"How Heavy Is a Pound of Gold?" Selected Scriptures Sunday Morning Worship Service

I've been reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, and I have found a uh interesting little anecdote I will share with you.

In the afternoons, when he was president, he would often go for what he called his afternoon rambles, where he would take a carriage to the DC tree line, and then he would walk in a straight line for an hour or two hours, however far in uh some direction.

Now, this was the only time his staff knew, the only time you could have a prolonged conversation with him.

Uh, throughout the day, he was doing little five-minute conversations here and there, but this was the time, if you needed his attention, you had to go on his ramble with him.

And it was considered an honor uh for to be an invited guest, an officer or a cabinet member or something like that to be able to go with him.

Well, he would set off in a direction, he would let his guests choose the direction, and the only rule of his walk is that you could not veer to the left or the right.

If you came across a boulder, you had to climb over it.

If you came across a little ledge, you had to go down it.

If you came across a creek, you had to ford it, even if that was the Potomac River.

Those are the rules.

Well, one day the new French ambassador in town came and had an appointment with him, and he came for the afternoon he thought walk.

Apparently, something was lost in the translation to French.

He showed up in a white linen suit with a silk top hat.

I don't even know what a silk top hat would be, but he was wearing one accordingly, and with two white silk gloves for his afternoon walk.

He wrote later when he described this to the Prime Minister of France, he said he thought he was going through a walk through Lafayette Park.

Instead, he was put in the carriage, they went to the tree line, and President Roosevelt let him choose the direction, and off they went.

They angled towards Georgetown and they got to the place where Rock Creek enters into the river there, and you have to you can cut across to the rest of Georgetown.

And so Roosevelt looks at him and says, Well, into the water we go.

You better strip down.

And so the two of them took off every stitch of clothing they were wearing to Ford the Potomac.

Later, when the Prime Minister asked him, So, what would it like meeting the American president?

He described this and he said, But I want you to know, for the dignity of France, I left on two articles of clothing.

My gloves.

He said, I did not want to give any American woman the disgrace of seeing a French gentleman without his proper gloves.

You can file that story away in the back of your mind, because we will return to it before the morning is over.

You can turn your attention now to Matthew 7, verse 12, where Jesus gives what is known as the golden rule.

Matthew 7:12

He says in verse 12, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets.

This is a verse that is often quoted and seldom applied.

Jesus here distills biblical ethics into one little sentence.

It is such a mastery of our Lord's turn of phrase that he can take something as complex as ethics and reduce it down to one sentence.

This shows our Lord's mastery with words.

This is not the only time he does this.

The New Testament is chalk-fill of descriptions that Jesus says where he gives something measurable memorable that is memorably succinct.

There's an ocean of truth underneath this, though.

You can never fully explore this rule.

It was Anglican theologians in the early 1600s that first referred to it as the golden rule.

They did so because this is the age in the 1600s of global exploration, plundering the New World for gold and all of that.

And these theologians argued that this right here is more precious than any gold you can find abroad.

If gold is the standard of measurement of everything else, if everything else has its wealth determined by how it relates to gold, this verse determines the value of every other law.

Every other law has its value in as much as it compares to this verse.

In other words, all other laws are rightly discerned or rightly valued in as much as they relate to Matthew 7, verse 12.

Matthew 7:12

That's what they meant by the golden rule.

More precious than anything else, and it gives meaning and significance and value to everything else.

The label, the golden rule, has stuck because it so encapsulates biblical ethics.

Like much of what Jesus says, he has an incredible ability to condense and synthesize.

Well, this is called the golden rule.

I'm going to give you two reasons why it's rightly called the golden rule.

So if you're taking notes, you're going to be two points this morning.

First, it is rightly called the golden rule because it fulfills all other rules.

It fulfills all law.

It fulfills all law.

This is what Jesus means here when he says, Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.

For this is the law and the prophets.

He just says, This is the law and the prophets, but this kind of language is picked up elsewhere in the New Testament, obviously referencing, learning it from the Sermon on the Mount.

And there, Paul and Peter and James all refer to this as the fulfillment of the law.

