You are listening to a sermon from River Community Church in Prairieville, Louisiana. Please remain standing for the reading of God's Word. 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. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments 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 Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. This is the word of the Lord. Amen. You may be seated. This morning, we return to Matthew 5, 17 through 20. And we were here two weeks ago. When we were here, we saw that Jesus is about to reinterpret and reapply the law of Moses for his disciples and for those Jews who would be his disciples. And he is doing so in distinct contrast to the standard explanations and positions and traditions of the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leadership. Jesus is here basically telling His disciples, do not hear me saying what I'm not saying. And what I'm about to do, don't think that I'm abolishing the law because I'm not. And don't think I'm giving you permission to neglect the law because I'm not. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Verse 20, Jesus says, I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. And in fact, he's telling us, I want you to understand, my friends, I expect more from you than even the Pharisees do. I expect more from you as my disciples than even the Pharisees do. Now, to us, we typically view the Pharisees as the bad guys of the New Testament, and for good reason. They are self-righteous, arrogant, conniving, and jealous, and they are in large part responsible for the plot to crucify Jesus. They represent everything that the Christian religion is not supposed to be. But in Jesus's day, the scribes and the Pharisees were the gold standard of what good religion looked like. They were the Bible scholars. They were the conference speakers. They were the PhDs in Old Testament. They were the most serious about understanding and applying the law of God in a way that honored God, that took it to the greatest extremes possible. To think that anyone could have more righteousness under the law than the scribes and Pharisees was unthinkable. They were the pros. So when Jesus says here that He expects you and me to do more than the Pharisees, to exceed them in righteousness, we've got to understand that that is absurd, that is shocking, that is unachievable. Now we'll explore Jesus' words here under two headings. First, what the Pharisees focused on when they applied God's law, and then what Jesus focuses on when he applies God's law. So what did the Pharisees focus on when applying the law? In the first chapter of his book, a rabbi talks with Jesus. Jacob Neusner begins with the introductory statement of the Mishnah, specifically the Mishnah Tractate Avoth. Now what is the Mishnah? The Mishnah is a philosophical Jewish law code completed around AD 200, so after Jesus in the time of the early church, which is the first authoritative and canonical writing in Judaism after the Hebrew Scriptures. So the Mishnah is fundamentally the Jewish New Testament. Not the Christian New Testament, but the Jewish New Testament. Now the opening statement of this Mishnah is as follows, quote, Moses received Torah at Sinai and handed it on to Joshua, Joshua to elders and elders to prophets, and prophets handed it on to the men of the great assembly. They said three things, be prudent in judgment, Raise up many disciples, make a fence for the Torah. And if you want to understand the basic approach of traditional Judaism regarding the law of Moses, it's found in these last words, make a fence around the Torah. It's true of traditional Judaism in Jesus' day, it's true of conservative, orthodox Judaism in the modern day. It has its roots in the traditions of the scribes and Pharisees. The basic approach was and is something like this. As teachers of the law, if we want people to honor God's law and obey it and keep it and not break it, then we need to build a fence around the law so that people don't overstep God's boundaries. so that people don't go where they're not supposed to go. And so we need to build and erect a system of living out the law and applying the laws of Moses so that we don't inadvertently break the law. We don't go those places, we don't trespass where we don't belong. So, if God told Moses, don't go here, we're gonna build our fence back here. If God told Moses, don't go here, we're gonna build our fence back here, so that we're safe, so that we don't break God's law. As a result of this attitude, the Pharisees focused on formal and externalized applications of the law, and they did this in minute detail. Turn with me to Matthew 23. I'll begin reading in verse 16. Woe to you, blind guides, who say, if anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he's bound by his oath. You blind fools, for which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, if anyone swears by the altar, it's nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that's on the altar, he's bound by his oath. You blind men, for which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and him who dwells in it. And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. In this paragraph, we see that Jesus is interacting with this attitude of the Pharisees, that they were saying, okay, this is the safe way you can swear. You don't want to break the third commandment. You don't want to take the Lord's name in vain. You don't want to bear false witness and take unholy oaths and vows. And so when you're going to swear, you swear by this, but not by that. This is the very same reason that to this day, good faithful Jews will not say God's name revealed to Moses. They'll say the word Adonai, which means Lord, instead of the Hebrew name Yahweh. Sometimes in Germanized English, Jehovah. Sometimes they won't even say God or they won't even say Adonai. They'll say Hashem, which just