Hear now, the word of the Lord from Matthew 5:17-20.

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 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. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:17-20, ESV

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. For anyone who's been in school, some of you are still in school, you know that there's one skill that you have to develop pretty quickly, pretty early on. Every student at one point or another has to learn how to perform a very precise kind of calculation. Now, I'm not talking about mathematics calculations, although you do have to do that addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, all of that terrifying stuff. But I'm talking about a different kind of calculation that applies to any of the subjects that you enter into study of.

Particularly, you have to calculate how much energy and effort you have to study in order to pass the test that you have. The calculation always goes like this. What is the minimum amount I can do in order to get the grade that I want? There's a very complex aspect of how you work out those ratios of minimum amount of study to maximum amount of grade, but every student has to learn how to do this.

Now what you find is every once in a while, you come across a subject or a class, or maybe it's a professor, where your normal variables and your normal ways of performing these calculations entirely goes out the window. You come into your first exam, perhaps, and you think you're sitting pretty and you're going to do just fine. The test is perhaps a little harder than you think and you get your exam back and it's filled with red all over it and you think, Oh my goodness, how am I going to make up for this failing grade? How am I going to have to adjust my studying and my preparations? How am I going to have to adjust that calculation for the next test that I have to take here?

Well, Jesus in our story today is talking about a particular kind of test. A particular kind of examination that is far more challenging than anything we ever have to take in school. It's a test that we cannot pass. In fact, it's a test that we have already failed at before we were born. Because our test was taken by our first father, Adam, and because he failed, we failed in him. He took the test for us and therefore we've already failed before we were born.

So when we enter into trying to take this test, we find that we are already behind the eight ball. We are all already condemned. The law of God puts against us a test that regularly condemns us, that we are already behind the eight ball because our first father failed at this test.

So what are we supposed to do with the law of God? Well, Jesus here teaches us about the fulfillment of the law in him. Our big idea today as we think about the test that God gives to us of his law is this, Jesus came to fulfill the law..

So we're going to see three parts to this.
1. The Fulfillment of the Law
2. The Fullness of the Law
3. The Force of the Law

The Fulfillment of the Law

So let's look at the fulfillment of the law in verse 17. As we come to verse 17, it's very important to understand that we are coming to a very significant and new section that marks a very significant part of this sermon on the Mount. Jesus has stated the Beatitudes. He's sort of applied the Beatitudes in the passage we looked at last week. This week we come to the beginning of Jesus's teaching about the law. This is the first of seven sections where Jesus will teach very patiently and carefully about the enduring, abiding application and force of the law in the lives of believers. Seven sections, remember seven is that number of perfection. This is the fullness, the completeness of Jesus's teaching on the law.

Now remember what happened at the very beginning of the sermon on the Mount back in Matthew 5:1 where we saw that Jesus is teaching this sermon on top of the mountain. That's not just to fill in our imagination so we can imagine Jesus up there on the mountain. That's a very particular purpose. Matthew is portraying Jesus as a new Moses, who is the new law giver. Just as Moses received the Law of God on Mount Sinai. So Jesus is coming and teaching the perfect, full, complete teaching in these seven sections on the nature of the law. He's coming as the new law giver, the new Moses, and what we see here is that Jesus is giving us the absolute authoritative interpretation from God himself about what the law requires.

Now, at the beginning of this section, this larger section that's going to take us all the way from verse 17 through the end of chapter five, it's interesting that the very first words of Jesus tell us about his relationship to the law. He doesn't so much start about talking about the law itself. He talks about him. He talks about himself. He talks about what he does in relationship to the law. The very first words out of his mouth are a denial.

Jesus begins with a denial. He denies that he has come to abolish the law or the prophets. He has not come to abolish the law or the prophets to put that in a positive sense. He says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets."

