I Did Not Come To Abolish But To Fulfill #4

So this week is going to be our second week studying Jesus' teaching on the law of God in Matthew 5 and the Sermon on the Mount. Last week, we saw how Jesus fulfilled the law and also how he prefaced what he was about to say. The next section that we'll be starting in next week, there's a refrain. There's a way of teaching that Jesus enters into and he often says, you have heard that it was said, but I say to you. And he takes aspects of the law or things that the prophets have said and he gets in there and he rejiggers what the... People have been taught what the Pharisees and scribes have believed. And so you realize that there's going to be a conflict. And the accusation is going to fly that Jesus has come to undo the law, to throw it away, to abolish it. And so he says, by way of preparation in the beginning, that's not what I'm here to do. I didn't come to abolish the law. I came to fulfill the law. In other words, I came to teach you the truth, the whole truth, and not what you've been led to believe thus far.

He was going to expose the Pharisees and scribes' failure to understand and teach the law of God to the people. This is what we looked at last week. This week we're going to be focusing on the last couple of verses in our section where Jesus warns us against wiping away God's law. My hope is that as we study this passage, we'll be able to recognize when that's happening. It's not always obvious. And so my hope is that God will help us to see when it's happening around us so that we don't get swept away by the pressures that go along with it. Our text is Matthew chapter 5, verses 13 to 20. Could you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.

Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets. I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So we're going to be focusing on the latter half of this passage where Jesus says, whoever then annuls the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Now, annulment is a strange word.

It's not a word that we use in our day-to-day language. Probably the only place that we've even heard this word used is in talk about Roman Catholics annulling marriages. And so what does annulment mean? What does it mean to annul something? It means to loose or to release or dissolve. So you should think about this word annulment in terms of breaking something free or having a constraint removed from it. You might think of a dog on a leash, being let off the leash. Or you might think of using a paint stripper to take paint. You pour the paint stripper on and you dab it on so it causes the bond to be broken of the paint. It causes the paint to release. That's what we should be thinking about as we study this and think, what does it mean to annul the least of these commandments? It means to release them, to break the bond, to free the people. It means to remove the authority.

to make the bond benign. It's no longer intact. Now, Jesus isn't talking about paint or barking dogs. He's talking about the law of God, the least of these commandments. And it's worth noting at the very beginning that when the law of God is annulled, it's not the sort of thing that's often done in the open. It's often done quietly, secretly, slowly. while maintaining a display of obedience. It's not until much later that it becomes obvious that the bond has been broken. Have you ever seen on your car, maybe? We live in Indiana, and so we have rust. Have you ever seen where they're still down near the quarter panels or on the rockers, if you know what they are? There's still paint down there, and from a distance it looks fine, but if you get up close, you can see the bubbles. What's going on underneath those bubbles? Did they come from the factory that way?

No, it didn't come from the factory that way. What's going on underneath that paint? Indiana salt is going on underneath that paint. Rust is going on underneath that paint. Now, how long does rust have to work before it delaminates and causes the metal to fail? Does it happen quickly? No, it doesn't happen quickly. It takes oftentimes years. And so what I want you to know from the very beginning is that when someone... The people that Jesus is warning against here, those who would annul the least of these commandments, it's not the sort of thing that's done wide out in the open for everyone to see. It's not like, oh, I can see what's going on. It works like the rust works. It works hidden. It's behind a facade of health, of paint, of integrity. And what that means is that it makes it hard to see when it's happening. If someone were to stand up and say, you can just don't have to worry about the law of God anymore.

It doesn't matter for us. We're Christians. All that stuff in the Old Testament where God told his people to do things, none of that. We are no longer, that's just not our business. All of our eyebrows would go up and we'd be like, I think you misunderstand something. I think something's wrong with the way you're processing all of this. And so it shouldn't surprise us that that's not how it actually gets done, especially not in the beginning. It takes work to see what's going on. To discern when God's commands are being annulled, broken, wiped away. It happens very quietly. It can be very subtle. It's often happening not by what is being said, but by what is not being said. I've said before to you guys, it's not hard to say true things or good things, honest things. It's not hard to say the truth.