For example, Romans 13, verse 18, Paul says that love fulfills the law.

Romans 13, 10.

Love can do no wrong, therefore love fulfills the law.

Owe nothing to anybody except for love, because love fulfills the law.

Jesus describes this here in this way by saying that every law could be summarized.

Law and prophets can be summarized by saying, Treat other people as you want to be treated.

Now the Old Testament, the Jews split the Old Testament up into law, into prophets, and into writings or wisdom.

The law is the first five books of the Bible, the Torah.

Jesus says a good summary of the law is do to other people what you want to be done to yourself.

But also the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the twelve, the minor prophets they're called.

They can be summed up the same way.

I mean, so much of the minor prophets are prophecies about Jesus, prophecies about the second coming, but there's a lot of ethical rebuke in them.

What does the Lord require of you?

To walk justly, love mercy, be humble before the Lord.

This is the golden rule.

This is the second greatest commandment, to love others as you would want to be loved.

Now, the first greatest commandment, it's not the only command in the Old Testament, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, right?

That is the greatest commandment.

But the second, Jesus says, is like it to love your neighbor as yourself, or to do to others what you would have them do to you.

That's reciprocal phrases.

To love your neighbor as yourself is the same thing as to do to others as you would want them to do to you.

It's just worded slightly differently, but it's the same thing.

This splits law up into planes here.

There's a vertical plane of law.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

That's the first tablet of the law, or the first table of the law, the first four commandments of the Ten Commandments.

They're about your vertical relationship to God.

Don't have other gods, don't worship idols, don't take the Lord's name in vain.

Structure your worship around the Lord, structure your week around the Lord.

That's the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God.

And much of the law is about that too.

You know, you Israelites are supposed to eat different foods, so they stand out different from the nations, so people see that their God is different than the nation's God.

The priests come from Levi because that's what God described.

He'd be worshiped in that way.

Don't offer a lame animal to the Lord because the Lord is holy and exalted.

So a lot of the law is vertical about your relationship with the Lord.

That's not what Jesus means here.

Jesus is talking about the second table of the law: commandments five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.

All of the horizontal commands.

They are all fulfilled by this command to love your neighbor as yourself, to do to others what you want them to do to you.

That fulfills the second greatest command.

Now, by saying it's the second greatest command, that doesn't mean it's insignificant.

It means it's weighty.

Jesus elsewhere rebukes the scribes and Pharisees and says, Oh, you guys, you tithe the mint and the cumin.

You tithe the spices.

You get a new box of spices, you with tweezers, take a tenth of the spice out to offer them to the priests.

But you neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy.

Talking about the second table.

Jesus calls that the weightier matters of the law.

It's the heavy part of the law.

To love others.

Leviticus 19 summarizes the Torah this way, Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself.

It's Matthew 22, 39, where Jesus says it's the second greatest command.

And if it's the second greatest command, it follows that it's the second greatest sin possible to break this command.

That's because this command fulfills so much of the law.

Galatians 5, verse 14 is one of the verses that always, as a preacher, it cracks me up, Galatians 5.14, because I sometimes say things just like this.

Galatians 5:14

Paul says, The whole law is fulfilled in one word.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The whole law is fulfilled in that word.

By word there, of course, he means it's this command to love your neighbor.

That fulfills the whole law.

You don't need other laws if you have that one.

Just do that one.

You don't need the rest of it.

You know, when I come home from work, I don't need to have a flashcard of rules in my in my car that I can look at before I go in the house.

Rule one, don't yell at Deedra.

Rule two, see if there's something you can do to help her in the house.

Rule three, if she asks you a question, answer it.

Rule four, try asking her a question.

I don't need to have some of those might be helpful, but that whole flashcard could be replaced with the simple commands to love your wife.

I don't need a rule that says, don't yell at her, if I love her.

I need a rule to answer her when she talks to me, if I love her.

All those rules are just irrelevant if you have love in your heart.

The same thing is true in the Torah.

So many rules in the Torah that just boil down to love your neighbor.

You know, you think of the command in Exodus.