Now where do we start here? Well, there are many reasons perhaps why Jesus begins at this point. But one of the most important reasons is that Jesus knows that he will be misunderstood precisely at this point. He will be misunderstood. People will think that he has come to abolish the law or the prophets. Now what are the law or the prophets? Was he talking about?

When we talk about the law and the prophets, that was a very common twofold way of referring to the entirety of the Old Testament. We see this phrase, or a very similar close correspondent showing up in Luke 24:27, where we read about Moses and the prophets in one breath. Luke speaks of Moses and the prophets, Moses is symbolic of the law, the law and the prophets, Moses and the prophets. In the next breath we read all the scriptures. What is the law in the prophets? Well, it's all the scriptures. Again, when Jesus is living, the New Testament has not yet been written. So we're talking about all the Old Testament scriptures. Jesus is saying, don't think that I have come to abolish the Old Testament.

Now again, why does he say this? Why will people misunderstand him on this point? A very interesting thing will happen later in the Book of Matthew. In fact, this word for abolish is going to come up again in the charges against Jesus that lead him to be condemned and crucified on the cross. That same word that Jesus is using here, denying right out of the gate, is going to appear later. The charge brought against Jesus is that people are going to come and say, he said, that he would abolish, only there it's translated destroy, the temple. He said that he would abolish the temple. He would destroy the temple. That shows up in Matthew 26:61 and Matthew 27:40.

Now why the temple and what's the connection to the Old Testament? Well, the temple was in many ways the center. It was at the heart of the Old Testament. The Old Testament commanded the creation of first to a tent form of the Temple, the Tabernacle. Then finally, the permanent structure of the temple, which was to be the center the heart of Israel's worship. This was where God dwelt in the midst of Israel. To come to the temple and offer sacrifices was the way in which the sins of Israelites were forgiven. It was the place where God's word was read and proclaimed, and they were praying and they were singing and they were gathering to worship three times a year at the festivals. For Jesus to destroy the temple would be tantamount for Jesus to abolish the Old Testament. Here he says that he will not, he has not come to abolish the Old Testament.

Yet in Matthew, 24:2, Jesus himself says that the temple will be abolished, it will be destroyed. He points out the temple to his disciples and says know that one day two stones will not stand one or another, one stone will not rest upon another. One day, this temple will be destroyed, about 40 years later, that's exactly what happened. The Romans came through. They destroyed Jerusalem and razed the temple to the ground. So when Jesus says this right out of the gate in this in this new section of his complete teaching on the law, do not think that I have come to abolish the law of the prophets. We have to ask, OK, so will you abolish the law in the prophets, the Old Testament, the center of the Old Testament being the temple or not?

Well, to understand what Jesus is saying, we have to make two very important distinctions. One is between the moral law and the ceremonial law. The moral law deals with God's timeless, forever enduring commandments about the way that we ought to behave and that moral law is summarized in the Ten Commandments. It's perfectly summarized in the Ten Commandments. Then there is the ceremonial law, and this gets at the Old Testament's manner of worship and the types and the shadows and the promises and the prophecies that led up to Christ.

So we have to distinguish from the moral and the ceremonial law. Then we also have to understand the distinction between two different kinds of abolishing something. Two different ways or two different reasons for getting rid of something. Let me give you two different illustrations to explain to you these different ways of abolishing something that Jesus is getting at here.

There's one reason for abolishing something is to point to something that is wrong, something that is failing, something that isn't working, doesn't work, hasn't worked, won't work, and to get rid of it because it is a failure. One of my favorite little clips that I've seen is a spoofed commercial that they used to do on Saturday Night Live, and it's of a fake business called The Change Store. I think I've talked about this before, but in The Change Store, what you do is you come in and you get change for your larger bills. The manager is telling you about this, and he's so excited to tell you. You can come in and if you have a $100 bill, you can get to $50s or you can get 10 $10s or one hundred $1s. Or maybe switch it up, you get a $50 and two $20s and a $10. It's all up to you, and that's the whole point of the business. That's The Change Store.

