Thanksgiving type message this morning. But uh but then I decided not to. I decided last week, you know, I didn’t get to my sermon because the Holy Spirit was doing things in our service that that uh was going in other directions and it was a really rich service last week if you were part of it. And uh this sermon had already had mold on it and I had to cut off all the brown spots this week. So I thought I’d better get to it because I I can’t leave it out on the counter for another week. So, we’re going to look at Sermon on the Mount a little bit this morning. And um God’s word to us today, it introduces probably the primary theme of the Sermon on the Mount, uh which has to do with the righteousness, the kind of righteousness that Jesus is looking for for people who will enter into his kingdom. He’s looking for a righteousness that’s deeply internalized, that’s radically sincere, a righteousness goes all the way down to the bottom of our hearts. And to introduce the theme, Jesus has something to say to us about the law of God and the way he wants us to respond to the law of God. And after this introductory section, as he talks about the depth of righteousness that’s required among his people, he will open up six files or folders in the next couple of weeks and uh six test cases that are drawn from the deepest realities of our relationships. and he’ll talk about our anger toward one another and our sexual lusts and our our marriages and our truthfulness and our desire to take revenge and and how we uh hold grudges against enemies. And Jesus’ point in opening those things up will be to show us just how the law of God, his commands and his requirements and his ethical standards, they can’t remain on the surface of our lives. He wants them to be deeply internalized, get into our bloodstreams and organically become part of us. And for the laws to travel from skin level into our bloodstreams can be a real challenge. It can take some time. I was reading a book by an author named Lorraine Daston and she’s written extensively about the history of rules about rule making and rulekeeping and her examination of the history of rules really opens up a new understanding of their purpose and their usefulness and how necessary they are to develop in our lives. In one set of examples, she points to the very slow development and acceptance of rules in the city of Paris during the period known as the Enlightenment. Because throughout the late 17th and 18th centuries, cities like Paris were transitioning from medieval walled cities to these sprawling commercial metropolises. They had advanced uh warfare techniques for siege warfare and it rendered walled cities obsolete. So, as the walls came down, Paris quickly swelled from about 200,000 people to over 500,000. And all of the major cities of Europe were bursting at their seams and their infrastructure was was buckling under the strain. And cities didn’t know how to be cities. And so, Paris quickly became a place of squalor and stink and congestion. It had only had eight carriages in 1594, and within a 100 years or so, it had 20,000 carriages. But most of the streets were still very narrow and crooked. The houses faced in every direction. Sidewalks were non-existent. And with all those narrow streets and and teeming with people and with animals and with carts, simply crossing the street was taking your life in your hands. You’re ever in danger of being run down by a carriage or a pack mule. So it was urban chaos. In an attempt to get their city to even halfway function, between the years 1667 and 1789, thousands and thousands of police regulations were issued. Regulations that were largely ignored by the people, city officials, they couldn’t get the people of Paris to shovel when it snowed or to stop playing ball in the streets or to place their trash in these appointed containers at the appointed hours. And when the old ruled fa rules failed, they just simply came up with newer, stricter ones to put in their place. And if you read from that vast avalanche of regulations, you can just hear the exasperation in the preamles to some of the rules being issued. Police Ordinance of June 22nd, 1732 said, “In defiance of the ordinance of 1729, carriages are still being rented to drivers under the age of 17, and mules and horses intended as beasts of burden are being ridden through the streets, injuring pedestrians.” Another police ordinance from November 28, 1750 says, “In defiance of the edicts of 1663, 1666, and 1744, Parisians are still not sweeping their stoops at 7:00 a.m. They’re still emptying the contents of their chamber pots into the street, and they’re still blocking the streets with manure and bricks, and not at all conforming to the edicts and ordinances and prohibitions repeatedly issued by the authorities.” This is one of my favorites. This is from uh September 3rd, 1754. It says, “In defiance of the edicts of 1667,72,700, 1703, 1705, and on and on, Parisians are still playing games in the street and endangering passers by and breaking street lanterns. The culprits, shop boys and artisans, livered servants, and other young people are hereby enjoyed to cease and desist or pay a stiff fine of 200 levers.” So these authorities have been trying for 90 years unsuccessfully to try to make that particular ordinance stick. And thousands of such regulations were issued and duly ignored by the citizenry of Paris. Can you imagine the government requiring you to be out on your stoop at 7:00 a.m. to give it a sweep? It took almost 200 years of such tedious rulemaking and rulebreaking for Paris to begin to internalize some urban order to realize that this was a way to live for the common good where external rules and regulations were internalized into habits and norms. All of us, we have hundreds and hundreds actually of