And we come away saying, well, they had a lot of good things to say. The question is not, did they say some helpful things? The question is, did they say the hard things that were helpful, that would have been most helpful? I've not grown up in a bunch of different churches, but when I first came to faith, I went to a big church, what we might call a megachurch. And if you went there and said, did they talk about Jesus? Did they talk about forgiveness? Did they talk about... the grace of God, the answer was yes. Undoubtedly, they talked about it, they sang about it, they taught on it. It was what they were really about. What they didn't do is say no. From personal experience, I can say that was the one thing I needed to be told. I needed to be told not what God says yes to, but what God says no to. Now, where do no's come from in the Bible? No's come from the law, okay? And so if you find that you don't ever hear no,

the word no, the concept of no, then you're probably witnessing and observing the law of God in some way being annulled. If you've had children and you've never, there's many ways to try to get children to behave. And in our day, in our society, perhaps outside of our circles, this idea of telling a child no has been removed. We tell them yes. We redirect them. We encourage them. We distract them. We medicate them. But if you tell them no, you'll catch the eye of somebody. Have you ever been in the store and just thought, I know what's wrong with that child. He needs to be told no. She needs to be told no. It's worth noting that Jesus here is talking about those who teach. There's application, obviously, to all Christians here, but it starts first with those who teach. And he has in mind the scribes and the Pharisees, those who've taught.

The people that the law of God doesn't matter. Now that may seem strange to say about the Jews or the Pharisees and scribes because they cared about God's law. If you were here last week, that's what I talked about. I said they cared about God's law. They never would be found to say that stuff doesn't matter. They would say this stuff really, really, really matters. But Jesus here very directly is accusing them of having set aside the law of God. In another place he says, you tithe your mint and cumin, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law. And so he accuses them of doing this very thing, of annulling the law, taking the things that are most important and most essential to our salvation and setting them aside. Why do pastors do that? Why would the Pharisees have done that? Is it just bad faith? They don't know what's good and bad and right and wrong, and they have no sense of it? I don't think that's the case. I think Paul and Timothy tells us one of the reasons why pastors do this.

the pressures that they feel. None of you are pastors, or Eric's a pastor, but the pressures that you feel as a pastor and as a leader to make the people who come happy is great. I have to count the cost. Your elders have to count the cost of what we say and think, how's that going to be received? Will they appreciate that, or will that make them angry, and will they leave? Maybe you can get some concept of this if you're in sales or if you own a business or if you've ever had your income and your livelihood tied to your ability to get people to do business with you. Then you have a sense of like every word that comes out of your mouth, the impact that it has. Those who are the best salesmen, the best businessmen, are they the ones who tell their customers and their clients everything they want to hear? No. I would call them used car salesmen.

I'd call them liars. A good salesman is going to talk to you and figure out what your interest is, and they might actually tell you, you know what? You would be better getting this whatever you need. You need something I don't sell. You need to go get it somewhere else. They're just honest. They're not afraid of losing the business. They're not trying to stroke your ego. They're not trying to just make a sale. They're trying to do you some good, which means that in the course of their interactions with you, they may say things to you that you don't like. They may say things to you like, you can't afford it.

I don't think, I'm supposed to sell you this thing, but I don't think you should buy it because you can't afford it. And the reason you can't afford it is because whatever reasons you've told him about your financial situation, right? I've got Luis back here smiling at me because Luis is the guy I'm thinking about with sales. He's the placeholder in my head. And if you guys know Luis, you know that he'll tell you all of this stuff. And that's what makes him a good salesman. Does Luis upset you from time to time? If you have to do business with him, the answer is yes, he will. He will frustrate you to no end. He'll give you homework. He'll make you go do things. He'll tell you no. But as a result of it, you trust him. I trust him. Because I know that he'll be honest with me. Now, is he just impervious to the pressures of sales? No. I'm sure Luis is very aware of that fact. And the same thing is true with pastors and with elders. They feel the pressure.

to please people. Paul tells in Timothy, he says, there will come a time when they will no longer endure sound doctrine, but desiring to have their ears tickled will accumulate for themselves, what? Teachers in accordance with their own desires. And so Paul tells us there's an incredible pressure that the people will put on the preachers to say what they want to hear. So then I'm left asking, do you want to be told no? Some of us say, well, yes, I know I want to be told no. And I say, okay, fine. Has that always been the case? Or did you have to learn the benefit of being told no? We had to learn the benefit of being told no. We had to endure the pain of being told no and the consequences of being told no. At some point, you had to come to grips with the fact that your desires were not God's desires and that if you were going to be a Christian, your desires had to die, not get put in second place. They had to die.

