I am Amen. Let us turn back to Matthew 5 as we were in Matthew 5 a couple weeks ago together. For those who are here, Matthew chapter 5. And we'll read verses 17 to 20 again. That's the key verses which introduce, which give the theme, we might say, for what follows. And then we're going to pick three of the six antitheses that Jesus Christ gives. He says, six times, you have heard it said, but I say to you, and we're gonna pick three of those six. They're roughly in pairs, and we're kind of taking one of each. pair so for example 21 to 26 and 27 to 30 go closely together and so we're taking one of those and so we'll read 17 to 20 and then 27 to 32 and then we'll read the the last verses of this section 43 to 48 and so I'll let you know when we're when we're jumping from one verse to another. But we're gonna start with verses 17 to 20. Matthew 5, page 1029. In most of the pew Bibles, Matthew 5, starting with verse 17. 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. And then moving down to verse 27 and reading to verse 32. 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. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. And then moving down to verse 43. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. For He makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. So far the reading, the grass withers, the flower fades, the word of our Lord endures forever. Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, as we considered a couple weeks ago, Christ is the one who fulfilled the law. And as the perfect fulfillment of the law, Christ is concerned that a proper interpretation of the law will be taught and will be heard. It is easy to fall into many patterns of self-righteousness. We don't give an exhaustive list here this morning. We just work through three of the patterns of self-righteousness. There are more. But one of the traps of self-righteousness is to reinterpret the laws of God so that what might make us uncomfortable by showing us our sin would lose its power. By nature, we all want the law to be nice and out there and not really condemning us. We want the law to be something which says how nice we are instead of how sinful we are. But Christ brings the law near, even into our hearts. Now we're not going to be able to detail everything before us in the verses before us this morning, but we will at least see this principle and this is going to be our focus even as we'll on some of the other things in these verses as we move through the text, but this is going to be the principle that to follow the Christ, the Anointed One, Jesus of Nazareth, is to follow all of what the law really demands. And that there are patterns of self-righteous interpretations, reinterpretations we should say, of the law which we must avoid. So this is our theme this morning. Follow Christ putting away patterns of self-righteousness. We're going to look first at the self-righteous pattern of the law broken, verses 27 to 30. Then we'll look at the self-righteous pattern of the law relaxed and then the self-righteous pattern of the law altered. So first the law broken. The first pattern of self-righteousness is to reinterpret the law to make it smaller than what it really is so that someone can claim to have kept the law. And so Jesus works through two examples that touch directly on this. The first example is 21 to 26. that there would be those who would pretend that the command to not murder would not include the heart and would not include the fact that we are also commanded not to be angry. And then the second example, the one we're going to focus on a little more, is from verses 27 to 30. And this is where someone would pretend that the seventh commandment, you shall not commit adultery, speaks only to that one specific sinful act. And it misses the point that the spirit of that law, even as the spirit of each law, is only summarizing a truth. And indeed, that it's even explicitly spelled out in the 10th commandment that you shall not covet your neighbor's wife nor his maidservant. So we are to seek to put away all sin, including all sinful desires, including the sinful desire of lust. Now, as soon as we see the full scope of the commands of God, and as soon as we see the full scope of this, just this one commandment, we ask, well, how can we be saved? And so I'll direct our attention already now, even as we'll come back to this shortly, to verse 48. You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. In other words, this whole section must be directing us to see our own unholiness and the holiness of God. This whole section is directing us to see that we are not holy, God is holy. Now we will come back to this, but now let's return to verses 27 to 30, as it were, And now let's ask another question. Because seeing that we are unholy does not mean, well, I'm unholy, so I just don't fight against my sins. No, not at all. On the contrary, we must fight against our sins, including the sin of lustful desire. And so now we say, well, how can this be done? And Jesus gives the answer. Only with radical action. Verse 29, Jesus speaks hyperbolically about cutting off the eye, cutting off the hand. He does this to make the point, not that we should literally do these things. We know that from many other texts in scripture that Jesus is using an image to grab our attention here, but he is making this point. We must be prepared to be able to do something that hurts in order to put away our sins. William Hendrickson, of the great commentator of the 60s and 70s and you're going to hear what worded this quote which perhaps gives away that it's from the 