The Law and the Heart-Lance Havens

Michael, thank you.

Did you break out a song from 1772?

You spend three months away at camp, and we think you're gonna come in with all these new things, and we come out with 1772.

It was awesome.

Thank you.

Um, just my heart's turned towards God.

I don't feel worthy to be here uh to have this opportunity to speak to you.

Uh, but we're gonna start off with the words of Jesus.

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, do not murder.

And anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.

Again, anyone who says to his brother Rakah is answerable to the Sanhedrin.

But anyone who says, You fool, will be in danger of the fire of hell.

In our series on the Sermon on the Mount, we are going to be in the first of what are called the antithesis statements of Jesus.

And you know the format of these.

Jesus says, you have heard, dot, dot, dot, but I tell you, it sounds like Jesus is propping the law up just to knock it down.

So, when you were a kid, did you love to build beautiful, intricate structures with blocks just to knock them over?

I'm talking Godzilla.

Anson's my brother, he's shaking his head, yeah, got that.

I'm talking Godzilla through downtown Tokyo, just knocking buildings down.

It's a lot of fun.

One time I got lost in a YouTube wormhole of domino falls.

Have you ever done this?

There's something so satisfying about watching all of those dominoes fall, knowing dozens and thousands of dominoes have been set up just to be tipped over.

And I think when we approach these six statements that way, as though Jesus is just setting up the law to knock it down, I think there's a whole lot that we miss in doing that.

And sometimes that's how we preach this text.

We spend a couple of seconds setting up the law just so Jesus can knock it down like so many hundreds of dominoes.

And I've probably done it myself as I've taught this.

There's this hacky thing that preachers can sometimes do with this text, and we're like, well, we know that murder is wrong, and I doubt anybody here has ever actually committed a murder.

So obviously, we're not going to be talking about murder.

We're just going to be talking about the heart.

Well, I don't think it's only about the heart.

I want us to do something that we sometimes fail to do.

I want us to take Jesus' entire teaching seriously, including the part today that he quotes from the law.

So last week Doug taught the context.

Christ himself says, I haven't come here to abolish the law, but I've come to fulfill the law.

I've come to make the law full.

So I want us to sit under the teaching of the law because I think the law helps teach our hearts.

And that's what I want to unpack today.

When Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, I don't want us to just rush past the next words that he's going to teach.

I don't want us to rush past those words to get to the good stuff because I think there's good stuff in those words as well.

Now, Jesus certainly challenged how some of the Pharisees interpreted and practiced the law.

Sometimes their traditions obscured the law's greater purposes, like justice and faithfulness and mercy.

But the problem was never God's law.

The law was good.

The psalmist says that the law of the Lord is perfect, that it refreshes the soul, that it makes the simple wise, that it brings joy to the heart, that it's more precious than gold and sweeter than honey.

Psalm 1 says the person who delights in God's law is like a tree planted by streams of water.

Its roots are deep, it bears fruit, it flourishes.

These are not the words of people who were burdened by God's law.

These are the words of people who were formed by God's law.

And I think sometimes we're so eager to get to what Jesus says next that we don't stop and appreciate the gift of what God had already said.

Jesus isn't just knocking down the law, he's showing us just how deep its roots go.

Today is not going to be about the tension between body and heart.

It's not a battle between law and spirit because we have an opportunity to sit under the wisdom of both.

And I think we forget just how much of what we consider ordinary morality has been shaped by these ancient commands.

What do I mean by that?

I mean we live in the West.

And I don't mean in the Western part of the U.S., I mean in the global West.

And in the West, we take the moral teachings of the law for granted.

Do not murder isn't nearly as obvious of a moral teaching as it sounds to our ears in 2026.

In many cultures around the globe, they're based on honor and shame.

And violence, even killing, could be considered an appropriate response to an offense against your honor.

And our thinking in the West has been so deeply shaped by the Bible and its moral code that we forget that that is exactly how much of the world still lives today.

When we use the phrase, that man down the road there, he's kind of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth kind of guy.

What do we mean when we say that?

What we're implying about this fictional man is that he's vengeful, that he isn't ruled by mercy or by charity.

Here's the thing: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, when it was written, was actually a form of mercy.

It was revolutionary because it placed a limit around violence.

Have you heard the saying that payback is double?

Anyone said it?

Come on, it's your chance to confess, right?

If you've got a sibling, you've said it, I promise you.