Well, if you think about that, if that's the entire purpose of the business just to make exact change, there's no real place for that business to make a profit. The manager acknowledges this at the end, he says, very proudly. He says, "You know, we lose a little bit on every transaction, but we make it up in volume."

Well, if you're the one who's investing in this business, if you're the one who is not only losing a little on every transaction, but in volume is losing a lot. You have to judge that business as a failure as quickly as you can. You have to stop the bleeding, the hemorrhaging of your money. You have to abolish that business where loss is baked into it from the beginning.

Jesus is saying, don't think that I come to reject the Old Testament on those terms. Don't think that I am looking at the Old Testament and thinking that it's outdated or outmoded or backwards. Don't think that I have found a flaw in the Old Testament and I have come to fix that flaw. I have not come to abolish the Old Testament, and here Jesus is giving particular attention to the timeless nature of the moral law. Don't think that I've come to put any part of the moral law away. I have come not to abolish it, but to fulfill it.

That fulfillment is going to take a couple of aspects. Part of the fulfillment that we are going to see is a filling out of the full requirements of the moral law. You think that you are keeping the moral law by keeping the external requirements of the Ten Commandments. I haven't murdered, I haven't committed adultery, I haven't done some of these things. I should be fine, right? Jesus is saying no, this requires so much more than an external commitment on your behalf. The test asks more of you than you will think. I've come not to abolish that. I have come to accomplish this, to bring this to its fulfillment in my teaching and also to live perfectly according to these standards in my own life. That's the first kind of abolishing in Jesus absolutely rejects this.

Here's the second reason, or the second way, or manner of abolishing something. It gets it the abolishing of the temple that Jesus will talk about later. Some of you are old enough to remember computer screen savers. Some of you probably are not old enough to remember computer screen savers. Back in the day when technology for monitors was not very old, in the Dark Ages, the monitors that we had were actually not digital but analog. They would use vacuum tubes and they would actually burn something on the end of those vacuum tubes and with a lot of different vacuum tubes put together. The burning, it would create this picture on your computer screen.

Well, when you create an image that way, if the same image stays up too long, it gets burned into the screen. So the problem was if you left an image up for too long, it would be so burned in that you'd go on to do something else, the old image that was up there would be ghosted and it would be ruined, and you couldn't get rid of that image because it would be burned into the monitor. So computers had what used to be called screensavers. Where after a couple of minutes of inactivity, your computer monitor would switch to something where you'd get different pictures moving by or you'd have designs. I remember the 3-D maze, maybe some of you had that one when I was a child. The reason was so that the same image didn't stay up too long in the screen.

Well, fast forward to now, we have a different kind of monitor that works on a different technology, not analog vacuum tubes, but LCD technology where the image isn't created in the same way. So you can keep an image up for a long time, we do this in the TVs in the parlor, just putting the same announcements up, and it won't burn into the screen. So now if you have a screensaver, I mean, you can find these if you want them. It doesn't actually perform the same function. It doesn't save your screen. It just wastes energy. To keep using these screensavers doesn't still fulfill the purpose that it used to in the past. It was necessary in the past, but now, with a newer technology, we don't need it anymore, and to continue using it is just wasting electricity.

Jesus is talking about this kind of fulfillment in the ceremonial law and the law related to sacrifices and the temple and circumcision. It served a point; it served a purpose. There was a need for it, a necessity for it. It was good and right and true, but all of that was pointing forward to him. It was a picture that pointed forward to a person. Jesus is saying now that the person has come the other way in which I am going to not abolish, but to fulfill the law is that I am going to bring all of these pictures to their completion in me.

So what's interesting is that even here, Jesus is not abolishing the ceremonial law entirely. It's still good and right for us to read Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy. But as John Calvin writes, "It's not that the ceremonial law was abolished entirely," in that first sense of abolishing something. It was wrong to get rid of it. It's not that. "Rather, the use of the moral law is abolished." We don't build a temple; we don't offer animal sacrifices.