And it was in that moment you went, oh, I have to count the cost. There's a cost to following Jesus. There's an expectation. All of this is rooted in the law of God. And none of us by nature like to be told, no, you can't have that, you can't do that. God says something else. I don't know that the pastors of today are all that different from the scribes and Pharisees in terms of the pressures they felt are all that different from the scribes and Pharisees. If you tell people what they want to hear, there is a benefit to doing it. trust, allegiance, support, those things flow from people being happy with you. If you don't believe me, I'd just ask you, what do people do when they don't like what the pastor or the church has to say? They leave. And they take their money with them. And they take their slander and their frustration and they put it out to whoever will listen. And so there's quite a bit of pressure to annul the commandments of God. To take them and say, you know,

These aren't the popular things to say anymore. It's also worth noting that they weren't annulling all of the laws of God, that they were annulling the ones that were most applicable to the people that were following them. It's very easy to make a big show of obeying God in the places where it doesn't cost you anything to say it. The measure of faithfulness would be, will they tell me the truth that I need to hear? Will they take the law of God and tell me where it says no to me? Will they do it because they love me? Will they do it because they want to see me protected? Or do they care more about what I think of them than what God's Word says? We need men who will protect God's sheep. And we need congregations who don't punish their pastors and elders for doing that work. This is sort of the recipe for the annulment of God's law. All of us would like peace. All of us would like comfort. All of us would like to be able to go along and get along without having the discomfort of...

But God says. But the Lord said. That's sin. You may not do that and call yourself a Christian. That's the sort of thing that will land you in hell. These things are subtle, and they take effort to discern. I remember as I was coming to faith, some of you, I'm probably going to show my age here. Way back when Hurricane Katrina went through New Orleans and flooded the city and just caused all kinds of damage, mid-2000s. Rick Warren was being interviewed. Rick Warren was a pastor of Saddleback Church out in California. It was sort of the papa bear of he and Bill Hybels of the megachurch movement. They had it all figured out. And he was being interviewed, I believe, by Larry King. And Larry King asked him, he says, where was God at in Katrina? And the pressure was apparent immediately. Because what's Rick Warren supposed to say? Yes, the question was really, Was God present in the water and in the wind? Did God cause this destruction? Yeah, that's what he said. So what Rick Warren said, instead of God was in the wind and in the waves, Rick Warren said God was in the people handing out the bottles of water afterwards. Now is that true? Yes. Is it the whole truth? What part of the truth got left out? The judgment, the wrath, the destruction.

That's an example of the sort of thing that is being left out, what's not said. What was said was true enough, but it wasn't the whole truth and it wasn't the most helpful truth. Now, I'd ask you, if you were in Rick Warren's shoes, do you think you would have done a lot better? We can look and say, oh, I was just unfaithful. He had a chance and he just whiffed. Do you do better? In your day-to-day life, do you do so much better? We all have this tendency to want to just... Figure out what we can say would not cause a problem. Trim off the edges, the rough edges. Say the smooth thing, the comfortable thing, the safe thing. I don't want you sitting here looking and thinking, well, pastors should just, they should just be of a different class of men and they should just not have these kinds of problems because the fact is we're like you. We feel pressures just like you do and we're not immune to it and we don't do the perfect thing always. Rick Warren failed. You and I fail. In this regard, we annul.

