Jesus and The Word

Thank you for joining us for our Church at the Grove online worship gathering.

My name is Russ.

If I hadn't met you, excited to have you with us as we begin a new part, a new series called Say What, as we continue through the Sermon on the Mount.

I was a youth pastor years ago, and we had this game that was called Telephone.

And it was kind of a goofy, silly game where you would whisper into the ear of one of your students, one of our teenagers, and they would begin to take the simple statement that you whispered in their ear and share it with their neighbor, and it would go around the group and around the room all the way to the end.

And sometimes we would have 50 plus kids trying to just simply hear a simple message and to share a simple message.

And the whole goal was to see if the message stayed the same by the time it reached the last student.

And so it would be something silly, like my dog likes to play with my cat.

But what would inevitably happen is by the time it got to the last student, man, that message was miscommunicated, misinterpreted, and twisted.

And so it became, instead of my dog likes to play with my cat, it was like my dog killed and ate my cat, or something simple and silly like that.

But it's a great picture, it's a great illustration of how sometimes a message that was meant to be clear, meant to be simple, became miscommunicated or misinterpreted or twisted.

And so there's this inherent danger of transmitting a message from its inception to its intended audience.

And so when it arrives, it's either incomplete and misinterpreted or miscommunicated.

It's just sometimes even intentionally twisted.

And so as it makes its way through time and through different recipients and through the channels of technology and communication, that message it always ultimately changes.

And I believe that our Heavenly Father has given us His story in the Bible, in the Word of God.

And it contains the message of His character, it contains His heart for us, His plans, His purposes, and His promises.

But what's happened is as that message has been shared through multiple generations over history, often that message has been hijacked by people, maybe even people with personal ambition and personal interest, and it's been changed and it's been twisted, it's been miscommunicated and misinterpreted.

And so the message of Scripture that we see all the way back to the first five books called the Torah, and where Moses took the word of God and he eventually wrote it down.

We believe that those messages were probably transmitted orally at the beginning, but at some point Moses wrote those messages down.

And the rest of the Old Testament was written down by the authors and the kings and the prophets.

And it was protected all the way up to the time of Jesus.

And when Jesus quoted Scripture, he always quoted from what we know now as the Old Testament the prophets and the Proverbs and the wisdom literature that we see.

And so just as the telephone game reveals how these messages are miscommunicated, the message that's been transmitted and through generations is often twisted.

And it's sometimes hijacked by personal ambition, political interest, and so instead of getting God's character and his plan and his purposes and his promises, we get the message that these recipients received and they twisted and miscommunicated over time.

And so we still struggle today with really humanity's failed efforts, sometimes ignoring the truth of God's word or muddying the message of God's word.

And we lose sight of the simplicity of the gospel and the simplicity of the message of redemption and reconciliation that Jesus provides us.

We've just concluded the first part of our Summer on the Mount series, this journey that we're taking that's going to last a good portion of this year.

It was called the Good Life, where we look at the beatitudes and the messages about salt and about light, and where Jesus begins to declare over us who we are in our identity.

He says, You're the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

I love the beatitudes where Jesus begins to use these building block messages, and just one verse at a time, as we took it over the last several weeks, and he begins to look at the inward character of the follower of Jesus and how that moves its way through our life, and it changes how we represent Jesus to a broken and lost world.

And I want you to see something as we get into this portion in Matthew 5, verses 17 through 20.

Matthew 5:17–20

As we look back, Jesus kind of changes how he is communicating.

In the Beatitudes, in the early part, Jesus is preaching and speaking in third person.

He says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek.

And so he gets to verse 11 and 12 and it changes to second person.

He says, Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.

And they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

And he says, You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.

But he gets to this next section.

And he changes to first person.

And Jesus is communicating about himself and really with simplicity and clarity.

In a sense, he's realigning and correcting the communication that's been twisted over generations regarding his word and bringing it back from the personal ambition and personal interest and the political nature of the people that were following him, and the people that had come before him, the Pharisees and the religious leaders.

And what he's doing is he is revealing his identity and his authority.