habits and internal norms. They may have once required rules, but now they seem completely good and natural to all of us. You know, I wonder what the initial reaction was in Edmonton when the city first required everyone to shovel their walks within 24 hours of a snowfall. I mean, who are they to tell me I have to shovel my walks and when I have to have it done by? Or a year or two ago, they delivered those great garbage bins on our front lawns and they told us we could no longer put up as much garbage we wanted to. We’d now have to separate things out and mess around with icky food scraps and and pay careful attention to the days of the pickup. As things become internalized though, we don’t think about the rules anymore because driving on the right side of the road or paying attention to speed limits or stopping for pedestrians, waiting in line at coffee shops, cleaning up after pets, uh they all eventually become second nature to us and we obey them because we see some good in them. We sense that they allow us to function as a city where everyone can flourish. And flourishing is really what the law of God’s all about. God doesn’t invent laws just to stifle people and to restrict us, take all the fun out of our lives, make us subservient and miserable. God’s laws are given as a gift of flourishing. So in scripture we find these ancient poets who knew that and they wrote long lyrical poems in praise of God’s law. We have Psalm 19 says the law of God does phenomenal things for us. It revives our souls and makes us wise and brings joy to our hearts. It’s desirable, more desirable than gold. It’s sweeter than honey. That’s pretty high praise for a set of ancient laws. Or if you go to the longest poem in the Bible, Psalm 119, the vast majority of those 176 verses just comment on the delight uh and value of God’s laws and his commandments, his precepts, his testimonies. What were those ancient poets seeing in the law of God that we might be missing? At the heart of it, they didn’t see it as ownorous and restricting. and they saw it as freeing and flourishing. Says, I’ll walk about in freedom for I have sought out your precepts. I run in the path of your commands for you’ve set my heart free. And they weren’t making any category distinctions in the law of God. The law God gave to Moses ran the whole gamut from moral laws against things such as lying and stealing and adultery to basic medical and health laws. There’s all these pandemic-like restrictions concerning social distancing and what to do in terms of isolating infected people so that their infections wouldn’t spread through the community. Laws dealing with manslaughter and covering nuances of intentional and unintentional criminal behavior. Laws that restricted retaliation when there was violence. Lots of laws concerning how to approach God, how and when to offer worship and sacrifices. laws concerning sexuality, clothing, what you could and couldn’t eat. And to the psalmists, simply having a law given to them from God was wonderful. Maybe they looked around at the other cultures and societies around Israel and how they tried to regulate themselves, and they realized how sophisticated and ethical and right and amenable the laws of God were for the flourishing of their nation. They revive our souls. They make us wise. They bring joy to our hearts. They set us free. So, it’s obvious that they were deeply internalizing the laws of God. The rules weren’t just sitting on the surface of their lives. When laws just sit on the surface, it’s easy for us to obey them grudgingly, pay attention only when other people are looking, try to get away with as much as we can. We become hypocritical. We try to avoid the rules ourselves, but make big demands on other people. Jesus preaches in his sermon that for people to enter his kingdom, the law needs to get deeply into their bloodstreams and become an organic part of them. And he begins by talking about his own relationship to the law of God when he says, “Don’t think that I’ve come to abolish the law or the prophets. I haven’t come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished. So Jesus is addressing, he’s addressing one of the leading criticisms that came against him that he had come to abolish the law and the prophets. When this young carpenter’s son began to create a following and he backed it up with healings and exorcisms, he spoke and acted in a way that really unnerved the nation’s leaders. Jesus never spoke against the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, but in their eyes, he seemed to sit far too lightly when it came to their community religious standards. He challenged the popular interpretations of the law at every turn. I mean, Jesus wasn’t fasting like John the Baptist or the other religious leaders were. He would go so far as to harvest crops on the Jewish Sabbath day because they were annoyed. He would go walking with his disciples through the fields. And he would pluck little heads of grain and eat them as he strolled along. And he’d do medical work. He would heal people on the Sabbath when he could just as easily have left it for the next day. And those were all clear violations of the law of God, the way it was being viewed and enforced in Jesus’ day. The scribes and the Pharisees were offended. They were preoccupied with being legal experts and masters of precedents and case studies. And they labored to keep extending their traditions and uh an everinccreasing number of contemporary applications. But Jesus treated their laws, their little applications of their laws, their traditions like children’s sand castles. And Jesus just seemed to delight in coming up and kicking their castles down in front of them and tell them that their traditions were no good. In fact, he says, “Your traditions are nullifying the word