70s. He said it this way at that time, quote, temptation should be flung aside immediately and decisively. Dilly-dallying is deadly. Halfway measures work have it. The surgery, the surgery, cutting work of removing sins from our lives. The surgery must be radical right at this very moment and without any vacillation the obscene book should be burned. The scandalous picture destroyed. The soul destroying film condemned. The sinister yet very intimate social tie broken and the painful habit discarded. In the struggle against sin, the believer must fight hard. If these things are leading us into sin, and it is, there is that condition. We don't want to overstate that or understate that. If these things are leading us into sin, they must be cut out. Is there a friend of yours who tempts you into sin? and indeed leads you into sin. A friend who leads you into drunkenness, a friend of the opposite sex who's enticing you, a friend who refuses to think about things that are holy and honoring to God and instead loves to talk about trash and you get dragged in and you talk about trash with him or with her. Whether these are close friendships or just acquaintances, the friendship must end. As the psalmist says it, you should not stand in the way with sinners. Especially this is true if we are being led into sin in these relationships. Is there a book, a picture, a film, a computer screen, an app which is tempting you in ways that lead you into sin? Destroy it. Delete it. Now, when we would do things like this for the purpose of following Christ and putting away sins, these are not some self-righteous goody-goody actions. On the contrary, they are exactly the things which Christ would command us to do in order to put away patterns of self-righteousness. Patterns of self-righteousness which say, well, the law doesn't really demand that, does it? The law just gives us these four words, and so it's really just telling me not to commit adultery. I'm not going to allow the law to touch my heart, but people of God, the law does touch our hearts. And God does require of us that we would seek righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, that we would seek righteousness to the level of the bottom of our hearts. We must fight the self righteous tendency to say, Well, I can do that without sinning. After all, I only did this or I only did that and only pick out the four words of the seventh commandment that we want to hear and ignoring all of what that command includes. We cannot do this with this commandment. We cannot do this with any commandment. If we are not seeking to kill all of our sins, And Jesus tells us in verses 29, the end of 29 into 30, that the punishment for not putting away sin is hell. The punishment is burning in hell. The word for hell that Jesus uses here is Gehenna. It's the word that emphasizes the punishment of continued burning. This is the seriousness of sin. There is a reason of eternal punishment which must make us cautious of the self-righteous patterns of breaking the law by pretending that the demands of the law are less than they really are, by pretending that the demands of the law do not reach the level of our hearts. So that's the first pattern we consider today. The second pattern is the law relaxed. Now verses 31 and 32, these are two verses among a handful of passages that address divorce in the New Testament. It's a short passage, it's not an exhaustive passage. We're not gonna come close to considering the whole teaching of scripture on this subject today. So but while we're not going to consider the full teaching of scripture on divorce and remarriage, the truth that Jesus clearly demonstrates in these two verses is that we cannot pretend that the permissions of the law allow for more than they actually permit. That's the pattern of self-righteousness. The pattern of self-righteousness is to take a permission, a conditional permission of the law and the text being debated at this day and is made clear in Matthew 19 is a text from Deuteronomy chapter 24 and it's a conditional law. It literally says if then. We cannot take some conditional permission of the law and pretend that it actually permits all kinds of things. That is a pattern of self-righteousness. We're not going to consider, again, all of what Christ teaches, but we will turn to one other passage, Matthew chapter 19. Matthew, if you would turn the pages over to Matthew chapter 19. And this is one of the places where it's very clear that Christ is opposing the Pharisees. And so in Matthew 5, when he says, it was also said, well, in Matthew 19, we see who is saying this. The Pharisees are saying this, Matthew 19, verse three. And we're gonna read just verses seven to nine. Again, just to give us a little bit more of the context. They, that is the Pharisees of verse three, so this is Matthew 19, verse seven to nine. They said to him, why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away? And he said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery. Now again, the passage, the mention of a certificate of divorce, the law from Moses that's being referenced here, Deuteronomy chapter 24, verses 1 to 4. And it's this conditional statement, one which many commentators have pointed out was almost certainly a mosaic law put into place to protect the women of Israel from further abuse. In other words, if a woman was divorced, at least she had some protection from the certificate of divorce and couldn't be further mistreated. The Pharisees have taken this conditional statement from the Law of Moses and they've turned it into a blank check, which permits