When we read the Old Testament, the law and the prophets, and we come across these ceremonial elements, we are to learn something about God's dealings with his people, to learn something about God's dealings with us in Christ, the ultimate prophet and priest, and the ultimate sacrifice once for all, for our sins. Jesus will fulfill everything that the ceremonial law pointed forward to. He will accomplish it in himself. But Jesus also come to live the perfect moral life to establish a righteousness for us. In both cases, he has come to fulfill the law, not to abolish.

Jesus starts right here, starts with himself as the definition, the important, the most important thing, the foundational thing that we have to understand when we start thinking about the Old Testament. He starts with him and he says, I have not come to abolish these things, not to judge them as bad and to get rid of them, but to uphold them and to fulfill them. But in this next section, he starts unfolding what it would mean to fulfill this law, especially the moral law, the enduring timeless moral law. What would this mean? Especially he has the ways that the scribes and the Pharisees have twisted the moral law in a way that he wants to criticize and to condemn. So first, Jesus dealt with his own relationship to the law, and now Jesus is dealing with the nature of the law itself. What does the law require?

The Fullness of the Law

So this brings us to section number two, the fullness of the law and verses 18 to 19. In verse 18 Jesus, by a variety of things that he says, issues one of the strongest statements, the most emphatic statements he makes at any point in all of the gospels. Look at what he says. He starts in verse 18, he says, "For truly." The word here is amen. It's a Hebrew word, it means truly or surely or this is reliable and trustworthy.

Where in the Old Testament, we have examples of this word on men showing up at the end of prayers. It shows up at the end of the five books of the Psalms. We see this in other rabbis who lived before and at the time of Jesus, they would end their prayers with amen. There is no precedent anywhere else, not in the Bible, not in the rabbis, of anyone beginning a statement with the word amen. Jesus is saying right from the beginning, what I'm about to say is absolutely certain. Amen. Truly hear what I am about to say.

Then he goes on and says, "For truly, I say to you until heaven and Earth pass away." He's giving us something of the duration of how long the moral law of God will remain in effect and endurance. He's saying it's through all time. The first thing that God created in the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. That's the first part of his creation, and that will stretch all the way to the very end when Jesus recreates the world. It is through this entire time through all of human history and even preceding human history, the moral law of God is in perfect, perfect authority over us. "Truly, I say to you until heaven and Earth pass away."

Then he says, "Not an iota, not a dot." The word for Iota, that's a Greek letter, the letter I. It's referring to the Hebrew letter yoed, which we would translate as Y or I? That was the smallest of the Hebrew letters. It's about the size of an apostrophe. Jesus is saying even the smallest letter can't fall away. Not only that then, but he also says, even a dot cannot pass away. The word for it literally means horns. None of these horns can pass away, and it refers to even a stroke within a letter. If you grab the sermon notes, I've given you some examples of Hebrew letters where there was just a little stroke that would change one letter to another. In English, think of the difference between a capital P and a capital R. It's just one stroke that changes it from one letter to another. Jesus is saying not the smallest letter, not the smallest stroke within a letter can pass away as long as heaven and Earth endures truly, I say to you until all is accomplished.

What he's adding in here that the way this is translated doesn't quite bring out, he's adding a double negative. Will no not pass away from the law until all is accomplished. Everything has to happen, particularly in and through Jesus himself. Jesus has the absolute highest view of the law's authority in an enduring nature throughout time. So in verse 19, he turns to criticize those who would relax or loosen or lower the authority of the law.

Look at what he says in verse 19. He says, "Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven." The word for relax here or loosen the idea of loosening and relaxing the least of the commandments.

This is more of an attitude than an action. It's an attitude that surfaced very originally in the Serpent's first statement to Eve in Genesis 3:1, "Did God actually say?" It's an attitude that questions the validity of the law. It's an attitude that tries to create some wiggle room within the law. It's an attitude that very piously and reasonably tries to seek a balanced approach to the law that undercuts what the law requires. It's a view of the law and attitude toward the law that raises doubts about the goodness of the law.