The law of God. Because we know that it would cause problems if we said it or lived it or proclaimed it. What else did Rick Warren do? Taking him as an example, what was the effect of him saying what he said? Or maybe a better way to ask the question is, was his failure apparent to everybody? No. His failure wasn't apparent to everybody. In fact, what he said was not seen as a failure at all, but as a triumph. that he found a way to thread the needle of God's grace and kindness and goodness through the worst hurricane that's ever hit that space. And we thought, this guy is good at communicating. He has figured it out. How in the face of a devastating hurricane, to just avoid any of the discomfort, we should learn from him. And many men did. And that's what Jesus warns against here. He says that these men...

Those who annul the least of these commandments and teach others to do the same. You have to realize that when you speak, other people are listening and you're teaching them. You're teaching them. What was going on in Rick Warren's heart? I don't know exactly. I wasn't there. But I can tell you what would have been going on in my heart if I had been the guy having to answer the question. The question that would have been plastered across my mind was, am I going to... Am I willing to suffer the outrage of saying what's true? Or am I going to be ashamed of what God did? Am I going to be ashamed of Jesus? The things he says, the things he does, the things he requires. I'll tell you, I'll pull the curtain back a little bit and I'll tell you just a story about the pressures that we feel, okay? Our assurance or our call to confession this morning, right? Jesus says, you hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy about you.

These people draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. I got a call this week about that thing. And the question was, should we use that in our congregation? And what was I being asked? Will the people be offended and upset with us if you, you know, and the question was, you're the guy who's going to have to say it. Are you willing to say that to those people? You hypocrites. Are you willing to say that to them? Do you think you're going to ruffle feathers? Do you think that's wrong? Or should we just leave that part off where they're called hypocrites and we'll just be an example of the hypocrisy? This people draws near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Should we have that very first line? That was the question. So I got the phone call. You willing to say this to the congregation? And I had to answer the question, right? Do I want to stand up in front of all of you and call you hypocrites? Does that sound like fun? You think I get my kicks out of saying things like that?

I felt the pressure to not say it. I was like, well, I could pray in such a way. I could like pray about hypocrisy and the people would learn that maybe that thing about their lips saying good things but their heart doing bad things, maybe they'd figure out that that's hypocrisy. And so I just said to John, who was the one asking me the question, John Kluk, I said, just leave it in. Jesus said it to the, Jesus said it, why wouldn't we say it? But it took faith for me to be willing to say it. And am I so different than you? Am I the only one who feels those pressures?

Am I the only one who fails? That time I didn't fail. I don't plan the worship service. John Klug plans the worship service. And so he hands me the things I'm supposed to say in terms of the call to confession and the assurance of pardon and that sort of stuff. So he realized, I'm creating a problem for my pastor. I may be causing a ruckus on the weekend. I'm gone. And so I'm going to ask him about it. John was sensitive to this idea of like, is this an okay thing to say? Do you realize what you're going to have to say? That sort of thing's all around us.

Now, I won't ask for a show of hands, but did anyone get offended when they were called a hypocrite? Did anyone think, that's not true of me. I'm not really that bad. I mean well. Or did you hear it? Did you hear that Jesus said, you hypocrites, you say one thing and your hearts want something different. I felt it, in part because John pointed it out to me. And so I'll point it out to you. The temptation to wipe away and to lessen, to dull the edge of the commands of God is all around us. And when we do it, we teach those around us to do the same thing. We do it by silence. When we should speak, we keep silent. Because we know that all kinds of trouble will come if we speak and say the thing that needs to be said, that should be said. There are lots and lots of things that the Bible has to say that don't go well in our society. They simply don't.

And to try to thread the needle the way Rick Warren did is to be unfaithful at the point of conflict. We would be fools to think that God's law is the sort of thing that people are going to always respond well to. They don't. They don't. Paul warns us of as much in 2 Corinthians. He gives this example. He talks about their preaching and he says, here's how some people respond to it and here's how other people respond to it. He says, for we are a fragrance of Christ to God. Okay? So the first referent, the first... person that's observing us is God. And he says, we are a fragrance of Christ to God. Among whom, among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. So there's two groups of people. To the one, an aroma from death to death. And to the other, an aroma from life to life. That means that when the law of God is said, some people will respond by the work of the Holy Spirit. They'll say, that's the truth. That truth condemns me, but that's the truth because God said it.