If you build a new house and it's got a balcony on it, put a railing on the balcony.

Why do you need a railing on your balcony?

So that your kids don't fall off of it.

Do you really need that rule written down?

Yes, you do, because people are dumb.

But if people would think about it for a second, they would realize, oh, I should put a railing on that balcony.

In our neighborhood, there's a new house just went up.

Well, a couple years ago during COVID, it went up.

And they put an in-ground swimming pool in the front yard of their house, in like level, not one of those elevated pools.

Some houses in our neighborhood have those elevated pools.

No, no, no.

An in-ground pool in the front yard uh with no fence around it.

You can see it off of Cherokee.

If you drive on Cherokee, you've probably seen it.

And uh there it is.

And that thing lasted there for like two years with no fence around it.

And uh finally the county came and told them no, they put a little sign up, and the county made them put a fence around their pool.

Apparently, it's a law in Fairfax County.

You have to have a fence around your pool.

They got away with it for two years.

You think, why do they need a fence around their pool?

Why is that the law?

Uh so raccoons don't fall in and drown, or there might be something else that bad that could happen from it, I don't know.

Uh neighbor kids.

I don't even have any kids.

No, there's neighbor kids.

You have to you have that law in Fairfax County.

The Bible has that kind of law.

Why?

All law can be fulfilled by the simple command to love your neighbor, do unto others which you would have them do unto yourself.

You can reason through this like with the Ten Commandments.

The first table is vertical towards the Lord, the second table, commandments five through ten, horizontal towards other people.

Don't murder.

Well, love fulfills that law.

You don't you don't obey the six commandments simply by not murdering, you obey the sixth commandment by loving other people, by actively loving them.

If you love them, you're not going to kill them.

So you have love for your neighbor.

You don't commit adultery, uh, and you don't obey that the command is don't commit adultery.

You don't obey that command simply by keeping your hands to yourself.

You obey that command by having pure thoughts, by by loving your wife, by putting entertainment that is not sinful in front of your mind, by dressing modestly.

There's a hundred ways you fulfill that command, but that's all based on love.

Don't covet.

You know, you don't fulfill that command simply by not desiring other things.

You actively fulfill that command by being content with your life, by being happy with how the Lord made you and your neighbors and your family and the skills he gave you and your health and your job.

You're content with that.

That's the opposite of not coveting.

Don't steal the eighth commandment.

You don't fulfill that just by not stealing from the grocery store.

No, you obey the eighth commandment.

You fulfill the eighth commandment by working hard to provide for your family because you love them.

That's the fulfillment of the and so forth.

You know, don't bear false witness.

If you loved your neighbors, you wouldn't lie about them.

If you love the truth, you wouldn't lie about anything.

See how all these commands, they're they're given negatively.

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.

But there's positive fulfillment in all of them.

There's positive action, and the positive action is predicated on love.

That is true of the Ten Commandments, that is true of every command in the Bible.

Now I want you to see this.

I want you to see it for yourself.

Flip back in the Old Testament to Deuteronomy 24.

Now you could go to any passage in the Old Testament, any law passage in the Old Testament, any passages giving commands in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, but I'm choosing Deuteronomy 24.

Kind of at random.

Again, you could do this anywhere, but I'm choosing Deuteronomy 24 because the heading in the ESV over verse 5 here is miscellaneous laws.

So if my argument is that love fulfills every law in the Old Testament, that would be easy with like your enemy's ox, right?

Your enemy's ox is wandering down the street and you see it, and Exodus 24 says you've got to take the ox back to him because he's your enemy and you but actually your neighbor and you love him.

Would you want your ox returned to you?

And that has American similarities.

If you see your neighbor's dog running free in your front yard, you've got to grab your neighbor's dog and take it back to them.

And I always see my neighbor's dog running through my yard when I'm late somewhere and like driving away, and there is the neighbor's dog.

I'm like, mercy.

But I remember that if I had a dog, and this is why I don't have dogs, but if I did have a dog, I would want my neighbor to grab my dog and shove him through my front door.

And so, you know, we get out of our car and grab the neighbor's dog and shove her back into the house.

