEAR SISTERS AND BROTHERS we are again involved in Jesus’ Sermon on
the Mount. Last Sunday we
heard verses about being “Blessed” in all kinds of serious
circumstances. A real aspect of the true faith that God gives us, in Christ
and through the Holy Spirit, is that the order of God’s righteousness
is in many ways the very opposite of our worldly perspectives.
Very simply, here Jesus has started with amazing situations in which we
are blessed by God, and then Jesus moves into teaching about obedience
to God’s commandments. Wouldn’t
our own first thinking be that if we obeyed God’s commandments, then
God would bless us? But
Jesus is ultimately teaching us that God first blesses us with a new
truth in our lives and then we are called to obey God’s commandments.
The picture is something like this.
God comes to us, embraces us, kisses us, shows us we belong to
God, and then God tells us to obey His commandments.
If we then in some way try and fail, God comes back to us,
reveals to us again that we are forgiven, embraces and kisses us once
more. Of course, next, we are called to obey His
commandments.
Jesus is leading us into understanding righteousness with, in, and
through God. After showing the beatitudes, then Jesus says to his
disciples, and probably some of the crowd that is now there, “You
are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its
saltiness be restored?”
In leading us to discover and experience the true kind of righteousness
that lives in the heart of the Triune God, Jesus leads us to see who we
are, to begin with, in the world, and then who we are as God reforms us.
Salt pertains to secularism. When
the Church focuses totally on being a worldly institution, it then loses
its specific importance and meaning.
Yes, it is certainly important that the Church has reach out
ministries in its community, but these ministries should come out of
rediscovering the gospel at a new level, not merely community helping
without a foundation of new blessings by God in understanding God’s
participation in the ministry.
There is a book titled Always
Being Reformed, by a professor at a Presbyterian seminary near
Atlanta, Georgia. One of
his first stories was about a Presbyterian downtown church that refused
to move out to the suburbs when there had been racial and economic
changes in the downtown area. They
stayed because they wanted to minister to the poor and mostly black
people, and to others around town who felt excluded or unhappy in other
churches. “For years,
even when it was a dangerous thing to do in the south, this church has
taken a stand for racial justice…It houses a shelter for homeless
people and a clinic with a doctor and dentist always on call to care for
men, women, and children who have fallen through the cracks of the
city’s health-care system.” To me, this is a wonderful picture of
how a downtown church really could be involved in its proper type of
ministries.
However, Dr. Guthrie, in this book goes on to tell of how at session
meetings, when new elders were asked to describe their “faith
journey” which had led them to membership in this church, they talked
about how they were attracted to a church that was involved in civil
activities that helped the needy in the city.
But, never once did these elders mention God, Jesus Christ, or
the Bible.
These ministries that this church was involved in were wonderful,
but apparently the church was still not offering the very new kind of
righteousness revealed in Jesus Christ.
It is perfectly fine when a church is legally involved in civil
community ministries; but a new righteousness that it truly ought to be
involved in, actually being reformed itself, is a deeper and personal
understanding of who Jesus is, what became of him, and what that has to
do with us.
You are a part of the light in this world.
And here the natural use of light that we use does come right out
of God’s creativity. When
you turn a light on in your house, you don’t then take a black plastic
bag and put it over the light and tie it down so the light can never be
seen. Neither does God. Because
you believe in Jesus Christ, you are a light on God’s candle.
And that is the truth about who we are as a congregation. We believe in Jesus Christ, and so we really are one of
God’s lights in this community.
We are a congregation with an amazing history.
We have been a church for more than 150 years. Originally we were begun with one of the first ordained
ministers in Texas. And, of
course, we have what we are going through right now.
Still, we are a light on God’s candle.
A new style of righteous is that God is going to hold our hand,
and walk us through. This
will be a new part of our history where our new heart will be seen by
others.
The Christ of the New Testament is the Christ prophesied in the Old
Testament and the Christ of Israel.
The new righteousness, starting to be taught in The Sermon on the
Mount, is not based on a more accurate type of human intellectual
legalism, but the truly kind of heartfelt and learning understanding of
the truth that it is not that God is in our history; but that
our history is in God.
A scribe, a Bible scholar in those days, came to Jesus one time and
asked him “What is the greatest commandment?”
Jesus told him that the first one was to love the Lord your God
with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength. The second major commandment is to love your neighbor as you
love yourself.
A new righteousness that our Lord Jesus is bringing to us is that the
love which God reveals is a personal love.
God the Father loves God the God the Son in the personal God the
Holy Spirit. God the Son
loves God the Father in the personal God the Holy Spirit.
And the ultimate truth that God is revealing to us, showing us,
teaching us, is that God’s greatest personal passion, from all
eternity is that you would be created, and then God through the Son
becoming human and returning to the Father, would bring you back with
him to know divine love with Him.
The new understanding of God’s righteousness is that this is our
truth. Once we hear this
truth and say “yes” to it that does not mean that we fully
understand it. We now, in this faith, live our lives praying “Lord I hear
you, and believe this gospel, and I need your help in experiencing ways
to grow in my understanding us this.”
It would be wonderful if God led us to participate with Him in
ministries within our community to the homeless, the poor, the
uneducated, and the sick. But
wouldn’t it be even more astonishingly wonderful if in and through
these kinds of ministries, we were to help people see and say “yes”
to the truth that all that was needed for them, and personally desired
for them in God has already been fully accomplished in Jesus Christ?
A NEW RIGHTEOUSNESS
Let us pray…
Amen!
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