And other people will hear it and they will gnash their teeth and they will hate it. And it's not a function of how it was said. It's just that it was said. Does anyone know what Paul says next? I didn't know until I read it. But he addressed exactly what I thought. It's exactly right. Who's adequate for these things? And who is adequate for these things? Like, here you are. Some people are going to love it. Some people are going to hate it. And who's adequate to speak about these things? For we are not like the many peddling the word of God. But as from sincerity, but as from God, we speak in Christ in the sight of God. Paul understood this pressure. He understood the response of loving God's law. Some people are going to love it. Some people are going to hate it. Are you adequate for these things? Or do you just peddle the word of God? Are you the salesman who just wants to close the deal? Do you think that if you share your faith or you tell somebody the gospel and they don't believe, do you take that as a loss? Do you say, I must have failed in some way?

Because they didn't believe. Because I invited them and they didn't come to church, so somehow I must have failed them. Because they didn't come to life. Maybe there was a failure, but the fact that they didn't all say yes and amen doesn't mean necessarily that you failed. Not everyone responds with faith. The pressures that we feel to be silent in the face of opposition and to wipe away the things that are difficult to hear, to annul the law of God, has always been present. It's always been present. So sometimes we're silent and we teach others to be silent. Sometimes we do what Rick Warren did, which is to try to thread the needle, to try to find the true thing we can say that's acceptable, palatable, and ignore the difficult part. We think this is like a middle ground position. It's a place where we can occupy. It's a place where we can say the truth but not have to face the consequence. If we were questioned privately,

without the public eye or without people around me saying, well, actually, I do believe this other stuff too. Meaning, if someone had been able to get to Rick Warren privately and ask him, do you think God sent that hurricane? I suspect he probably would have said yes, off the record. But what good is it to maintain your convictions privately? Former President Jimmy Carter said he was a Christian. Jimmy Carter was president before the vast majority of you were alive. He was personally opposed to abortion, but he wouldn't let his personal faith impact his public policy. But I say, well, what good are you then? What good are you? You're teaching everyone else that this is a place where we can, how we can behave and things we can say, and you can call it faithfulness, even as you lead other people astray. There's not a middle ground. There's not a middle ground. You'll either be a Christian and serve God and say the things that God says by faith, or you won't.

There's not a demilitarized zone where we can hold on to the truths privately while refusing to acknowledge them publicly. The church that I came to first when I started going to church was this megachurch. And what they would tell people in terms of their philosophy of ministry and the way they would do things, they would say, we're gatherers. That's our job. We gather people. We're good at gathering. That's why we have lots of people here. What we want to do is we want to get them in. We want to get them to come to faith. And then we want them to go, then what we expect is that they're going to go into smaller churches or other churches for actual discipleship. This is what they would say, which may seem strange to you because you're like, well, then why are all these people here? They're not going anywhere. You're not plugging them into other churches. I don't think they were being entirely honest with their desires. I think it was their way of negotiating the fact that they didn't do discipleship.

They didn't actually teach people what God's law said. And so they said, well, what we want is for when they want to go deeper and they want to get into the harder, more meaty portions of Scripture, they can go somewhere. That's not our emphasis. That's not what we do best. And so they would emphasize certain portions of Scripture, the grace of God, the mercy of God, the forgiveness of God, the patience of God. But they did that at the neglect, and I think the intentional neglect, of other portions of Scripture. God's law, his no, his wrath. His justice. Warnings of Scripture. Not just the promises of Scripture, but the warnings of Scripture. And they would say, it's not easy. Those things are hard. They're not easy for people to accept. We'll get to those things. They need to get to those things. Just not yet. They're babies in Christ. And it is true. Babes in Christ are like babes in arms. They need milk. It's what they can handle. It's what they can digest. But the goal of a baby, if you have a baby,

is that at some point they'll get to eating real food. At some point, right? At some point they'll get off of milk. The problem in the church is that oftentimes we never get past the milk. I have these dilemmas that I have in my head as a pastor of a congregation and wanting to see the church grow and wanting to see people ministered to and trying to figure out what type of sermons I should preach. I really do enjoy preaching and I really don't like trying to figure out what I'm supposed to preach about. Because I'm like, well, if I say that, if there are visitors here or there are new believers or there are people who aren't accustomed to God's no, they're going to come here and they're going to hate it because no one's ever taught them the whole counsel of God. And I'm like, I don't want them to leave because of that. Well, maybe I should just say the yes and kind of downplay the no. And I think, well, what about the people who come every week? They do know the yes and they do need to hear the yes when the yes shows up in Scripture, but the discipleship really happens with,