He makes an appeal for a deeper heart-level righteousness that surpasses the shallow righteousness of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law that have distorted God's word up to this point.

Here's the big idea for this message is that Jesus seeks to communicate his new covenant with clarity.

Let me say it again.

Jesus seeks to communicate his new covenant with clarity.

And as we look at this this little section of scripture, as I shared, Jesus begins to teach from a first person perspective.

But he also, you can't deny the way he communicates and the likeness of Moses from the Old Testament.

Theologians even teach that Jesus is the greater Moses.

He spent time in Egypt as a child, and Moses was raised in Egypt until he was an adult.

Jesus, like Moses, spent time in the desert wilderness, and he spent 40 days in the desert wilderness praying and fasting.

And Moses spent 40 years with the nation of Israel.

Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River.

Moses led the people of God through the Jordan River.

Moses went up on the mountain to receive the word of God.

And in Matthew 5, 1 it says, seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain.

And when he sat down, his disciples came to him.

And Jesus had 12 disciples, and Moses had the 12 tribes of Israel.

But you need to understand this.

Just as Moses received and then delivered the law to his people, Jesus not just delivers, but he embodies the law.

He embodies God's word.

He is the word, is what John says.

And so Jesus is delivering this message.

Read this with me if you want to.

Follow along.

Matthew 5, verses 17 through 20.

Matthew 5:17–20

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 the 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 Pharisees, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

So here's what I believe Jesus is communicating.

He's communicating his covenant in three specific declarations.

And the first one is this Jesus delights in and affirms God's word.

He delights in and he affirms God's word.

Verses 17 and 18 again, he says, 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, unless heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

Now Jesus states that he didn't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

He's affirming God's word revealed to his people at this point in history.

He states twice when he says, Truly I say to you.

He says it again, truly I say to you.

It doesn't say, listen, it doesn't say it is written, but he says, I say to you.

He is declaring truth.

And this is a common statement he will be repeating over this section of the Sermon on the Mount.

And he's basically placing himself on equal terms as having authority with the law, with the word of God.

And so that word fulfill, it literally means to fill up.

Jesus is saying his role is to fill up and to satisfy the law of God.

And I want you to imagine, if I had a glass of water right here, the law and the prophets, what we call the Old Testament, it would represent a glass half full.

And that glass would represent the purity and the pureness of the Word of God.

And so when Jesus comes to fulfill and not abolish the law, he's saying, I came to fill up and to satisfy the law in its fullness.

And so you imagine Jesus filling that glass of water up to the top and to the to almost just overflowing with the fullness of God.

And so he came to represent completely and fully the character of God, to affirm the law of God and God's plans and purposes and the promises of God for us.

See, the law delivered to Moses was the revelation of God that was seemingly half full.

And not only that, when you bring in the Pharisees and the religious leaders and those that had twisted, hijacked, miscommunicated, misinterpreted God's law, you not only have a glass half full, you have a glass half full of muddy, murky water.

And so Jesus is bringing clarity in the midst of confusion and wanting to make sure that we are realigned with how God communicates who he is and what his plans and purposes and promises are.

See, he seeks to communicate the new covenant with clarity.

And see, there's no more need for the sacrificial system, no more need for priests to stand in our place on behalf of us before God.

Jesus' death on the cross and the fact that he was raised from the dead, it fulfills the requirements of the law.

It fills up and completes and satisfies.

And so the second declaration that Jesus states here is that he reveals his identity and he declares his authority of God's word.

Verse 19 said, therefore, whoever relaxes one of these, one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven.

But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

And so there's this idea of that word therefore, and we would speak uh uh hermeneutically, and uh that's a theological term.

It requires you to ask, uh, what is the therefore, therefore?

And this therefore in verse 19 is is is is referring back to what we've all uh already read and what we've already been taught in the Beatitudes and the verses about being sought and light, and he's saying, therefore, whoever relaxes one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be the least in the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus introduces this deduction, which which now draws for his disciples from the enduring validity of the law and his own attitude with respect to it.