And that's that's because we love our neighbors.

So it'd be easy with the passage about your enemy's ox.

But what about a passage that's called miscellaneous laws?

Well, verse five When a man is newly married, he shouldn't go to the army.

He shouldn't get drafted for one year.

Why?

Because would you want to be drafted in the first year of your marriage?

You just got married, spend a year with your wife.

Don't get drafted into the military.

This is a simple command.

Treat others like you would want to be treated.

You wouldn't want to be compelled to be in the army the first year of your marriage, so don't make other people do it.

Verse 6, don't take a mill or an upper millstone for a pledge.

For that would be taking a life in a pledge.

That's how somebody mix their food.

So your neighbor says, I need to borrow this, and you're like, I'll give you$20, but in exchange, give me your kitchen.

What's he supposed to do to eat?

So don't take their millstone or their mill as a pledge.

Let them continue to eat.

Lend them, would you want somebody to take your kitchen for a loan?

Verse 7 if a man is found stealing one of his brothers, or he treats him as a slave or sells him, then he shall die.

You should purge the evil from your midst.

By the way, I've heard people say, American slavery followed biblical ethics, American slavery, a biblical precedent.

Not true.

Not true at all.

This one verse, if followed, would have completely eradicated the American institution of slavery.

If you kidnap someone or you are found in possession of somebody who is kidnapped, you should have your head cut off.

That's this verse.

That one command would have ended slavery.

But set that aside.

Do you really need a command that says don't kidnap people?

How about just love people?

And this command would be irrelevant.

But because people are sinful and materialistic and all that, they need the command that says, if you kidnap somebody, you will be put to death.

But you recognize very easily love fulfills this command.

If you loved your neighbor, you wouldn't need a rule.

You see your neighbor and you're like, oh, what am I supposed to do?

Don't kidnap, don't kidnap, don't kidnap.

You just love him.

It's obvious with verse 8.

Take care if you have leprosy, don't touch other people.

This is like a kindergarten classroom rule right here.

If you are a leper, don't touch your neighbor.

Because if you weren't a leper, would you want your leper neighbor touching you?

That's this command.

Verse 10.

When you take a loan from your neighbor, or when you give a loan to your neighbor, don't go into his house to collect it.

I've been thinking about what that means for a while.

Why is this a command?

Let's pretend that I lent you$20.

And now I want my$20 back.

This verse says, I cannot go into your house to get it.

Why?

Well, maybe your kids don't know you had to borrow money.

It would be embarrassing in front of your family.

It's just not a loving thing to do for me to walk in your house and be like, hey, that money I lent you last week, fork it over.

It's just, it's your house.

It's your family.

I shouldn't do that to you.

Plus, what if something bad happened?

Like, what if we got in a fight and one of us died and then it's totally weird?

Like, oh, he owed me money and now he's dead, or he was collecting money.

Nobody knows what happened.

It's in the house.

So stay out on the curb, stay at the top of the driveway, he'll see you and bring you your money.

Do you really need that law?

No, not if you loved each other.

And if you loved each other, this law would be unnecessary.

Love fulfills this law.

Verse 12.

If he's a poor person, don't sleep in his pledge.

If you took the jacket from him in exchange for 20 bucks and it's nighttime, give him his jacket back, otherwise he'll be cold.

Verse 14, don't oppress somebody who's poor and needy.

Again, such an obvious command.

If you love someone, you don't need a rule that says, don't oppress them.

Verse 15, give a day laborer his wages the day that he works.

It's gotta be hard.

If you're working for somebody different six days a week, how do you remember who paid you and who didn't?

Like last Tuesday, I'm not sure if I got paid.

Plus, you need the money for food for your family.

So if you love the person who's working for you, pay him when he's done.

A neighbor high school kid mows your grass, pay him that day.

Don't expect the high school kid to remember two weeks from now if you mowed your grass two weeks ago or if you got paid for it, pay him now.

How else can you go play video games with his friends?

Verse 16.

Fathers should not be put to death because they're children, nor children to be put to death for their fathers.

Each one should die for his own sin.

