A Change of Standards

Sermon 2 in the Series: “The Greatest Sermon Ever Preached: A Spiritual Overhaul by the Master.”

Between five and twenty years ago, the fad in many churches was to preach sermons that were immediately relevant to the daily lives of average citizens, the secrets of a happy marriage, the secrets of raising good kids, the secrets of becoming a leader at work, and so on. That’s not what Jesus did. Listen to this all of you. This may be the most important thing you hear today. Okay, maybe not, but I got your attention, didn't I? For Jesus, the question is not whether his message is relevant to our lives, but whether our lives are relevant to his message. We said that Jesus wants us to be distinctively godly, so that we can be the light of the world and the salt of the earth. In order to be distinctive in the way Jesus has in mind, we must adopt goals to depart from worldly goals for our lives and instead to adopt the goals set forth in the Beatitudes. Last week, we said that Jesus wants us:

To become poor in spirit, knowing our need for God.

To become among those who mourn, lamenting our own dependence on and participation in evil.

To become meek, that is, humble and teachable, ready to obey God’s will.

To become among those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, seeking to live out God’s holy and just character.

To become merciful, refusing to sit in judgment on sinners, but showing compassion to them.

To become pure in heart, not divided in our hearts and minds, but totally committed to God’s way.

To become peacemakers, seeking the best for enemies, and, if possible safely and justly, reconciling with them.

To become the persecuted, those who stand so strongly for God’s ways that we are at odds with all ungodly powers.

That was last week’s message. Today’s message continues from it.

In today’s message, Jesus calls us to change our standards of acceptable performance. He has only one direction in mind for our change of standards, upward, way upward. There is a vast difference between what Jesus taught and our sloppy society with its “I’m okay, you’re okay” “any philosophy of life is as valid as any other” values.

Matthew 5:17-20, 48 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.”

If you had polled the Jewish people in the days of Jesus about who were the most righteous people in their society, the big majority probably would have said the scribes and Pharisees. The Pharisaic scribes were the most obviously devoted to strict legal standards of behavior touching every part of their lives. They had added countless layers of tradition around the written law of the scriptures so that only people of considerable leisure could ever hope to measure up to the standards, but still the even most people who failed at their standards thought that they had the highest standards. Jesus thought that their layers of traditions often missed the point, adding burdens without purpose. He favored an approach that looked for the underlying intent of God’s laws and sought to fulfill that intent more deeply than any legislation could ever do. The Pharisees accused him of watering down the law. He accused them of muddying it up.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus clarified that he was not watering down one jot or tittle of the law of God, but that he was actually teaching a higher standard of righteousness than the Pharisees. Note that he did not say that, unless our practices were more cumbersome and time-consuming than those of the Pharisees, we would fail to enter the kingdom. He only said that unless our standards were higher than theirs we would fail to enter the kingdom. A bit later in the sermon he gets around to saying what the higher standard is. Matthew 5:48 says, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” What fulfills the law of God? Perfection and nothing less. Gulp.

Now before this sermon ends, we will talk about that word perfect and what Jesus meant by it. We will remove some misconceptions about it. We will show that Jesus was not crazy or out of touch with human reality. We will show that he meant what he said. We will show why what he said is good news and not bad news for the likes of us.

Eddie Keever recently emailed me and tagged his signature with, “Falling short of the glory for over 40 years and counting.” I responded, “I've been doing that falling short of the glory thing for over 60 years now.” Actually, I don’t know of anyone who has measured up, but I still think that what Jesus said about perfection is good news, once we understand it. Stand by.

One day while leading a Bible study at a regional training event in Ohio, I made reference to Matthew 5:48. An older minister in the study was deeply offended. He said, “I just don’t believe that Jesus expected us to be perfect.” I tried to get him to explain what he was getting at, but he could only repeat himself more adamantly. I suspect that he did not have much confidence in the inspiration and authority of the scriptures and did not believe that Jesus ever said such a thing. I also suspect that he was a student of modern therapeutic theory that we must cast off all guilt about shortcomings and affirm that everyone is special and good just as they are…unless of course they believe that Jesus said that we must be perfect, in which case they must be corrected before they are okay. Well, if I read him right, I know how he saw me.