of God. You’re trying to protect the word of God, but you’re actually nullifying it. So, in the minds of the scribes and the Pharisees, Jesus had some real explaining to do concerning his loose uh behavior concerning the law. So, response to those criticisms, Jesus says, “No, I’ve not come to abolish the law or the prophets.” And when he includes the prophets, he means the entire Old Testament. It’s not just the sections with the laws and the commands. It’s everything in our Old Testament. He embraces the whole story and says that he has arrived not to burn to the ground what came before him, but he’s going to continue the story with his own place in it. He says he hasn’t come to demean or belittle even the smallest detail of the law. He has such high regard for the word of God. So the same Old Testament that modern scholars can tear apart and take out all the supernatural and criticize, Jesus lifted those scriptures very high. Smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet is yod and it looks like a tiny little apostrophe. And the least stroke of a pen is the serif. It’s a tiny extension on some letters like uh like we use on a capital I to distinguish it from a lowercase L. And Jesus says not even one yod or serif will disappear from the law until heaven and earth disappear. The law is as stable as the earth. It’s as lasting as heaven. Jesus held it in the highest regard. He quotes it frequently as the solid, timeless, reliable word of God. So he’s not like modern people who think that the Bible is largely corrupt but might contain a little bit of truth or that it only becomes meaningful when we interact with it. For Jesus, the Bible, the scripture, he says in John 10:35, “It cannot be broken. You can’t take anything out of it.” He affirms the complete validity of the Old Testament every time he quotes that is being wise, coherent, binding, and reliable. So he says he’s not come to abolish but to fulfill the scriptures. And for something to be fulfilled, it has to have a connection with something in the past in a vital and meaningful way. And Jesus’ part in the story as the fulfillment, it does alter the way we now interact with some of the law, but none of the law should ever be thought of by us as being primitive or of little value. It’s clear that in Jesus’ part of the story, his fulfillment means that for us in our generation, we’re not bound by the civil laws of the Old Testament that governed the nation of Israel. We’re not bound by the system of rituals and sacrifices in the tabernacle and the temple, which they were bound to as they approached God. Even if we wanted to, there hasn’t been a temple in Jerusalem for 2,000 years. The dietary laws, the laws regarding special days and observances, they don’t apply to us any longer. Jesus as the once-for-all sacrifice that dealt with our sin on the cross, he rendered all the ceremonial aspects of the law obsolete for us. Of course, the moral law, the Ten Commandments repeated in the New Testament, those are timeless and universal. They’re binding on our lives. But even though something’s part of the past and it’s largely obsolete for us now, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t elegant or that it wasn’t beautiful or that it wasn’t wonderful. Even if it’s being come and gone and been fulfilled by Christ, it doesn’t rob any aspect of God’s law of its beauty or of its wonder. Most of us, all of us have been done with floppy discs in our computers for many, many years now. But for a guy, 72-year-old guy named Tom Perski, they retain an elegance and a beauty that uh that just won’t go away. He describes himself as the last man standing in the floppy disc business. And he says he wasn’t a great visionary. He says he just uh he’s someone who forgot to get out of the business when everyone else did. And it left him in a position where he has done very well. Decades ago, as computer technology advanced, number of floppy disc users went down. But the number of people who provided the discs went down faster. So at that time he bought up a couple million floppy discs and he’s been using his inventory ever since to fill a significant market niche. He’ll still he’ll sell a few discs to hobbyists, computer hobbyists, but his main source of income comes from industrial users. Because machines that were built in the ‘9s, built to designed to last 50 years or more, they utilized the most advanced technology of their time, which was those 3 and 1/2 in floppy discs. Perski says that about half the airlines uh the airplanes flying today are more than 20 years old, and they continue to use floppy discs as part of their avionics. says the US Air Force stopped only stopped using floppy discs for his nuclear weapon systems in 2019, which isn’t very comforting, is it? A sophisticated medical equipment. His biggest customer of all is the embroidery business. Thousands and thousands of machines are functioning that require floppy discs. And he has comments on the elegance. He says, “To make a CD or a DVD, you just pour plastic into a mold. But a floppy disc has at least nine unique components, which is why no one’s building a multi-million dollar factory to produce a largely obsolete product. He says, “To me, the floppy disc is a highly refined, technical, stable, not very hackable way to get relatively small amounts of data where you want it. It’s really a remarkable thing. There’s a beauty and elegance to them. The plastic molding, the cookie, a shutter, a spring. I can see how complicated they are. What an elegant solution they were for their time. He says, “I’m not a watch collector, but I have friends who are. The beauty of a finelymade watch is something to behold. Even though it might be less reliable than a $19 clock, it’s a work of art. Just consider the human effort that went into