Okay?

Payback is double.

That's how humans naturally act and how we and how we naturally feel, and how many civilizations that haven't been touched by the scriptures, that's how they handle their issues.

But the teaching of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth says no, payback is not double.

The law places limits on what my wounded pride tells me that I have a right to do.

Okay, I haven't seen this in a lot of years because I started going to Michael's church camp, Blue Haven.

All right?

But at other camps, sometimes you see this played out when cabins get to pranking other cabins.

And it's terrible.

You might as well just end camp on that day because the cabin that gets pranked never wants to do the same thing back to the other one.

They want to do more, and it escalates and it ratchets back and forth.

That's what the law was restraining.

This desire to escalate, to get even, and then some.

Six times Jesus is going to say, You have heard it said.

And six times he's going to take his listeners deeper into the wisdom and the intention of God's law.

So later in the chapter, Doug will come back to this teaching about an eye for an eye.

But for today, I want us to stop and to behold that the law is beautiful because it makes us stop.

It places a limit on what we can do.

And that boundary teaches us things.

And here's what I love about God's law it doesn't require me to stop being angry before it tells me what I can and cannot do.

So hypothetically, let's say I get mad.

And let's say that I'm mad enough to take a life.

The law says, no, Lance, that car driving in the left lane at the exact same speed as a car in the right lane, blocking traffic.

Contrary to what you think, Lance, that driver's not worthy of death.

Seriously, have you been there?

You're driving, you listen to a podcast that you really love, you got your sunglasses on, you're driving, okay?

You just want to cruise, and pretty soon traffic is stymied.

It is.

It is bumper to bumper.

And sometimes, I mean, I can see the car, I know its color, I know its license plate, I'm trying to figure out if it's man or woman.

I'm like, what's going on here?

And sometimes I'm angry enough in my flesh if I could pull out my phone and use an app and call down a drone strike on that car.

There's times that I would be tempted by that.

But the law makes me stop.

I can't just kill a person for driving slow in the left lane.

There's a boundary.

And if there's a boundary, then there has to be a boundary setter.

Laws keep us alive long enough and healthy for long enough, hopefully to learn to live together.

You have to train your kids not to punch, bite, and kick.

You teach them to control their outward bad behaviors so that one day you can teach them to love.

I hope this isn't too on the nose, but you can't love your brother if you've already killed him.

And the law was never only about individual behavior.

The law wasn't given to a Jew, to a person.

It was given to the Jews, to a people.

And it was meant to work across an entire population.

It didn't have little carve-outs for every personal situation.

The law was meant to allow a people to thrive as a nation.

So this is one of the things that Moses is going to say.

He says, uh, to observe the law carefully.

Listen to this part.

For this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations.

One of the reasons for the law was to show the wisdom of God to the nations around the world.

But it was given to a nation.

So we have to learn to crawl before we learn to walk.

First, don't do the bad act.

That's crawling.

Learn to live together.

But the goal is to learn to walk.

We have our inner man transformed so that we can genuinely love one another.

Most of my life I thought about this the other way.

I've said, okay, if you get the heart right, then outwardly you'll live right.

And I think that's true.

In fact, I think it's mostly true, but I think it runs both ways.

Because I also think that our heart can learn from the boundaries of the law.

The law doesn't require me to feel um affection or kindness before I treat someone rightly.

And sometimes treating a person rightly is part of how I train my heart to love them.

When I can't just kill a person, I have to learn to live with them.

But living with them isn't the same as loving them.

And to learn to love the person that I wanted to kill, what am I left with?

It's a hard challenge.

I have to work on the inner man, and that's where the real work begins.

The heart and the law are not at odds.

The law gives us wisdom and boundaries and prepares us for the hope of a new heart.

Even the prophets who loved the law, even the prophets who were calling people back to following the law, even the prophets understood that we needed something more, that we need a new heart.

Jeremiah says in chapter 31 that God will put his law and their minds and write it on their hearts.

Ezekiel says that God will remove the heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh and a new spirit so that we can follow his law.

David pleads for a pure heart and a steadfast spirit.

The law can tell me not to murder my brother, but it can't make me love my brother.

It can restrain my hands without transforming our hearts.

And that's not because there's anything wrong with the law.

It's because there's something wrong with me.

Paul is clear that the law is good, that it is spiritual, that I am the one that is sold as a slave to sin.