Your father is a loser scumbag, you shouldn't be punished for it.

Your kid is a rebellion, rebellious, runs away from the faith, runs away from you.

You shouldn't be judged for him.

It's a simple concept.

Why shouldn't you be judged for how your kids are rebelling?

Well, you don't want to judge them, your neighbor for how his kids are rebelling, because you wouldn't want to be judged for your kids' rebelling.

You don't want to be judged for your dad's sins, then don't judge your neighbor for his parents' sins.

And we we this is such an obvious one too, and we break this all the time.

You know, your kids rebel and you're like, I tried my hardest.

Your neighbor kids rebel and you're like, oh, it's their own fault.

We're so like that.

If you loved your neighbor and you treated them like you would want to be treated, you wouldn't conduct yourself this way.

Verse 17, don't pervert justice to the sojourner, the immigrant, the fatherless.

Very obvious.

Don't pervert justice.

Verse 19, when you're reaping the field and you left a sheaf in the field, like you, the the you're harvesting and you left some of the wheat in the field, don't go back and get it.

Leave it there for the poor person to get.

Or the olive tree, verse 20.

When you hit the olive tree, you harvest the olive tree by shaking it, the olives fall out, you pick it off the ground.

It says, Don't shake it twice.

Shake it once, get the olives, and move on.

Yes, there's probably 10 other olives in the tree.

Leave them there for the poor person to eat.

Come back and shake it again in a few weeks.

Maybe more stuff is ripe.

But don't keep shaking it.

Yeah, you don't harvest the edges of the field for the poor people to eat.

Why?

Because if you're poor, wouldn't you want some scraps left in the field for you?

Did it with the grapes in verse 21.

Chapter 25, verse 1.

If there's a dispute between men and they come into court and the judges decide between them, acquit the innocent and condemn the guilty.

Again, what an obvious command.

You're a judge, you're hearing a case between two people.

That guy's innocent, that guy's guilty.

Okay.

Now what am I supposed to do as the judge?

I forget.

You find the innocent person innocent and the guilty person guilty.

But what if the innocent person is poor and the guilty person is rich, and you gotta run for reelection next year, and that guy's got a nice house, you want to go there, and you're never gonna see that poor person again.

If you were on trial, would you want the judge to give a fair verdict?

Then give a fair verdict to others.

We could go through all of the rest of Deuteronomy like this.

Chapter 25 is about to get very weird, so we will stop here and go back to Matthew 7.

But the same principle, believe me, the same principle applies to the rest of Deuteronomy 25 as well.

So go to Matthew 7, though.

The Jesus' point is that if you loved your neighbor as yourself, if you treated other people like you would want to be treated, then all of these laws would be fulfilled and would be unnecessary.

That's the first reason it's called the golden rule.

It fulfills all laws.

Second reason it's called the golden rule.

It forfeits all righteousness, it fulfills all law, but it forfeits all righteousness.

When you think about this verse for longer than five seconds, you quickly realize that you cannot live by this verse.

Because you want to be treated very well, don't you?

You are the sun in your solar system.

Everything revolves around you.

You want others to treat you well, you have a very high view of yourself, you have self-esteem out the ears, you think about yourself, you want other people to think about you.

You can't treat other people that way.

And the more highly you think of yourself, the more obvious it is that you can't treat other people that way.

Much less everybody, this verse is self-defeating.

It shows you one function of the law, and this is true of all Old Testament law, one function of Old Testament law is to show you how to live.

Do this.

Like go in this direction, go towards love and justice and mercy.

But another function of the law is to condemn you for your inability to do what it tells you to do.

And that is true here.

You can't actually live like this.

When Paul says, owe no one anything except love because love fulfills the law, you're like, yes, love fulfills all commands.

But keep thinking about it.

O's is present tense.

You are always in debt to those around you.

Your enemy's ox gets out and you walk him back home and your neighbor's dog gets out and you stuff it back through the door.

That's today, tomorrow when the ox is free again.

You can't say, Yeah, but I love my neighbor yesterday.

No, you still owe love to your neighbor today and tomorrow and every day.