By this word, if Jesus's words have ever condemned a culture, this condemns our culture. Because our culture is always looking at the law of God, the perfect, wonderful law of God, and saying this is not reasonable. This doesn't make sense. We are more enlightened than this. This is on the wrong side of history. We've moved and progressed beyond this. What reasonable person could still believe what the law requires? And Jesus says this law will in no way pass away. Not the smallest letter, not the smallest stroke. Wherever you are, whatever culture you and in you are in, your culture cannot in the least relax these laws. If you do, the best you can hope for is to be least in the Kingdom of Heaven.

What Jesus is calling us to is to uphold all of the law in all of its perfections. Jesus doesn't lower God's standard. What he's seeking to do is to raise us up to the fullness of God's standards as enshrined in law.

You know, one of the best classes that I ever took was my junior year of high school with a dear woman named Mrs. Cort, who taught my English class. Mrs. Cort knew that the junior year of high school is the year when most people were taking their ACT classes, and she knew that the English section, the grammar section, was going to be one of the main sections of the ACT class. She took it personally that her students were going to do it as well as possible on this English class. She trained us until we begged her to stop. You see, what happened often is that whenever the subject of grammar had come up, all of the teachers succumbed to the whining, just the outright grumbling and whining of all the students. We don't like grammar; we don't want to do this. These teachers would just do the minimum they had because they couldn't withstand the pressure of the whining of all of us as we rebelled against the rules of grammar.

Mrs. Court, I mean you couldn't fill a thimble with the amount of care that she had and pity for us in our complaints about grammar. She taught us everything she taught us, every rule she does. Everything was going to come up in the test. She pressed beyond that so that we understood the reasons for this and to drill this deeply into our skulls. She assigned reams of homework. I remember being on a school trip and just in a bus, sitting somewhere filling out page after page of diagramming sentence, after sentence after sentence.

Without fail, everyone, all the other people I knew, certainly from me, this was by far the highest score that we got on the ACT. She drilled us, she drilled us until we were absolutely prepared for this test. If Mrs. Court taught us to pass an ACT test, which is of some value, Jesus is saying of how much more value is the law of God? The examination of our conduct and our character and our heart with God.

What Jesus turns toward in the next sentence, saying, even if you know all the rules of grammar, of religion, there's still more to it than this. There's still more to it that is required of you and can you keep even that?

The Force of the Law

He began by talking about his own relationship to the law. Then he talked about the nature of the law. Now he is applying the requirements of the law to you and to me in verse 20. His demands are exacting and perfect. He says, "For I tell you," again, he's staking everything on his own authority in this third section where we see the force of the law. He says, "For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Well, who are these groups, the scribes and the Pharisees? The scribes are when we talk about scribes, we're talking about a profession. This was a job that you could hold. The scribes were the copyists of the law, but because they copied the law, they had to know what was in the law well enough so they wouldn't mishear things and write down the wrong thing when they're copying. They had to be thoroughly acquainted with the law, and they were professionals so much that they also taught the law. These were legal scholars.

One of my best friends growing up is a legal scholar for the civil law. He got his juris doctorate in a law school, but now he is working in a law library. He was never actually admitted to the bar. He can't practice law. But he is a legal scholar, teaching the law and writing scholarly articles for four law journals about the law. That's what he does. That's this kind of a role that's like a scribe, but for the civil law, not for the law of God. That's where the scribes of Jesus's day did.

The scribes referred to a profession, whereas the Pharisees, this was a group of people, this wasn't your job, you didn't get hired as a Pharisee. The Pharisees were a member of an ideological movement. They put a strict emphasis on ritual, on the external and formal aspects of the law. So that they would memorize details. They would just be awash in details. They could tell you how many letters were in each book of the Bible. How many letters, they wouldn't let those pass away either, but awash in a sea of details. To switch metaphors, they lost the forest for the trees. They missed the big picture when they were focused on the minutia.