divorce for almost any reason. ancient jewish tradition which as far as we can tell is exactly what the pharisees were embracing said you can divorce away for for whatever you want and it took a particular phrase from Deuteronomy 24 and reinterpreted it that way and it basically boiled down to this you don't like the way she looks you can divorce you don't like the way she cooks you can divorce her we don't have exact statistics as far as we can tell the divorce rates were high in Jerusalem among the Jews in the days of Jesus and Jesus comes and he says but I say to you where you think there's no sin where you've taken these conditional permissions of the law which God gave because of the hardness of your hearts by the way Matthew 19 you think that because of those conditional permissions you can divorce for whatever you want And so you're going to, by that pattern of self-righteousness, say, well, look, we did this and it's not a sin. That's where the self-righteousness comes in. And Jesus says, no, no, no. Where you're saying there's no sin at all, I am telling you there is sin on top of sin. There is sin on top of sin, such that for those who are unlawfully divorced, Their next marriage and whoever marries them is itself sin on top of sin. It's a marriage of adultery. It's not a true marriage at all. Self-righteousness says, well, since the law permits this, it must permit all kinds of things. See, there's no sin here. Christ comes and he says, There is sin. There's not just sin. There's sin on top of sin. Now, I'll say it one more time. We're not covering everything the Bible says about marriage, divorce, and remarriage with these two verses. But that's the pattern. It is a pattern of self-righteousness pharisaical self-righteousness to say, what sin is here? The law permits this, doesn't it? To take what the law might permit because of the hardness of heart and to say that we can really do whatever we want, that is self-righteousness. Because after all, if the law doesn't demand much, our first point, if the law actually permits all kinds of things, as the Pharisees were trying to say in our second point, then I can pretend to be righteous. Because if the law doesn't demand much and if the law permits all kinds of things, then I can sit back and I can say, look here, look here, see, I'm following it, I'm righteous. That is Pharisaical. self-righteousness. People of God, what areas of sin might we try to relax and relabel as permissible? What laws might we be in this way ignoring? As divorce rates have skyrocketed around us over the last decades, are we not tempted, even in this very same area, to fall into self-righteousness as the Pharisees did? And in what other areas are we tempted to relax the law and say, see, there's no sin here? When, if we follow the pattern of Jesus, we would point out, not only is there sin here, there's sin on top of sin here. To follow Jesus is to recognize the full teaching of the law and to call every form of sin, sin. So there were times when the Pharisees and those who followed them would break the law, pretending that the law said less than it did. There were times when the Pharisees would relax the law, pretending that the law allowed more than it did. There were also times when the Pharisees would simply add something new or alter the law completely. This takes us to our third point. Again, we're just looking at three patterns of self-righteousness. The Pharisees had more patterns than this, more ways that they did this. We can have more ways of falling into this as well, but these are the three patterns we're looking at this morning. And so here it's the law altered. Well, we read for the summary of the law from Leviticus 19, and that's what the law actually says. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The Pharisees have dropped the words as yourself, and they have added hate your enemies. They have altered the law, they have rewritten it. This is against the Word of God. Now the Old Testament didn't have chapter and verse divisions, but those have been added and so now it's easier for us to reference where things are close to each other. So now that we have chapter and verse divisions, We can say this, you don't even have to leave Leviticus chapter 19 to see how wrong this was. It's right in the same chapter, or if you were to say it to the Pharisees, it's just a few sentences later. Leviticus chapter 19 verse 18 is the misquoted command. Leviticus chapter 19 verse 34 says this, you shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you And you shall love him as yourself. There it is. You shall love him as yourself. We're not just talking about our brother. We're not just talking about the fellow man in our land. Yes, we talk about that. It starts there. Those are the people closest to us. But read on just a few verses. There it is in verse 34. The sojourner, the stranger who is among you, you shall love him as yourself. For you are strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Now that's just in Leviticus 19. There are many other chapters, many other places we could turn to in the Old Testament for showing the wrong thinking of the addition that the Pharisees made to the law. Now it is true that the psalmist on rare occasions will speak about hating enemies. But there is something very important to note about this. Psalm 139, we're not gonna turn there and read it, but if you write down Psalm 139 verses 20 to 22, this is the pattern. The psalmist is speaking about the enemies of God and about those who would take God's name in vain. And then the psalmist says, your enemies become