its making. That same can be said about the floppy disc.” So, you can just hear his ongoing respect and admiration for something that’s largely become obsolete. And even though aspects of the Old Testament law no longer apply to us, Jesus never belittles any aspect of the law of God, neither should we. Even the civil and the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, they’re so jammed with prophetic meaning and rich significance. And if something comes to us from the mouth of our creator God, and it was wonderfully elegant for its time, given as a gift from our father, we should view it as finely spun gold, something of lasting significance. So if we had eyes to see, as the poets of old did, I think we’d regard all the precepts of God as delightful, as an elegant path. It’s part of the story leading us from lives of sin into lives of freedom and flourishing. So if you’re reading the books of Exodus or Leviticus or Numbers, and you’re left pretty uninspired, we should try to read them as best we can through the eyes of the Old Testament poets and see if something gets revived in our hearts as we do that. So after speaking of his own relationship with the law, Jesus goes on to talk about you and I and how we’re to be related to the law of God and what obedience or righteousness should look like in our lives. And he says, “Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you’ll never enter the kingdom of God. Now, it’s difficult for us to imagine how shocking those words would have been to the people sitting on the hillside with Jesus that day. Jesus was saying, “If you want to follow me, you’re going to have to go far beyond the religion of your most revered religious leaders.” They were the acknowledged holy men of the Jewish community. To say that normal people would have to have a righteousness beyond theirs, that’s radical stuff. No one knew the law like their religious leaders did. Their religious leaders were scrupulous in the way they kept them. How could an ordinary person ever be expected to match or or exceed their righteousness? The problem Jesus had with the religious leaders, it wasn’t so much with what they were doing because they were doing the same things, the religious practices that Jesus says all of us ought to be doing. In this sermon on the mount, Jesus recommends disciplines and spiritual practices like praying and fasting and giving to the poor. All are good things. But Jesus is going to call out those people who do those things superficially on the surface of their lives where those that kind of righteousness hadn’t gotten into their bloodstream. They obey on the surface, but just those inner dimensions of their lives are untouched. Everything in Jesus sermon on the mount reaches deeper than that. This is where Christianity separates itself from the pack of all other religions. We might think that, hey, it’s great just if if people would fast and pray and give to the poor. I mean, that’s wonderful. What else would you expect? But no religion ever dares to dig as deeply into the soul and to the inner heart and the attitudes and the emotions and the motivations as Christianity does. Again, Jesus would say that obeying the law without deeply, inwardly delighting in the law is hypocritical and falls far short of what he’s looking for in kingdom people. Christianity, it’s a radically internal religion. So, he calls out all the people whose motives are mixed and and uh who are concerned maybe about how they appear in front of others, how spiritual they appear, and they skirt their real intentions of the law, and they they try to get off on technicalities. Jesus says, “I’m looking for much more in the hearts of people who will enter the kingdom of heaven.” And he does not mince words. Only a little further on in the same sermon, Matthew 5, Jesus will say to the people, “You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father’s perfect.” Well, when we read that statement, any religion we have in our lives just runs out of steam, doesn’t it? If Jesus won’t mo modify or soften those demands for righteousness, our religion will provide no protection for us. Be perfect as God is perfect. Completely shuts down any kind of liberal tolerant religious view that says just do your best. Be a good person. That’s good enough. God understands and he accepts you. It also shuts down a more conservative self-righteousness that says I love the rules. I’m pretty good at keeping them. Certainly, I’m better than most other people I see around me. I thank you, God, that I’m not like them. Jesus takes the law much, much more seriously than either the liberal tolerant or the conservative self-righteous comes to real righteousness. Neither neither of those approaches begins to satisfy. You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. That word leaves all of us undone. Unless we begin to take the law as seriously as Jesus does, none of us will ever make the journey from the law to the gospel. Commenting on those radical demands of perfection, CS Lewis writes, “The command be ye perfect is not idealistic gas, nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command.” And Jesus wants to make all people perfect through his work on the cross. Galatians chapter 3, Paul talks about how the law was our guardian, our tutor, our school teacher. It held us. It even imprisoned us until Christ came. It was our school teacher, a stern but elegant guide. It was certainly sufficient for expressing the holiness and perfection of God. It was great for providing guard rails for society so that people could flourish together. But it was deficient in terms of making us truly righteous and right with God. Galatians says the law was our school teacher until Christ came so that we might be justified by faith. None of us could ever keep the