There is a connection between the law, Jesus' submission to the law, and his authority in relationship to it, and to the kingdom of God.

See, Jesus upholds his authority.

He upholds the authority of the word, and he declares that there is a new standard of righteousness that the law demands from us.

And so we're called to that standard of righteousness.

We're called to a standard of obedience and how we now have a passion to follow Jesus and to have a love for his word and to understand that all of this advances the kingdom of God.

And so the religious leaders of the day had reduced God's law to 248 commandments and 365 prohibitions, and if you kept these man-made reductions, that you could morally and ethically attain the righteousness of God.

And so God's word is so much more than 613 rules.

And so even if some of these make some kind of sense in how we're to apply God's word, God's word is so much more than these simple rules that are man-made.

God's word is the living word of God.

Here's what Moses says about it in Deuteronomy 4, 5 through 7.

He says, See, I have taught you statutes and rules, as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of peoples who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon him?

See, God's people were called to be the light to the nations, and through obedience to the law, they would demonstrate that God was real and draw people into a loving relationship with the God of the Bible.

It's through living out God's word that we're identified as the people of God.

We are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.

And see, God's word does not change.

It doesn't need our editing, it doesn't even need our affirmation because Jesus is affirming it when he quotes it and when he teaches it with authority.

See, when we acknowledge the power and authority and we seek to obey God's word, we have that power to advance the kingdom of God.

I love what Tim Keller shared in some of his writings.

He says in the mid-70s, Case Western Reserve University did an interesting survey.

They surveyed all the clergy of America by doing a random sample, and they questioned 7,500 pastors and church leaders, and that's a pretty big sample, so this is a pretty accurate test.

They asked these folks, among other things, do you believe the Bible is the inspired word of God in any unusual sense?

That's an interesting question, right?

They didn't ask, do you believe in the infallibility or you know, the inerrancy?

They just said, do you believe the Bible is the inspired word of God in any unusual sense?

Three-quarters, three out of four of those pastors and leaders answered with a simple no.

No.

And that this was back in the mid-70s, and now we're in 2021.

Do you think that's probably remained the same?

It's beyond three out of four, and that is a sad indictment, not on just the people that are in our churches, it's it's the people leading our churches and preaching and teaching the word of God.

See, we need to go back and and and and really find our authority in the scriptures and to see what the scriptures say about the scriptures.

Hebrews 4.12 says the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Isaiah 48 says this, 40 verse 8.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will last forever.

And so this final declaration that Jesus makes is this.

He makes an appeal for a heart-level righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the religious leaders of his day.

See, verse 20 says this, for I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

And so our belief in the Bible being God's word is important, but the Bible is meant to lead us to so much more than just intellectual ascent, just more than just believing in our minds.

It's to reach down to a heart level where we enter into a personal relationship with the author of the Bible, with the God of the Bible.

Here's what I have found.

Many of you are married, some of you have have family members and kids.

And so when we have relationships with other people on this earth and with our wives and with our kids and with our friends, with our church family and people we work with, those relationships are made possible through the exchange of words.

That's how you know each other.

That's how you communicate.

Words matter.

And so we must know the words of God.

We must know the word of God.

We enter into a relationship with God through his word.

And so Jesus is saying here that Christian righteousness, Jesus-centered righteousness, is greater than the Phariseaic righteousness because it's deeper and it's a righteousness of the heart.

How does God change lives?

He begins with our heart.

It's a new heart righteousness, which the prophets foresaw.

And so that they knew that there was a blessing from a future Messiah that would come to us.

And Jeremiah 31, 33 says, For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.

Ezekiel writes in a similar way in chapter 36, verses 26 and 27.

He says, I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.

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.

And so the Pharisees taught that, and they thought that it was an external conformity to the law that would be righteousness enough.

And so we could never produce a righteousness that would grant us citizenship in the kingdom of God.

That's why we have to receive righteousness as a gift by faith.

And the righteousness that is provided through Jesus is a heart level righteousness.

And as a result, the Spirit comes in.

Lives inside of us.

The Spirit leads us.