as though they are my enemies. So how do we summarize this? John Stott said it very helpfully this way, quote, so there is such a thing as perfect hatred, just as there is such a thing as righteous anger, but it is hatred for God's enemies, not our own enemies. It is entirely free of all spite, rancor, and vindictiveness, and it is fired only by love for God's honor and glory." End of quote. We cannot take the handful of what we sometimes call imprecatory Psalms, excuse me, of imprecatory Psalms and take what they say about how we view God's enemies and pretend that we can then say, oh, look, I hate my enemies. This is a complete twisting of the law. Forget about relaxing it. Forget about ignoring it. This is altering, rewriting the law of God. No, instead of hating our enemies, as the Pharisees would try to rewrite the law, we are called to be merciful to all, even as God is merciful to all, and he gives gifts to both the righteous and the unrighteous, verse 45. We are called to have a loving and merciful attitude toward all people. Indeed, we are no different from the world, Jesus says, if we only love those who love us. We are to love our enemies, verse 44, even to the point that we would pray for them as they persecute us. People of God, let's pause here. Again, we can't consider all the details, but we're gonna zoom in and look at this one. Pray for your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Almost 2,000 years ago, a great preacher of the early church, John Chrysostom, he called praying for our enemies, quote, the very highest summit of self-control, end of quote. And he looked at, he took verses 21 to 44, and he said you can rearrange it as a series of challenges to our self-control. And so climbing the mountain of self-control begins with controlling our anger and loving our brother. And then it moves to controlling our lust and not committing adultery in the heart. But then as we move up the mountain, we reach to the very summit, to the very highest point, and that is to pray for those who would persecute us, to pray for our enemies. People of God, are you seeking to follow Christ? Do you want to climb the mountain of self-control? You should. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit. And this is the law of God, rightly interpreted. You can begin to climb this mountain by controlling your anger, by controlling your lust, And you can take more steps by seeking to understand all that the law of God calls us to without doing more than the law of God would permit. And finally, you can reach the top of this mountain when you begin to earnestly, lovingly pray for your enemies. This is one of the climbs of the Christian faith. This is one of the ways that we must seek to follow Christ. Climbing the mountain of self-control is fighting against many of the patterns of self-righteousness. But of course we cannot leave the application here. If we just say, climb the mountain of self-control, we're gonna be completely hopeless. Because of course we can't climb the mountain of self-control. We are called to seek to do this. We're called as God's people to grow in righteousness and begin to do this, but we cannot do this. If there is any place in the Word of God which so clearly shows us our sinfulness, it's right here. We can't climb this mountain. And so we need verse 48, and we need The rest of scripture telling us how verse 48 works. We need the holiness of God. We need the one who climbs this mountain perfectly. The same one who interprets it perfectly. The same one who is both our teacher and our savior, Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul says it this way in 2 Corinthians 5 verse 21, for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin. He had to be sin to be our Savior because we can't climb the mountain. We are sinners. But he could be our Savior because he knew no sin. He is our perfect Savior. Finally, the call of the Christian life is to follow Christ. But this includes seeking to obey the full demands of the law. So we don't say, I can't climb it so I shouldn't even try to climb it. No, the rest of 2 Corinthians 5 verse 21 is this, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. We must, following Christ, first trust him and then say, I am going to seek to climb this mountain. I'm not going to say that it's impossible to control my anger. I'm not going to say that it's impossible to control my lust. I'm not going to pretend that those are not part of the commands of God. I'm not going to pretend that it's easy to pray for those who persecute me, but I'm also not going to pretend that I'm not actually called to do that. I am going to say, Christ, I follow you, and I praise you that you climb this mountain perfectly. And then, Christ, I'm going to ask that you teach me and shape me and lead me to stumble up this mountain a little bit better as I walk through this life. Lord God, I know that I'm not going to climb it perfectly. If I even tried to, I would just be falling into some other pattern of self-righteousness thinking that I could save myself. But no, help me up this mountain. and all the mountains of the Christian faith, all the mountains and struggles of sanctification, so that I might put away the patterns of self-righteousness, so that I might put away all the ways that I could pretend that you don't call me to complete holiness, even to the level of my heart. You are my teacher. You are my savior. Amen. Let us pray. Our Father in Heaven, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, show us the perfect obedience of Christ and teach us to love righteousness, to love all