And that's true of everybody.

You are always in debt.

You're always in debt.

You remember the lawyer who asked Jesus, I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself?

Alright?

I'm lowering up here.

Who's my neighbor, Jesus?

And Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan.

The guy, the Jew, fell among robbers and was beaten up, and the priests and everybody passes him aside, but the Samaritan takes him home, drops him off at a hotel, actually, leaves the credit card, checks him in, pays all he needs.

You can't actually live like that.

You understand that, right?

You can't live like that.

You can't, it's one thing to give a homeless person a sandwich, it's another thing to check him in at the Hyatt and leave your credit card there.

You can't live like that.

You get condemned by what the law commands.

That's the function of the golden rule.

It condemns you.

Now, many commentators point out that every religion in the world has their own version of the golden rule.

So I've chased down a bunch of them, and you know what's interesting?

Yes, every other religion has their own version of it, but every other religion's version of it is different, and they're all different in the same way.

I want to read you some versions of the golden rule from other religions, and I want to see if you can pick up what they all have in common that is different than what Jesus says.

One of the most famous Jewish rabbis, Halael, says, quote, what is hateful to yourself, do not to someone else.

Tobit, which is in the Catholic Apocrypha, says, quote, what thou thyself hatest, to no man doeth.

Confucius, what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

The Greek Stoics, the Greek philosophers, they had their own principle, often quoted in Greek literature.

What you do not want to be done to you, do not do to anyone else.

I have many other examples, but I think you get the point.

All of them, you notice this, all of them are negative.

They're all, they could all be fulfilled by passivity.

You don't want to get punched, then don't punch your neighbor.

That's pretty easy to fulfill.

Somebody with a modicum of self-control can fulfill the golden rule of other religions, but Jesus flips it around.

It doesn't leave you room for passivity.

Jesus flips the tables here just like he did in the temple and says, No, you want to fulfill the law.

You have to love others, you have to treat others.

It's active.

Passivity is not on the table here.

You have to actively engage in pouring out your life and love to others.

There's no possible way to do this.

Avoidance can't fulfill this command.

Passivity can't fulfill this command.

Only hard, active, intense, constant love can fulfill this command, and failure to fulfill it at one moment is the second greatest sin you can possibly commit.

And we fail to fulfill it at every moment.

We lack the capacity to fulfill this command.

Oh, sure, you can.

You can show love to your enemy here and there.

You can treat somebody like you'd want to be treated every now and then.

You can help, you can do acts of virtue, you can give to charity, you can help the old lady crossing the crosswalk with her grocery cart, you can do volunteer hours or pick up trash at a park.

You can do different things at different times in your life and different moments.

But that is not the fulfillment of this command.

You can do lots of ethical things, but you cannot fulfill this because this demands perfection and a life of ultimate self-sacrifice all the time.

We all like sheep have gone astray, each their own way.

We desire our own good and not the good of others, and so we stand condemned by this.

And our world is filled with hate, our world is filled with war and conflict, our lives are filled with hate and war and conflict because we fail to love others like this.

Calvin, very insightful words, Calvin writes in this passage: quote, The only reason why so many quarrels exist in the world and why men inflict so many mutual injuries on each other is that they knowingly and willingly trample justice under their feet while every man rightly demands that it should be maintained towards himself.

Calvin says, Every person is an expert in ethics when he is the object of the ethics.

But when it involves someone else, suddenly there is nuance and two sides, and the need for restraint and skepticism before rendering a verdict.

When you're the object of injustice, you cry out.

When somebody else is, you're like, Huh, let me hear the other side.

We fail to love others as we would want to be loved.

And this shows how unrighteous we are.

The very existence of other rules in the Bible reveal our inability to do this.

James 2, verse 8.

James 2:8

If you really fulfilled the royal law according to the scriptures, you would love your neighbor as yourself.

And the problem is that we cannot do that.

That's what I meant by my question on the title slide.

How heavy is a pound of gold?

It is heavy enough to fulfill every law in the scriptures, but it is also heavy enough to crush you and to convict you and to make you stand condemned before God.