means the name. They're so afraid of violating that they can't even say what God has revealed Himself to be. Look at verse 23. For you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. So when it came to the law of the tithe to give 10%, the Pharisees were so fastidious, so particular that they were giving 10% of your herb garden. How much attention to detail would it take for you, get a little ruler, go out to your mint, your basil, and snip off just 10% and bring that and off, like that's some pretty serious, minute detail giving right there. And that is that Jesus doesn't condemn how fine-toothed they are in their obedience. What Jesus condemns is the fact that they're just worried about the outside. They are so focused on the external, minute details of obedience that they're not living out the core of the law, which is justice, doing justice, loving mercy, living faithfully and humbly before God. Verse 25, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they're full of greed and self-indulgence, you blind Pharisee. First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside may also be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Here Jesus explicitly condemns and speaks to the problem of externalism. The Pharisees are focusing on the outside of the cup. They're focused on appearances. They're slapping on a new coat of paint to a tomb time and time again. They never deal with the rottenness inside. Indeed, they cannot. This is why they're hypocrites. Jesus doesn't call the Pharisees hypocrites just because they're two-faced. We don't have any indication that they were two-faced. They're not hypocrites in the sense they act one way in public and another behind closed doors. The real issue, the real hypocrisy is that they are play-acting as righteous people on the outside when their hearts are unchanged. The real hypocrisy is that they are play-acting as righteous people in society when their hearts are unchanged. Their religion is only on the surface. And of course, there is a direct connection between the way that the scribes and Pharisees were handling God's word and their failure to deal with the heart. This is why Jesus reinterprets the law in the Sermon on the Mount. By building a fence around the Torah, the Pharisees sought to prevent people from breaking the Torah. But by doing so, they also prevented the Torah from breaking people. By protecting the law from the people, they also protected people from the law. Here's what I mean. As Paul writes in both Galatians and Romans, the purpose of the law is to lead us to Christ by making us aware of our own sinfulness. By showing us how we violate the law. But if you don't allow people to get close enough to the law to violate it, then you don't allow them to get close enough to the law to feel conviction of sin. I'll say that again, if you don't allow people to get close enough to the law to violate it, you don't allow them to get close enough to the law to feel the conviction of sin. This wasn't what the Pharisees intended to do, I'm sure, but it's what they did nonetheless. They violated the law even while they were trying to uphold it. Indeed, whenever you reduce God's Word to something that is manageable, you actually make it useless. The point of the law is that you aren't able to do it on your own. So when you make God's Word, when you make the law, when you make the imperatives of Scripture something that you can accomplish in your own strength, you actually make it powerless. The power of the law is to show our impotence with regard to it. And this is precisely what Jesus recaptures in the Sermon on the Mount. But before we get there, I need you to understand that this pharisaical approach to God's Word that is formalistic and externalized, it's no less a danger today. It's just as prevalent among Christians as it was among the Jews. Now, we may not obsess over the Law of Moses the way that the Jews did. We certainly have our own traditions and desires and way of doing Christianity that we can confuse with biblical faithfulness and that can protect us from the probing nature of God's work. In their book, How People Change, Tim Lane and Paul Tripp write, whenever we are missing the necessity of Christ's indwelling work to progressively transform us, we will pursue a Christian lifestyle that focuses more on externals than on the heart. In other words, whenever we are either missing or avoiding the necessity of heart-level transformation and change, we're going to focus on externals and on things that we can get for ourselves. So for example, you can reduce Christian discipleship to things like church attendance, Bible reading, giving, and community service. You know, doing the right Christian things, having all the right Christian disciplines. But in this, your relationship with Jesus is more about what you do for Jesus than what Jesus does for you and is doing in you. It doesn't require much for you to go to church, or to give a little, or to serve a little, or to block out 20 minutes to an hour a day to read your Bible and pray some. But Jesus doesn't want just your external things that you do. Jesus wants your heart. Jesus wants all of you. He won't settle for anything less. You can reduce Christian discipleship to a list of do's and don'ts. We might call this legalism or fundamentalism. It could be as simple as, we don't drink, smoke, or chew, and we don't hang with those who do. It could be your stance on what movies or music you allow into your household. It could be how you educate your children. But whatever it is, you can reduce the high, even impossible calling to holiness to a few things that you can personally manage. And they're all externals. They're all things that you keep out of your home or you don't participate in. And in this, when we do this, You're more worried about the threats out there than the threat in here. You're more worried about the risk