The nose. Okay? If you were learning to play a musical instrument, a lot of your training is, you know, okay, we're going to get together and we're just going to bang on the thing and squeak on the thing or, you know, whatever for a little while and you get to have some of that fun. But when you learn to play the instrument, it's all disciplining that noise into actual notes, actual rhythms, actual music. It's all just a big, long training of don't do it that way, do it this way. No, that's not right. Do it again like this. All it is is a bunch of no's. That's how you teach somebody to play music or to learn any sort of a discipline. So should it be that way in the church? If we're to make disciples, how much discipline, how much no, how much no, that's not right, it's like this, should there be? How much of the law of God should we annul? How much of it should we set aside? It makes me think of King Josiah when he discovered the law of God. You know, I've been buried, hidden away in the temple. No one had ever, hadn't studied it, hadn't read it. It was just...

squirreled away somewhere, and he finds and he reads this thing. He's like, whoa, what did Josiah go do? He set off on a campaign to acclimate all of the people to what was about to happen for a good long while and brought them up to speed. Some of you may not know the story, but King Josiah, who was a boy, he went on a campaign to smash and tear down all of the idols. He's just like, God's word says this. What are we doing? And he just went through the country and just destroyed and tore down all of the idols. All of the high places, right? You think some people were put off by Josiah doing that? I mean, here's this eight-year-old kid just destroying all of your religion because he's the king now. Hebrews warns us against this idea of staying on milk and always, always, we'll get to it. The truth, the difficult, the no. Hebrews says in Hebrews 5, it says, for everyone who partakes only of milk,

is not accustomed to the word of righteousness. And the question is, should people be accustomed to the word of righteousness? Do they need to become accustomed to the word of righteousness? The answer is yes. And he says, but babies are not accustomed to the word of righteousness. They're not accustomed to the truth. Why? For he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. And so in my mind, when I think about the law of God and about saying no and about our church and what I should preach on, I think, how do you get people to solid food? I have a profound answer. You feed it to them. How do you teach your baby to eat? You start giving them the food. And what do the kids do with the food? If you have a baby, what do they do when you put a spoon in their mouth? They go, right? And they, you know, it's what little babies do.

And you're left being like, and every parent, especially with their firstborn, they're like, is this worth it? It's just a mess, and they don't eat, and then we have to make them a bottle anyway, or we have to nurse them anyway, whatever. Like, we do all this work, and they just spit it out and puke it up and smear it all over the place and throw it on the floor. But you teach your children to eat food, don't you? And you go through the process, and I think then as a church, we ought to go through the process. People are going to do the exact same thing that babies do when they come to the law of God. They're going to go.

Get that out of here. That's not for me. I don't like that. But isn't it miserable to have a baby that has food sensitivities and doesn't like those textures and she only eats this and that? That's no fun. That's not enjoyable. That's not what you want in your child. So why would we accept that of Christians? We should want people, we should want to be ourselves accustomed to the law of God. When we read it and we come across passages that are offensive, to our flesh we want to be trained and disciplined and well practiced in saying i'm the one who's wrong here that's the goal when you read a passage of scripture and you're like i don't like what that says what you want to get to is the point where you realize the problem is not with what was said but with you you say this is god's word this is his law these are his prophets and i'm sitting in judgment of them as though i know better what a fool i'm a fool

I need to figure out what's going on here and why God's doing these sorts of things because he doesn't do anything wrong. How will we ever get to that point, ask those questions, and wrestle through those difficulties if we take the law of God and we just set it aside and say, well, it doesn't matter to us anymore. Just milk. Just dessert. What's the consequence of us teaching those around us to do the same? What will become of our children? How many of you grew up not being taught the law of God? Not being told no? And are here because you finally found a place that will tell you no. That's why I left the megachurch and ended up in what became our sending church. I finally found a place where people will love me enough to tell me no. That was it. I went, there are fathers here. These men care. And they care more about the word of God than they do about my affection for them. And it made me love them. Our children need to be told no. We need to be told no. We need to hear the law of God. We need to read it. We need to study it. We need to understand it.