Now it's common when we talk about legalism because Jesus is criticizing the legalism of the scribes and the Pharisees. It's common to define legalism as the attempt to add something on top of the law. God's law requires this, legalism tries to do more than this. But notice what Jesus criticizes here. It's not that they added to the law, it's that they subtracted from the law. They loosened; they relaxed the law. They had an attitude with the law that tried to find wiggle room. They tried to make the law understandable to people through all of their strict standards. In the process, they relaxed the law by focusing on the externals and missing the heart requirements.

This is where Jesus says that the real requirement for entry into the Kingdom of Heaven goes beyond even the scribes and the Pharisees because God is after our hearts. Now, I wrote this quotation from J. Gresham Machen, both in the sermon notes and in the sermon worksheet, but I want to read it to you because he just nails what's going on in the sermon on the Mount. Machen writes this, "The legalism of the Pharisees with its regulation of the minute details of life was not really making the law too hard to keep. It was really making it too easy. Jesus said to his disciples, 'Accept your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of Heaven.' The truth is, it's easier to cleanse the outside of the cup than it is to cleanse the heart. If the Pharisees had recognized that the law demands not only the observance of external rules, but also in primarily mercy and justice and love for God and men, they would not have been so readily satisfied with the measure of their obedience. The law would then have fulfilled its great function of being a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ." Machen concludes this way, "A low view of law leads to legalism and religion. A high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace."

The one thing that Mrs. Cort could not teach us was to love grammar as she loved grammar. Now some of that rubbed off. Certainly, you weren't as frustrated with some of these grammar tests because you'd done them so many times that they were easy. At the end of the day, no one loved grammar like she did. If a test of the ACT had required us not only to pass the test, to answer the grammar questions, but if it could measure our heart well, we were still the same grumbling people about grammar. I can't wait to get over this class, can't wait to get past this test, so I can put this grammar stuff aside. Who wants to keep talking about direct and indirect objects for the rest of their lives, after all?

When we talk about the law of God, the test is about the heart. As Mike mentioned it this morning, when Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments, he summarized them in two commandments, where he was quoting from the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 6:5, "You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength." Then Leviticus 19:18, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

That was never less than the law required. That was never just an added bonus extra credit that you could work on. That was the test. Do we love God? Not just to keep the external regulations. Do we love God and love our neighbor from the depths in the fullness of our soul? When we hold up that righteous standard, we see that that is what God requires. Then unless our righteousness exceeds that of the externally focused scribes and Pharisees, we will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

We may normally know the ratio of studying and preparation to passing a test, but the test of the Law of God throws us a curveball. We get our papers back and we see they're filled with red for all of our sins and transgressions. Then what do we do with this?

Application

Well, the application to this is just what Machen said, "A low view of the law makes legalism, but a high view of law makes a man to seek after grace." The application is seek after God's grace. Jesus is clarifying a radical, towering, unreachable, unattainable, infinitely high as heaven itself view of the law. He stakes his own authority. Do you want to hear the law taught by the Son of God himself? Jesus teaches us this in this in the following sections in his teaching of the law.

Jesus came not to soften the rough edges, certainly not to get rid of the law entirely. Jesus came to polish up those rough edges so that we see them precisely for what they demand of us. As painful as it is, Jesus wants us to see the law for what it is so that we despair. That doesn't sound pleasant, and it's not. Jesus came to teach, to fulfill the law by filling out our understanding of all that God requires of us in the law. In what he's going to say in the next six sections, he is going to prove to each one of us our utter guilt and utter helplessness before the legal standard of the Law of God.

What standard are you relying on this morning? Do you think that you have done well enough? Is there a bar in your head that you say, well, I haven't done this, so I'm OK? Or do you say, well, I have done this over here, so that's got to be enough, right? God says it's not enough. You've missed the standard. You, like everyone else, has fallen short of the glory of God. So that unless your righteousness exceeds the most outwardly righteous people ever to have lived, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Do you see the towering high as heaven standard of God's righteousness and despair?