of the culture or certain groups of friends or peers or whatever. You're worried about things out there corrupting you instead of the internal corruption that's really destroying you. You can reduce Christian discipleship to the pursuit of a spiritual experience. Looking for emotional and dynamic encounters with God that keep you spiritually positive, spiritually uplifted, so you're hungry, always looking for the next spiritual high, the next thing that will aid you in your spiritual journey. And in this, if this is you, you're likely avoiding genuine relationships with other Christians. you're generally avoiding real interaction with God. Because real relationships involve conflict and confrontation. Real relationships with other Christians and with God require you to change. But if all you're looking for is positive spiritual experience, That challenge is going to put you off, and you're gonna run away from it. You're gonna find another church, one where they don't talk so much about sin, or press you to become a member, and such things. You can reduce Christian discipleship to biblical and doctrinal knowledge. Engaging in intellectual study, while ignoring your need for deep personal change. You turn Holy Scripture and the wonderful truths of our confession into a purely cerebral affair, often to the detriment of your actual spiritual well-being and as an excuse to avoid relating with other people in the life of the church. True worship is missing from your life because you worship only here. You're little more than a brain and a vat thinking holy thoughts. Jesus wants all of you. To let Tim Keller summarize, you cannot deal with your spiritual hideousness and self-absorption through the moral law by trying to be a good person through the act of the will. You need a complete transformation of the very motives of your heart. An externalized or partitioned Christianity, my friends, will not do the trick. It is no real Christianity at all. And that brings us to the second point, what Jesus focuses on when he applies the law. Jesus is telling us here that he expects more from us than the Pharisees do. But how can that be possible? Well, if the Pharisees focused on external obedience, what does Jesus focus on? He focuses internally. He focuses on the heart. He focuses on the deep person, the real person. We see this clearly in the next series of lessons in the Sermon on the Mount. You have heard that it was said, you shall not murder and whoever murders will be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Jesus speaks to the internal world, the thought life, the emotional life, the deep you, the real you. Or as Jesus says in Matthew 15, verses 18 and 19, what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, and slander. Indeed, this is what the bulk of the remaining Sermon on the Mount is going to dwell on. The heart. applying the Old Testament Scriptures to the heart. When we read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus, the conclusion is inescapable, that sin begins in the heart, and so any obedience we would offer to God must begin thereto. If we would be truly righteous, we must begin inside. We must begin with an internal transformation. Obedience to God's law is not first a matter of what we do on the outside. It's a matter of what's happening on the inside. What we do on the outside matters, but it's a consequence of what's going on within. As Jesus will say at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, a healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Paul Tripp writes, if a tree produces bad apples year after year, there's something drastically wrong with its system, down to its very roots. I won't solve the problem by stapling new apples onto the branches. They also will rot because they are not attached to a life-giving root system. And next spring, I will have the same problem again. I will not see a new crop of healthy apples because my solution has not gone to the heart of the problem. If the tree's roots remain unchanged, it will never produce good apples. This is the very thing for which Christ criticized the Pharisees. Change that ignores the heart will seldom transform the life. For a while, it may seem like the real thing, but it will prove temporary and cosmetic. So much of what passes for good Christian accountability and good Christian advice is little more than tying good apples or even plastic apples onto a dead tree. We bought into the lie of behavioralism. That if we change behaviors, we change the person. If we change behaviors, we change the relationship. If we change behaviors, we can change character. But that is not the biblical perspective. Biblical change must begin with the change of the heart. Changing external behavior is never good enough. It cannot get the job done. Better coping mechanisms might help in some areas, might smooth out your life, but better coping mechanisms doesn't change you. And you're the problem. I'm the problem. Unless we grapple with the heart of darkness that produces the rotten fruit in our life, we will not rise to the life that Jesus calls us to. If we have a bad root, we will always produce rotten fruit. So we must begin there. And this is what Jesus does. He begins with the heart. And in so doing this, He fulfills the prophecy of Ezekiel 36. In Ezekiel 36, 25 through 27, God says, I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. How does Jesus expect us to surpass the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees? He does it by giving us the Holy Spirit. Did you hear the cause and effect of verse 27 there? I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and to be careful to obey my rules. Apart from the gift of the Holy Spirit, friends, the Sermon on the Mount is cruel because it's so unaccomplishable. Is it really possible to not be angry? Is it really possible for a young man not to lust? Or an older man? Is it