I didn't put it in here, but I was thinking about earlier in Hebrews 5 where there's discussion of Melchizedek. Now, who's Melchizedek? Well, we don't know a whole lot about him. We know that he was a priest. Way back when, around Abraham's time, like back before the law of God, there was this priest, Melchizedek. He was a high priest before there were high priests. We don't know much about him. What we do know in Hebrews... right before the section where he says that your infants, when you should be mature, is he says, we have a lot we'd like to say to you about Melchizedek, but you've become dull of hearing. And so we can't say it because you haven't accustomed yourself to the truth. You've dulled your senses. You would receive this the way an infant would receive meat. And so we can't say it. We have to return again to the elementary foundational principles.

Brothers and sisters, we ought not to do this. I don't have a terribly profound thing to say to you. I just want to say to you, if you call yourself a Christian, you should love God's law. And you should demonstrate that love by reading it and studying it. The longest psalm that we have in all of Scripture, Psalm 119, the subject of it is the law of God. David goes on and on and on for 176 verses about the law of God. Could we go on for five? In time, I hope we sure can. If you want to grow as a Christian, if you want to become more like Jesus, you need the law of God. You need to not wipe it away and think it doesn't matter. Study it. Read about it. Get it in you. Jesus says that the men who teach these things, who in all the commandments of God and teach others to do the same, he says they shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. What's it mean to be called least in the kingdom of heaven? It means unworthy to bear the name of Christ.

We might interpret this as saying, well, they'll be the people who get into heaven by the skin of their teeth and will have no rewards. And then perhaps they will. Perhaps some of them will. But the majority of them, because of their dereliction of duty, their unwillingness to teach and believe the law of God, he says, they're not even worthy to be called Christians. They should be leased in the kingdom of heaven. Then he gives us the other side of the story. He says, but whoever keeps and teaches them the law of God shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. And what we need, I hope has been becoming obvious to you as I've been talking about the failures. What we need are pastors and elders and churches that teach the law of God and who aren't ashamed of it. That's what we need. So that they teach us to do the same thing. Whatever good there is in me, it's there because there were men who invested into me and told me no. And said, this is what God says and you can't do that. And that's what was missing at that megachurch. No one ever told me no.

Once I realized that what I was doing was stupid, their words to me were literally, we're so glad you figured that out. That was awful. I'm sorry. Why didn't you tell me that while my life was miserable? It really frustrated me, as I'm sure it would you. There was no love for me, a sinner. You need men and women in your life who teach you to obey God. You need it. Your soul needs it. You'll find no greater friend, no greater father. or mother than one that will tell you what God requires of you and lead you to Christ and through faith in him onto the obedience that he requires. This isn't easy to be the one teaching. It's not easy to be the one hearing. I can say that those who said no to me did me a great service, but I would be not telling you the whole story if I didn't say there were times I hated it. I did not like being told no. I did not like being told you may not. In the moment anyway, in time, I came to love them for it.

But in the moment, it was unpleasant. And we need this throughout our whole lives. It's a lifetime of work. I'm not giving you a checklist. I said last week, I almost felt silly saying to you at the end of the sermon, what you need to do is you need to read the Pentateuch and you need to memorize the Ten Commandments. And I thought about asking you, so who did it this week? Who read all five books of Moses and who memorized the Ten Commandments this week? It's like, unless you had a really good start on the Ten Commandments already, I bet precious few of us, did accomplish either one of those things this week. Now, was I being manipulative or mean or heavy-handed by saying that this is what you should do? No. I'm just saying, the work's more than a week's long worth of work. And so again, I say to you, you have to get the law of God into you. And you're not going to have it done by next week. And that's okay. You're not going to have it done by this time next year. You're not going to have it done ten years from now. But you need to be putting it into you. Getting it into you.