law perfectly and Jesus kept it perfectly for us. On the cross, he paid the debt that was owed to God for our unrighteousness so that he could declare us righteous, having paid our penalty. It cost the son of God everything to make it possible for us to be made perfect even as our heavenly father’s perfect. And when we place our faith and trust in what he’s done, then that moral perfection, it’s not our earthly experience, but it is our heavenly reality. We are made perfect as our father in heaven’s perfect, fully accepted by a holy God. Not on the basis of our ability to keep the law, but on the basis of our faith in the one who did keep the law perfectly for us. And as we embrace the gospel, then the law, it doesn’t have threat in our lives. We don’t have to keep it at arms length. We can deeply internalize and have it penetrate our lives. If you’ve ever done paint by numbers, you know that you work on the picture, you have to carefully fill in each small numbered section with the right color. And it’s detailed work, but once the picture’s completed, you don’t see the numbers anymore. Numbers are obliterated. And the beauty of the completed picture is what you see. When Jesus says that he hasn’t come to abolish the laws but to fulfill them, he means to tell us that when we look at him, the details of the law get subsumed. They get swallowed up in the finished portrait. He fills it all in. So for us to obey the law, then it’s all about Jesus. It’s a relational thing. It’s not a technical exercise. Becomes much easier for us to internalize and obey the law when the person of Jesus is in front of our eyes. Jesus says, “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.” Or more specifically in Romans 13, he says, “The commandments, don’t commit adultery, don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t covet, whatever other commandments there may be, are summed up in this one rule. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.” Galatians 5, the entire law is summed up in a single command. Love your neighbor as yourself. So, love fulfills the law. And we think about that, it just makes sense. You don’t need the commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” Cuz if you love your boss or you don’t want to take things home from work, and if you you love your neighbor, you’re not going to steal things from from that person’s yard. You’ll want your boss and your neighbor to be successful and not not be the victim of your theft. You don’t need the commandment, you shall covet your neighbor’s wife. If you love your neighbor and you pray for their marriage and you pray for their families and for their kids, you don’t need any laws to keep you from lying and committing adultery and dishonoring parents. Love just starts fulfilling all the requirements of the law. So looking at Jesus and love for us, it leads us into a more practical righteousness that far exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees. It doesn’t make obedience effortless or easy for any of us, but it does allow us to grow and delight in our progress. Of course, we know that the pandemic threw a lot of new laws and rules our way concerning masks and distancing and vaccinations and travel restrictions and and among many people there were various levels of compliance and resistance. Friend of mine was telling me that during the pandemic, he hadn’t been in church for a long time. And uh when churches were allowed to be open, but masking was still required, he decided to visit a church that he had never been to before. My friend didn’t want to wear a mask. So, he walked in and without one, and he was approached and he was asked to put one on in compliance with the rules in effect at the time. And he refused and said to the person, “So, you won’t let me worship with you unless I put on a mask.” And he was told you’d have to put one on. So, he left. I think my friend was wrong that day because churches that fractured over restrictions concerning CO they didn’t don’t really have a pandemic problem. They have a love problem. I mean my friend didn’t really have connection with that particular church family and that community when walked in. If he’d had if he loved those people, how easy is it for him to slip on a mask just to make them feel safe and make them feel comfortable? And rather than insisting on making his point about how he felt about government regulations, the entire law is summed up in a single command, love your neighbor as yourself. So as we delight in Christ and delight in loving others and delight in the law as God’s vehicle for human flourishing, obedience makes much more sense to us. The ancient Christian church leader Augustine asked, “Who can embrace wholeheartedly what gives him no delight?” And if we could have the delight in God’s law that the Old Testament poets had and internalized in us, the freer we become and the more we flourish together and the better we get at loving one another. Let’s pray together. Father, if we if if we’re guilty of of demeaning or belittling or mocking any part of your law, pray that you’d uh you’d reveal to us um just how wrong we’ve been, how we’ve refused to delight, we’ve refused to see the law as coming from your hand. We’ve refused to acknowledge how good it is for human flourishing. I pray father that uh the law would penetrate deeply into our pores and we would find ourselves obeying that law of love and by loving others obeying your commandments perfectly or more perfectly as as perfectly as we can as sinful people. Pray that you’d give us new delight in all of your commands and that we wouldn’t begrudge your guidance and uh the things you put on our lives, but we would embrace it because we know it’s from you and we know it’s for our good. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.