Tearing up the Checklists
It’s Monday evening at your house. You have had a long day and now after dinner you are going through the mail at the kitchen table. A long envelope falls out of the stack of junk mail that is hand addressed to you. The feel of the paper is rich and textured; the stamp of a design most beautiful. It appears to be an invitation. Carefully peeling back the envelope’s flap you open a card that reads;
"You are invited to an audience with the Lord Jesus for a discussion about your account with Almighty God. Prepare to meet Him on Sunday."
Would you feel compelled to start going over a checklist in defense of your life’s choices or would you begin to anticipate the opportunity to meet the Lord face to face?
Checklists abound! Performance is measured everywhere - at school with grades, at work with reviews, on the streets by police with radar guns, on the football field with stats and scores. And that is not a bad thing. I am not anti-competitive. Measuring results helps to assure a quality product and maximum productivity.
Bringing our natural ideas about gaining the approval of others into our relationship with God, we start to create lists of rules; extensive do’s and don’ts; which we use to assess our own spirituality as well as the spirituality of others. We hope to prove our acceptability by maintaining our checklists.
Q.- What kinds of rules show up on those lists?
HOWEVER.... (big pause here!) nobody gains God’s acceptance based on keeping the rules or being good!
Turn with me this morning, please, to Matt. 5: 17-20
Let me re-read that last verse.
The Pharisees of whom Jesus spoke were among the best rule-keepers of all time!
They devoted themselves intense study to the Law of Moses, working out the application to every detail of living. Jesus had issues with them, but He recognized their sincere diligence in trying to do the right things...
In Matthew 23:23 He says, "You give a tenth of your spices - mint, dill and cummin."
They tithed from the smallest produce of their gardens! Now that’s keeping the absolute letter of the law! Such a conscientious observation of the rules is not condemned. That verse continues " .....you have neglected the more important matters of the law - justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former."
But Jesus said even such attention to detail in keeping the rules is insufficient to please God! He says to us "....unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."
If you are a rule-keeper that statement should send a chill down your spine!
Few, if any, of us keeps rules as well as the Pharisees. For those who are trying to love God by being religious Jesus’ words are a high wall that blocks out hope. In comparision to the rigidly righteous Pharisees, most of us realize that we haven’t kept the rules even on our own check-list to very well.
What then is the hope of our approval before God?
How might our righteousness surpass that of the Pharisees?
For understanding, let’s go back to the 17th verse. {read it.}
In this Sermon, Jesus is challenging those who follow Him to think about the whole concept of right and wrong in completely new ways that goes beyond religion and keeping rules. Repeatedly, He says, “You have heard it said... but I say to you.”
Some people, gaining only a partial understanding of His words, make the mistake of thinking that there are no more rules!
Jesus reminds us that He didn’t wipe out the 10 Commandments, and God’s expectation of holiness in us. He came to fulfil God’s Law not to abolish it! The New Covenant which starts to unfold with the Gospel of Matthew, does not invalidate the part of the Bible that precedes it! Jesus came to bring those truths to their ultimate revelation. He came to carry them to their logical conclusion.
The Law of Moses shows us the righteous demands of God. Paul explains to us that (Galatians 3:24-25) "the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law."
The Law of Moses also contained provisions for a way of forgiveness for God’s people when they failed to meet His demands. If a person sinned under the Law, there were prescribed sacrifices and offerings that were to be brought to the priests so that the sinner could be released from the guilt and penalty of his transgression.
Jesus came to show us, in person, the holiness of God and to be, in person, the sacrifice that takes away our guiltiness. In that sense, He fulfilled the Law.
The weakness of the OT Law was that it made people aware of their guilt but did not provide people with the power to change their ways! Jesus fulfilled the Law by helping us to meet its demands by changing us from the inside out!
Thus, He challenges us with His declaration about the need to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees. Where they were motivated by fear and/or pride they mistakenly turned their focus on keeping up a good appearance. We who are filled with the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ, are motivated by love and the love of God causes us to seek change that goes heart-deep!
Tragically, a BIG problem that goes back to the first generation of Believers remains with us to this day. Many who trust Christ to forgive them for their sins and who experience the life of the Holy Spirit, relapse into trying to keep the rules.
Paul asked the Believers in the city of Galatia, around 55 AD. (Galatians 3:2-3)
“I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?”