Our society teaches that high expectations are dangerous and destructive, and wrongly applied they can be! A few years back, our daughter suffered a debilitating eating disorder due to an overdose of the wrong kind of Christian perfectionism that left her feeling that she was personally responsible for solving the problems of the world. I know all too well that this can happen.

But I would contend that the high expectations that Jesus held out for us, rightly understood, were still loving and good and beneficial. I personally know that high expectations and beneficial love can go together. I experienced it from my mother.

She was an amazing woman, creative and resourceful, a great motivator and encourager, gentle but firm, steel covered with velvet. I recently had a couple of very powerful memories of her. When she took me to church as a toddler, she carried a metal Band-Aid box filled with puffed rice. She held it where I could get to it. I don’t remember how she convinced me to follow the rules, but the rules were that I could open the box and put a damp finger in, get one grain of puffed rice to stick to the end of my finger, remove it, close the box, put the rice in my mouth, carefully chew and swallow it before getting another. It was amazing how long that could keep a child quietly occupied. I also remember the Sunday a couple of years later when I had gotten a bit restless. Another child, whose behavior was even worse, had been taken outside the church and paddled that day. I remember listening to the whap, whap, whap, and the squalls filtering back inside. On the way home from church, my mother said, very quietly, “You were not as quiet as I would like for you to have been today. I am afraid that you made noise that may have disturbed some people around us who were trying to worship, pray, and listen to the sermon. I know that you will try to do better next week. I can’t tell you how sad and embarrassed I would be if I ever had to take you outside the way Betty had to take Billy today.” The names have been changed to protect the guilty. As I remembered this as a sixty year old man, there flooded back over me the images that came to my mind that day in the car on the way home from church. I could not imagine that my mother would have administered more than the gentlest single swat to my hindquarters, but I could imagine that I would have bawled my head off in heartbreak, and I could also imagine that she would have done the same. That image of my mother and me standing outside the church squalling together never happened, but it was a powerful motivator and reminder to be considerate of those who were worshiping.

A few years later, when I was in about the first grade, my mother on the way to church said, “I believe you are old enough now not to need entertainment at church. I believe that you can listen to the sermon and get something useful out of it. I know that at first, you will not understand everything, but I believe that, if you listen carefully, you will get something. And, if you make a practice of listening carefully, you will get more every Sunday.” Our church was served by busy seminary students. They sometimes took seminary courses such as “Exegesis of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” So you know what the sermon series was while they were trying to survive that course. My mother was definitely proven right by saying that I would not understand everything, but she was also right that I would gain something if I paid attention. I preached my first sermon at age 15.

I am not trying to tell you what will work in your family. Every parent is different, and so is every child. Some are not wired to sit still, and they require a different approach. What I am telling you was that I never doubted that my mother loved me just as I was and would love me no less if I fell short, but that she had high expectations for me that would make my life better. I never doubted it about her, and I do not doubt it about Jesus.

I think that I can make my point about Jesus’ high expectations very quickly now. Jesus has one standard and only one standard for us: perfection. The word that most translations render as perfect has to do with the end goal. It could be translated as complete, mature, whole, whole-hearted, fulfilled. What Jesus is telling us is that there is no law or set of laws that we can obey and then say, “Now I have done it.” We have not reached the goal until we are completely like God in our character. In the Old Testament, God had made the same point in these words, “You must be holy, for I, the Lord your God am holy.”

Does Jesus know that we are sinners and that we will fall short. Of course. That is why he came and died on the cross for us. That is why he offers to share his righteousness with us if we will entrust ourselves to him. But, when we entrust ourselves to Jesus, we commit ourselves to a journey toward the goal. The goal is that, in eternity, we will be perfect not just because of Jesus’ covering, but perfect because we have completed the journey. Yes, we will fall short of the glory in this life, but we must never settle for less than the best and highest goal. Holding the goal of perfection before us will preserve us against self-righteousness. We will never be able to put anyone else down for their failures when we are so conscious of our own. But holding the goal before us will also keep us moving forward, showing forth the transforming presence of our Lord in our lives.

Jesus loves us. He tells us that we must become perfect. He will help us to the goal. If we trust him, we will get there in eternity. In the meantime, we must never settle for less than the best. Adopting that attitude is part of the spiritual overhaul that he would give to us.