Here's the movement.

The law teaches us how to live.

The new heart teaches us how to love one another.

I got a lot of rules in my house.

Ask my kids.

A lot of rules.

The rules exist so that we can live together in peace.

So we're not constantly fighting about chores and food and shower time and allowances.

But here's the thing.

I can make a rule.

Okay, Callie, you're down here.

Sorry, Kip is up there.

Callie, I can make a rule that says you have to treat Kip with kindness.

Kip, it goes for you too, right?

I can make rules about that.

But I can't make you love your brother.

Kip, I can't make you love Callie.

Only Christ can give you that kind of heart.

So listen to the words of Jesus again.

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, do not murder.

And anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.

You've heard that it was said.

Said where?

In the law.

It's the sixth commandment.

We know this.

And there's a punishment if you break the rule.

You're subject to judgment.

And this teaching goes all the way back to the judgment on Cain, and then after the flood, God gives Noah a command concerning the taking of human life.

And so this is literally one of the oldest moral laws in the Bible.

This law teaches us how to live together, that you can't just take a life.

But watch what Jesus does next.

He says, But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother will be subject to judgment.

Notice that.

Judgment.

Jesus uses the exact same word.

Now, it makes sense for murder, right?

That someone who does a terrible act that they take a life, it makes sense that judgment follows.

But why should the person who is merely angry face the same judgment?

This is what I think Jesus is doing.

He's no longer dealing merely with what a person has done.

Jesus is dealing with what's happening inside that person.

Think about Cain.

Before Cain ever murders his brother, God confronts Cain about his anger.

He points out that sin is crouching at his door and it desires to master him.

But God tells Cain that he must rule over it.

That Cain has a choice.

That he can master his anger or he can allow sin to master him.

And tragically, we know where that anger leads.

He takes his brother's life.

That's what Jesus wants us to understand.

Murder doesn't simply appear out of nowhere.

There's something going on in the inner man long before the outward act.

The question isn't simply, yeah, but did you kill the guy at work on Tuesday?

Or did you kill the guy driving in the left lane?

The question becomes, what is happening in your heart?

As a matter of law, human governments can't really do this.

They can't see the heart.

Governments have to deal primarily with what we outwardly do.

But God can see our hearts.

And Jesus is teaching us that the condition of our hearts is itself a matter of judgment, even when you don't outwardly actually do the physical act of killing.

Now Jesus is going to make this point twice more.

He's going to circle around this.

And something strange is going to happen here.

The offenses seem to get smaller as he circles around this, but the warnings, the consequences, seem to get bigger.

I'm going to say that again.

Seemingly on the surface, the con the act, the offense, the bad thing, okay, they seem to get smaller, but the consequences go up.

If killing and anger both make you subject just to the generic word for judgment.

And then Jesus says, again, anyone who says to his brother, Raka, is answerable to the saying, Hedron.

Now we're talking about something on the surface that definitely seems less than murder or murderous anger.

We're talking about calling names.

I mean, Raka is an insul in um in Aramaic, and it carries the idea of somebody being empty in the head, of being good for nothing, of being, of being worthless.

And I think this is fascinating because you may say, okay, I understand as a matter of moral ethics that I'm not allowed to murder a person.

Okay, I get that.

And Jesus is saying that I can't be angry at the person.

And so guess what I'll do?

I'll jump over to the other bar ditch, and instead of wanting to kill them or being mad enough to kill them, I'm just gonna jump over to this bar ditch right here, and I'm just gonna say, if I can't kill him and I'm not allowed to actively hate him, I'm just gonna treat him like he's nothing to me.

He's a zero.

He's worthless.

He's not worthy of my thoughts, he's not worthy of my time.

He's just Raqqa.

And Jesus said, uh-uh-uh-uh, stop right there.

I'm not letting you off the hook there either.

Because that's contempt.

That's despising them to the point that you don't even want to look at them.

Jesus is reminding us that when we do that, we've looked at another human being, somebody else made in the image of God, and we've decided that they have no value.

And notice what happens to the judgment.

We started with murder, and you're under judgment for that, and then and then we talked about anger, and you're under the same word, judgment for that.

And now we're talking about calling names.

And somehow we've gone from just regular judgment to Sanhedrin, to the highest Jewish court, to the supreme court.

And then Jesus is gonna circle around this teaching again, and he says, But anyone who says, You fool, will be in danger of the fire of hell.