So then is the solution? Well, the solution is to seek after God's grace, we need God's grace in all of life. Ceremonially, we need Jesus to have done everything that the law foreshadowed and fore signified. We need Jesus to be our perfect priest. We need Jesus to offer himself as the spotless sacrifice. We need Jesus to go before us into the holy places and open the way for us, for the forgiveness of our sins and for our cleansing so that we can stand before a holy, holy, holy God. Unless Christ does this, fulfills everything that the ceremonial law requires, we have no hope, we're disqualified before we are even born.

We also need Jesus to fulfill and live out both in his teaching, in his life, everything required of the moral law. It is not merely that our sins are forgiven, although that's necessary and essential. It is also that Christ has done everything necessary. Christ has passed the test. Christ did love his Father in heaven with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. Christ did love his neighbor as himself, even to the point that he came down from heaven to become the servant of all. To die as a slave, as a guilty sinner in our place for our sins.

By his perfection and his keeping of the moral law, the gospel holds out that for all those who turn from their sins and look to Jesus, Christ not only forgives you as your priest who has shed his blood for your purification, but he also gives you, bestows upon you, credits you, with his own righteousness to stand before God in confidence. You have passed the test not because of anything you have done, but because of what Christ your savior did for you.

As Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8-9, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." This is the gospel of justification. That Christ counts us both not guilty and also righteous because he ceremonially became our priest and because he morally lived every bit of the requirements of God for us.

The further gospel, the gospel that Jesus continues to press toward us in this whole Sermon on the Mount, is the gospel of sanctification. Seek after God's grace to grow. Jesus is serious about the law. If you walk away from this passage thinking that, well, I just need Jesus as my get out of hell free card, you've totally missed the point of what he is saying here. He is so serious about the law. He wants you to know the law, to love the law from the interior parts of your soul, so that you love it like he loves it.

He's not offering cheap grace. He wants you, yes, to despair over your unrighteousness so that you will seek his righteousness by faith. But then he wants to teach you, his righteousness. There's a perfect statement of this in the Old Testament. In Psalm 23:3 where David prays about the Lord, "He restores my soul and he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his namesake." First, your soul must be restored, by the salvation that only Jesus Christ can offer. Second, Jesus trains you like his sheep as you follow him as your good shepherd, as you relate to him, as a disciple to your master. He leads you to walk in paths of righteousness for his namesake. This is what Jesus is after. To forgive you of your sins first and then to teach you to live according to the instruction of God that he's given us in the law of God.

We are saved by grace and through faith. But the next verse that Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10 is this, "For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." These aren't the good works we do to qualify ourselves. We failed. We must have Jesus to fulfill the law on our behalf. God then takes us, and he makes us his son's workmanship. Jesus molds us and shapes us and teaches us and trains us to walk in good works, which God prepared for us in a way that is pleasing and acceptable in his sight. Where every impurity and imperfection that remains, and that will remain, is still washed away by the blood of Christ. Where the light of our walking before men are the good works that leads others to glorify our Father who is in heaven, as Jesus spoke in verse 16.

Seek after God's grace. If you don't know, Jesus turned to him by faith today, and if you do know Jesus, keep looking to him in faith to grow in the righteousness and in the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Seek after God's grace. Jesus came to fulfill the law.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that you would give us Christ. That you would give us Jesus Christ and him crucified. That you would help us to love the Lord and that you would help us to do that from the depths of our souls. That our love for God that's given to us by the Holy Spirit would overflow into love for our neighbor. That you would continue to conform us by the Gospel of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit to the image of Christ. That we too would learn to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves as he did. This is the work that we can't offer to you of our own strength. This is the work that we are entirely dependent and look to you for grace to accomplish in us. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.