You want men and women around you who teach you these things. You want to be the sort of men and women that teach others. This last week, I've had the occasion to think about death a few times. I've had a few people, a few funerals. I went to one. I had a dear friend call me this last week a few days ago and just said to me, he never calls me. He's a pastor here in town. Love him dearly. And he called me and said, I just want to tell you I love you and thank you for your ministry and it's been so wonderful. And I'm like, what?

what are you talking about, dude? And he says, well, I'm very ill. And so what I realized is he was calling to say goodbye. He's calling to say, I'm dying. I said, how long? I don't know what's wrong with him. I never asked, what's wrong? He just called to tell me he's very ill and to encourage me in the work. I said, how long? And he says, months, maybe weeks. And I said to him, you know, I've thought often when I'm on, he's a pastor of a church over on the east side of town. I said, every time I drive by on 70, I think I should go down and visit you. And then I think, he's up to his eyeballs loving people. He's not sitting in his office with nothing to do. He's loving people and caring for them and leading them to Christ. And he said, yeah, that's what I've been doing. And it's true of him. And when God calls him home, there will be a mark left by his ministry. Scads and scads of people who say, that man led me to the Lord and taught me what it meant to be a Christian. We need those people in our lives. We need to become those people in others' lives.

We'll end with the last verse where Jesus says, For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Just a few things. One, righteousness comes from the law of God. And the scribes had some desire or some show or some shell, some modicum of righteousness in them, at least as others perceived it. They honored God with their lips, but their hearts were far from him. Jesus warns us and says that unless your righteousness surpasses them, is more than them, is bigger than theirs, deeper than theirs, wider than theirs, more alive than theirs, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Where they played at the law of God, where they made sport of it and poked at it, and said the things that tended to gain them respect and clout, where they played at it, we should be serious about it. There's far too much acceptance in the church today of...

ease and comfort and laughter and everything's just comfortable all the time. Now, do I want everything to be heavy and weighty and miserable to bear? No. But after all, it is true that we're talking about heaven and hell and our eternal souls. And it's not the sort of thing we should just laugh about and laugh off on a regular basis. It's important stuff. At some point, we'll realize it's very important stuff. When we come to our final days, we'll realize it was very important stuff. And we would do well to remember that now before we come to then. I think Paul was one of the men, the Apostle Paul was one of the men who knew his own sinfulness very well. And he was the kind of man that everyone would look up to. And so he says of himself in Philippians 3, he says, I have not already obtained it. I have not already become perfect. And then he tells us what he does. He says, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which I also was laid hold of by.

By Christ. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus. Brothers and sisters, to be complacent as a Christian is to not be a Christian. To set aside the commandments of God and think you'll get to it later, we'll take it seriously later, we'll concern ourselves with obedience and living like a Christian later is... To walk away from the Lord. That's what it is. To be lukewarm. You're neither hot nor cold. You say with your mouth the right thing, but with your lives and in your hearts, there's a different story. I don't want that to be true of us. That was the scribes and the Pharisees. That's the temptation that every one of us, if you're a Christian, faces. And I don't want us to be swept away with the comforts and the ease of lukewarm Christianity. I want you to actually...

have a Christian pulse in you and a love for God that disciplines you and is salt and light to those around you. It'll come with a cost. It will not be easy. You will end up having to say no to things that you don't want to say no to. But you'll say no for the benefit of your soul and the benefit of the souls of the people around you. It's possible to teach people to neglect the Word of God. It's also possible to teach them to take it seriously, to care about it. to treasure it, to store it up in their hearts, to live according to it. And that's our work as Christians. Next week, we're going to move on to the passage where Jesus starts saying, you've heard that it was said, but I say to you, and we're going to go through the law and see how he expounds and opens these things up and says, you thought you were doing it right, but there's so much more. There's so much more for you, for us, for this world. We're to be a city set on a hill, not down in a valley, a lamp set on a lampstand, not with a blackout shade over the top of it.

That's where we're headed. Let's pray.