When we return to keeping check-lists we lose the joy of knowing Jesus and become slaves of fear. We no longer live confidently in this world as children who trust Him to provide for our needs. We become neurotic, we are full of guilt and anxiety. We constantly compare ourselves to others as if God judges us on the curve. And, we begin to be harsh critics of others who do not keep our rules for they threaten our security.
After a time, we are deceived by our own self-righteousness. The checklists of holiness that we have written for ourselves often ignore the sins of our culture or even our family so we are ignorant as to how far off of God’s mark we really are. If we fail to measure ourselves by God’s unchanging standard, we start to look very foolish, for we lose sight of our the true mark of holiness.
*ex.- Imagine a situation of a father whose son is 4’ 6" tall. All the son’s friends are 6’ tall and the son
desperately wants to be 6’ tall. One day this father decides to create a new measure so he makes a new ruler that changes 9" into a foot. Now his son can say, "I am 6’ tall." Is he really? No! He is still 4’ 6". He is still shorter than his friends who would now measure 8’ tall if they used his new ruler. The absolute truth is that the son is shorter than his friends and no re-definition of height measurement can change that.
If we think that we can gain God’s approval by keeping the rules on our check-list, we are going to be severely tempted to re-write the standards to ignore our own short-comings.
What does Jesus say about that? [ read v. 18-19 ]
When we read the Law, it shows us how far short we have fallen in our attempts to live acceptably before our Holy God. And then, made desperate by the Truth, we come to Jesus, with great thanksgiving for His gracious love that forgives us and for His power that changes us.
Here’s the basic principle of this:
Only to the extent that we accept the unconditional love of Jesus are we able to face the ugly truth about our sins and our guilt before God. Seeing our sin, we own it, with honest confession, and the Scripture promises that we will find full forgiveness as well as a new heart!
*to illustrate-
Kids who come from secure, loving, and affirming homes are best equipped to resist peer pressure. A child who has grown up with unconditional love flowing from his parents is not so needy of approval that he will do anything to gain it from his friends. He has the self-respect that enables him to choose according to his own desires and needs. He is enabled, by the love he has received, to face his own weaknesses and strengths. He does not have to be the "ideal" demanded by the crowd. He can be himself.
On the other hand, the child that has been taught to believe that he is valuable because he does good things, whose parents have demonstrated highly conditional love and acceptance is ripe for peer pressure. He will whatever the crowd tells him to do to gain acceptance. Even if the child knows that his choices are destructive and/or wrong, he is conditioned to need approval more than to do what is morally/socially right.
Our Heavenly Father unconditionally loves us through Jesus Christ. As we grasp that fact, we are able to look at the ugly truth about our sins and our failures with the hope of being changed by God’s power. God’s love forms a foundation from which we can grow into emotional and spiritual health. The fact of His amazing love is a far more powerful motivator to holy living than the fact of His judgement.
Close:
As I close this message today, let me ask you a pointed question.
Are you a Pharisee locked into keeping rules to gain God’s acceptance or
does your hope of approval before God come from the grace of Jesus Christ?
Are you abusing the grace of God in Christ by continuing to ignore the call of His word to holy living?
As we celebrate Communion today, which takes us back to the sacrifice of Christ, I urge you to invite the Holy Spirit to make the Cross and the meaning of what Jesus did there 2,000 years ago more real to you today.
See this time of worship as an invitation to intimacy.
Let the love that He showed flow into every corner of your life. As you accept the fact that God loves you, you will begin to love Him in a new way that is powerful, healing, and liberating.
Chuck Swindoll in his book, Grace Awakening, says that you will experience four changes as you surpass the Pharisees, tear up your checklists, and grab hold of grace that leads to heart-felt transformation....
a. `You will gain a greater appreciation for God’s gifts to you and to others. You’ll will learn to live free from guilt.
b. You will spend much less time and energy being critical of and/or concerned about the choices that other people are making.
c. You will become tolerant and less judgmental. The outside of people’s lives will mean much less to you than the inside.
d. You will begin to take giant steps toward emotional and spiritual maturity.
1 Grace Awakening, Swindoll, pg. 13
Close
Amen
Jerry D. Scott, copyright 2007
www.WashingtonAG.com