really possible to turn the other cheek when somebody strikes you if you don't have the Holy Spirit? Can you really love an actual enemy if you haven't received God's love for you as a sinner yourself? Can you really forgive those who have really wronged you if you haven't received the forgiveness of Christ yourself? No, you can't. You might can play at it on the surface for a little while. We're all pretty good at bottling up certain emotions. But it is beyond your ability to bottle it up, beyond your ability to be self-disciplined and self-controlled to do these things at the level that Jesus requires. It takes a miracle to be the type of person that Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount. But when you give your life to Christ and you submit to his reign in your life, He transforms you. This miracle takes place. You become a born again, new creation type of person in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. And the Holy Spirit gives you the ability to do what the law requires. Not by your effort alone, but by a change of your character. This is what Paul writes in Romans 8, verses 2 through 4. The law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemns sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. You hear that? A righteous requirement of the law. What the law has always been driving at is fulfilled in you and in me when we walk in step with the Holy Spirit. Not by trying our hardest to line up with an external written code, but we humbly and faithfully walk in step with the Spirit as we study the Word of God in community with one another. In Galatians 5 we read, but I say walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. And the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of your efforts, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. When the Holy Spirit is at work in you, He produces in you a deep, heart-level righteousness that the Pharisees could never dream of. He develops in you a true righteousness, the public display of His holiness at work in you, because He is, after all, the Holy Spirit. And where the Holy Spirit dwells, holiness results. What is more, this must be true of you, my friends. It must be. Jesus says, unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. He simply, you simply cannot claim to be his disciple. You cannot expect to enter the new heavens and new earth if you live a less than righteous life, a less than perfectly righteous life. As Martin Lloyd-Jones writes, unless my life is a righteous life, I must be very careful before I claim that I'm covered by the grace of God in Christ Jesus. For to receive the grace of God in Jesus Christ means not only that my sins are forgiven because of his death for me on the cross on Calvary's hill, but also that I've been given a new life and a new nature. It means that Christ is being formed in me, that I've become a partaker of the divine nature, that old things have passed away and all things have become new. It means that Christ is dwelling in me and that the Spirit of God is in me. If anyone does not have the Spirit of God, he does not belong to him. So as we close, I want you to be encouraged, my friends. I've endeavored this morning to place the emphasis where Jesus has on a very extreme and impossible call to discipleship and obedience. If you haven't felt a little bit of that pressure, that vice grip of God calling you to be something that's impossible for you, then you've missed the point. Some of you today are hopefully wrestling with the problem of your own weakness of obeying Jesus. That's part of the point of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. So you're in a good place, you're in the right place. If after hearing today's sermon or reading the Sermon on the Mount you feel good about yourself, you've missed the boat. The Sermon on the Mount is meant to drive us to our knees. And His call The deep transformation is real and we cannot lessen it or minimize it because He doesn't. But even the best, most mature believers among us still struggle with our sinful flesh. We still lack the righteousness that Christ requires of us. And so be encouraged by the words of the Apostle John. I'm writing these things to you so that you may not sin. I'm preaching this sermon to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. Amen. Friends, if you are in Christ, if you believe in him, he has imputed his righteousness to you. He has accounted you as righteous in his sight, not because of what you do and what you offer, but because of his perfect standard. When it comes to God's road rules for life, Jesus has a perfect driving record. And he has put his driving record in your file on the DMV. His drive safe and safe is on your account. So when you fail to do what God's word commands, his righteousness is right there for you. It's already applied. His blood is upon your head, both your best deeds and your worst deeds are already covered in the blood of Christ. And so in Him, your worst sins are already forgiven and completely forgotten by the Father. And the best deeds that you could muster are covered in the blood too, so that they are offered to God and accepted by God as Jesus' own, without any taint of your sin or selfishness or self-indulgence or transactionalism that you might have when you offer things to God. Your best deeds are made all the better. How, friends, can you possibly possess a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees? In Christ. Only in Christ. Christ has given you all of His righteousness. He has given you His Holy Spirit to transform you from the inside out. Hallelujah. Thank you for listening to this sermon from River Community Church in Prairieville, Louisiana, where you will always find biblical preaching, meaningful worship, and the equipping of disciples. For more information on River Community Church and its ministries, please visit rivercommunity.org.