So you should ask yourself this question.

When you pray to God, on what basis does God hear your prayers?

Why does God turn his ear towards you and listen to your prayers?

When you worship God, why does God receive your worship?

What about you in your relationship with God makes God receive your worship?

Or you can track this out all the way to the end of your life.

When you die and you stand before God for judgment, on what basis should he let you into heaven?

What basis should he have fellowship with you in the afterlife?

And I fear that too often we think, oh, God hears my prayers because I'm a hard worker, I love my family, I try to do the right thing in every situation I'm in.

God receives my worship because he knows that I work hard and I'm generally a good person, and I God knows my heart that I try my best, and so that's why he receives my worship.

And I'm telling you, those are just wrong answers.

We stand condemned by our inability to keep this most basic of laws.

The one law that summarizes all the other horizontal laws, we can't keep.

Ask yourself, have you failed to be content in your circumstances?

Have you failed to love your wife like you should?

Have you failed to love your enemies like you should, your neighbor like you should for even for a moment?

And of course you have.

So we stand condemned by God for our inability to do what he calls the weightiest part of the law, the second greatest command.

We can't do it.

And how often our hearts think that we're gonna be okay before God because we've done these other things.

We worked hard at sports, we worked hard at church, we worked hard at home, we worked hard at our jobs.

And so God is gonna see that and receive me.

I'm telling you, that is like the French ambassador standing there stark raving naked and saying, I'm modest because I've got two gloves on.

Oh, God is gonna see that I'm a good person because of these good things I'm done?

My friend, you're naked.

You don't have any righteousness on you.

You don't have anything covering your sin.

Yeah, nice gloves, I guess.

What is that for?

The person who thinks they're received by God because of how hard they've worked or the good things they've done is actually condemned by God for their failure to do the very things God has commanded.

What's the alternative?

The alternative is to look to Christ, who is the only person who ever lived to fulfill this perfectly.

Jesus always loved his neighbor as himself.

He always did unto others what he wanted others to do unto him.

He poured his life out for other people.

Sometimes that involved rebuking sin, sometimes it involved not casting pearls before swine, sometimes it involved sacrificing his life for his disciples, and it literally involved him sacrificing his life for us.

He takes our sin from us, so he dies on the cross, bearing the penalty we deserve for our failure to keep this command.

We then place our faith in him, we receive his righteousness.

So we're not robed in our gloves and we're not robed in our own clothes, we are robed in the righteousness of Christ, which covers us from our sin and shows us God's favor.

We have God's favor because of what Christ has done, not what we have done.

This is the intro to the Sermon on the Mount again, that in order to have a right relationship with God, you mourn over your own sin, you recognize that you are hungry, you are broken, you don't have your own righteousness, you cry out to God for mercy.

God gives you righteousness based upon your faith.

That then changes your disposition.

You become merciful towards others, gracious towards others, because all of the righteousness you have is a gift from God that alters your whole life.

But to get there, you have to be broken over your sin, which looks different at every age, of course.

You know, a six-year-old who comes to faith might be sad about their sin.

But if you get saved when you're 18, like I did, or 40 or whatever, you should be broken over your sin, where you're just like, you're grieved at how much sin you have, how much you fail to love your neighbors yourself.

That should crush you.

You should mourn over it, and then you direct your mourning to God who covers you, meets your mourning, dries your tears, robes you in the righteousness of Christ.

That's the way you have a right relationship with God through your faith in his righteousness, in his love, which led to him laying down his life for our sin.

God, we're grateful that you poured out your life so that we could live.

That you alone fulfilled the law.

The best deeds of our hands are worthless before you, but you have poured out your life and your love for us.

So, God, I pray for anyone here today who doesn't know you, who's never given you their life.

I pray today that they would be broken for their sin and would turn to you and ask for forgiveness of sins, and they would receive you by faith.

We're grateful that you rose from the grave on the third day, which is why we worship you on this Sunday to mark your resurrection.

We're thankful for the resurrection and life that we have that frees us to love our neighbors.

We're grateful for that.

In Jesus' name, amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to iBc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with both of us.