Now, the Greek word here for fool is uh moray, and basically it means fool or idiot.

And it's hard to rank calling someone a raka against calling them a fool.

It's kind of hard to confidently say which one is worse, but that's almost the point.

Because we've gone from regular judgment to the Jewish high court, Sanhedrin, to the fires of Gehenna, to divine judgment.

And the offenses kind of seem to get smaller because we go from murder, anger, to rakah to fool.

But the warnings get bigger.

What is the Lord doing?

Well, I know one thing he's not doing, he's not just giving us a new list of names that we're not allowed to call.

Other people.

In fact, Jesus Himself is going to call the Pharisees blind fools in Matthew 23.

And so the question is not, well, what names am I allowed to call the people I don't like?

I think I actually asked my parents that about calling my sister and my brother names.

So what can I call them?

The question is, what do I believe about the people that I don't like?

How do I see people?

What's happening in my heart?

I may not actually kill a person, but I get angry.

I may not technically call a person a raka or a fool.

I'm almost positive I've never called a person a rakah.

Okay?

But I can still look at them with contempt in my heart.

I can still decide that they are less valuable than they are in the eyes of God.

And the consequences and the warnings that Jesus gives doesn't allow me to dismiss those things as trivial or small.

Because the same God who says, do not murder, is the God who made that person in his image.

I don't get to decide what that person is worth.

God gets to decide what that person is worth.

And Jesus is telling us that this is serious.

That it's serious enough that he uses the language of Gehenna, of the fire of hell to warn us.

So what kind of heart can keep this teaching?

You see, I don't think Jesus is just giving us a harder law to follow.

I think he's showing us what the law was pointing us toward all along.

The law says, don't murder your brother.

And thank God for that law because it keeps me and my brother alive.

But Jesus wants something more than a brother who is alive.

He wants a brother who is loved.

And to be able to love like this, we don't need a new rule or a new law.

We need a new heart.

And that's what God has promised through the prophets.

And that's what Jesus offers us today.

The water that's behind me represents cleansing and a new life.

God makes us new and then spends a lifetime teaching us how to live like the people we've become.

That's one of the mysteries of the faith.

In a moment, you're washed clean.

But learning to live well and especially to love well takes a lifetime of transformation.

And we don't do it alone.

We gather here as a people, learning together how to love like Jesus.

Is a callback to what I said before?

The law wasn't simply given to an individual, it was given to a people.

And now we gather here, and Christ is forming us and calling us into being a people.

And as we share this life together, we break the bread, we share the cup, we patch the holes in the roof, we send kids to camp.

We figure out who's going to cook the meal on Wednesday night.

We schedule the pickleball and the classes and we scan the bulletin to see if our favorite song is going to get led.

There could be so much ministry and so much goodness that goes on here and a little bit of business.

And there's so much going on in this church family.

And sometimes in the midst of all that, we kind of tend to lock horns.

Sometimes people tell me they don't like how I preach.

Can you imagine that?

Sometimes they tell me they don't like what I wrote in the bulletin.

Sometimes we say things and we do things we didn't mean or it lands the wrong way, or we have a disagreement.

And that's where this teaching gets real.

It's easy to love people when we agree.

But what happens in my heart when someone frustrates me, when they disappoint me, when they tell me that I'm wrong.

Let me say this.

We are a kingdom of priests, of people who have been set apart.

And the Sermon on the Mount teaches us how we live together so that we can reveal the kingdom of God to Brownwood.

And when Brownwood looks at us, I don't want them to say, man, there is no murder in Austin Avenue, Church of Christ.

They got number six on lockdown.

I mean, they met last week and nobody died.

That's impressive.

That's not what I want the people of Brownwood to say.

I want our hearts to be so transformed by Jesus that Brownwood looks at us and says, look at how well they love.

Jesus says in John 13, 35, by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you, if you, if you want another.

I heard somebody fill it in.

That's how the world is supposed to recognize the people of Jesus.

Not simply by the things we refuse to do, but by the way we by the way we want another.

Maybe you've treated someone made in God's likeness as though they were worthless.

Maybe your heart needs some work.

The good news is Jesus doesn't merely tell us to stop sinning, He invites us to become a different people.

The law teaches us how to live together.

Jesus is teaching us how to love.

If you have needs of the church, come as we stand and sing.

Creating me a clean