The Spirit guides us into a life of surrender.

And so we had this gospel produced, Jesus granted righteousness that gives us access to the kingdom of God.

Jesus makes, he seeks to communicate his new covenant with clarity.

Jesus seeks to communicate his new covenant with clarity.

So here's the question as we close.

What do we do with this?

How do we move back to clarity with the simplicity of the message of reconciliation and redemption?

God's character, his plans, and his purposes and his promises.

How do we join with Jesus in submitting to the authority of God's word?

And so I can tell you what we don't do for sure.

You don't get emotional, you don't make superficial commitments to the Lord, and you don't make superficial commitments thinking if I just read more, obey more, and then ultimately connect with God.

No, you're ultimately going to fail over and over again.

You start by realizing that you can't separate from the Word of God and the standard established through Jesus.

Following the way of Jesus, falling in love with Jesus, and placing Jesus at the center of your life.

That's where it begins.

And when it's all about Jesus and we make it all about Jesus, here's what happens.

We might just desire more time in the Word.

We might just desire to respond to God with more obedience, but it comes from a heart level rather than just an information level.

And so I want to encourage you, some of you maybe just need to begin by responding to Jesus.

Take a step and to put your faith in Jesus who lived a perfect life of righteousness, who surrendered to God, and he was punished and he was beaten and he was crucified.

And he took upon himself all of our sin and all of our shortcomings.

And then he was buried and he was raised from the dead, walked out of that empty tomb, and through that power, we are introduced to a new life in Jesus Christ.

I want to encourage you, if that's you, if you've never taken that first step, maybe today when you're watching this, you just simply call out to Jesus.

The Bible says that if you will call upon the name of Jesus, you shall be saved.

And you just admit to him that you're a sinner, you believe and trust in the gospel, this good news that we're talking about, and you and you repent and call upon the name of Jesus and surrender to his plan and purposes and promises for your life.

You confess Jesus as your Lord, and he will begin to change your heart.

And here's a bit of a tease for what's coming next week and the next few weeks as we move forward.

Here's what Jesus is doing in this passage.

Jesus is distinguishing between what man has made God's word to be and what Jesus actually confirms God's word to be.

Jesus makes these anathetical statements coming up, these six statements where he says, You have heard it said, and then he describes what man has made God's word to be.

But he says, I say to you, and then he gives you the reality of God's word, the truth of God's word.

And so we're going to be diving into this and understanding what God's word is truly meant to be.

So I want to encourage you, maybe you've already put your faith in Jesus, to join Jesus and affirming God's word by making it a part of your daily diet.

Just as I need food.

I mean, I'm hungry right now.

It's about lunchtime.

And so my body is telling me I need food.

Just as I need to eat, I eat at least once a day.

And usually three or four times a day.

Just as much as I need God's food, I need a diet of God's word in my life.

And so it's not about following rules, it's about a relationship with Jesus.

So when we connect to God, we connect to God in the same way that we connect to other relationships in our life, through words.

God has given us his word.

We can speak words back to him through worship and prayer.

And so my question is: have you connected to God through his word?

Where you can say, man, I am I am all in.

I am surrendering.

I am confessing and I am with Jesus in his mission.

Can I just pray for you?

Heavenly Father, I pray that you would help those that need to respond to Jesus for the first time.

Lord, that they would simply call out to the name of Jesus and ask him to save them and to repent and believe the good news and to confess Jesus as their Lord.

And for those of us that are already in the family, already in the faith, Lord, may we not only try to practice this way of Jesus, but God, that we would be transformed by Jesus and make it a light burden, just a way of life that comes natural because He's given us a new heart.

So Father, would you work in us and pull out of us this desire and obedience to follow you?

And if you pray to receive Jesus today, this message, text, start to follow.

All lowercase, all together, one more one word, start to follow to 9700.

We would love to hear from you.

And if you are looking for somebody maybe to help you in your journey, let us know through filling out an encounter card through the Church of the Grove app or the Church at the Grove online website, church of the Grove.com.

And I can't wait to see you back here next week as we continue this series called Say What.