Sermon Tone Analysis

We are officially 1/3 of the way through the Sermon on the Mount, at least in terms of chapter length.

I have enjoyed hearing from some of you over the past weeks how God is working in your heart and mind through the study of these passages.

I would say that the most significant thing about our journey through Matthew so far for me has been to see just how intricately woven and interconnected the Old and New Testaments are.

Truly our God is the same yesterday, today, forever.

His Word and His Promises stand, and the same God who created all things, called his people out, led them through many challenges into their land, and saw them through centuries of turmoil, is the same God who is speaking in the New Testament.

Jesus’ teaching has been incredibly practical in nature.

Matthew 5 was full of blessings and examples of blessed, true Righteousness.

And the amazing thing about Jesus’ teaching in that regard is that He is not simply speaking as a man who presumes that these are good things, but as the Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, who made and designed all these things and knows that they are good, because He has declared them Good.

So when Jesus says that the poor in spirit, the mourners, the merciful, the pure in heart, the persecuted, and they that hunger for righteousness are blessed, it is true because He is both the designer and the “blesser” if you will.

And when Jesus’ gives examples of true righteousness, examples like murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, he gives these examples knowing that in following Him there is a blessedness and peace that can only come from following the ways of the One who designed and made the world.

So when we say that these teachings are very practical, it is not simply to say that they are teachings that we can put to work, or put to practice.

It is to say that these are teachings that are life changing and world changing.

After all, that is what we are called to be, isn’t it?

Again, we are called to be salt, and light in the world.

Agents of preservation, agents of change, agents of truth.

Now, this ties in to our passage today directly.

As we walk through the next two chapters in the Sermon on the Mount, we will continue to see this kind of practical teaching.

So far you have heard me say many times, perhaps to the point that you are sick of it, that our righteousness must be more than skin-deep.

I think that is one of the major points that Jesus is driving home in the Sermon.

Our righteousness must be more than just superficial, more than pretentious, more than outward.

Now, our righteousness must be outward in some sense.

Yesterday at the Men’s breakfast, Frank led a study from Philippians.

I had Scott read that passage, Philippians 2, earlier in the sermon because it ties in very well.

Because of who Christ is, how he came, emptied himself, took on the Servant’s form, humbled himself to the Cross, and is now exalted above all others, so that every knee must bow, because of all that, we are to “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.”

That is, what is true within, the salvation that Jesus bought and delivered to us, must have practical ramifications in our life - and Jesus’ is our prime example of what those ramifications are.

We must be a servant of God first, and others.

Our righteousness must work itself “outward” so that we can be salt and light.

We must be agents of change and truth, by not simply believing truth, but living it.

After all, you could easily make the argument that if you don’t live the truth you claim to believe, you probably don’t believe it.

If I stand and preach with all my might that I believe these words of Jesus, but in my life I never put them to practice, then I am a hypocrite in the first degree.

So we take that as a warning, a warning that we must be agents of change, and we also must be changing - as the final verse in chapter five told us, we are to be mature - perfect - even as God our Father is mature and perfect in these ways.

But directly after that warning, Jesus takes the warning to the other end - after all, there are two ditches on every road, and its just as bad to go into one of them as the other.

In this case, it is just as bad to go into the ditch of “self-righteousness” as it is the ditch of “no-righteousness” as it were.

We are going to dive into this passage, and look at the warning or this principle, along with two examples that Jesus’ gives.

Here is the main Idea for the sermon today.

Christ’s followers live for an audience of One.

God desires and blesses true righteousness, but pretentious righteousness is comparatively worthless in His sight.

1.

The Principle: Righteousness Isn’t a Performance

There is a way that the sermon turns a corner here that goes right along with Jesus’ warning that we just read.

The sermon turns a bit from being outwardly practical, to viewing our lives as lived before the Creator.

Things like prayer, fasting, laying up treasure in heaven, not being anxious.

But really, even in the very practical things like murder and adultery, our primary audience is One - and that is God.

Jesus’ words here get at a basic question - why are you doing what you are doing?

That question is basic, but it is existential - it has a depth to it.

We can as that about literally any activity, action, or attitude that we have.

I remember being a boy and doing something silly, or enacting some half-baked idea and being approached by my mom or dad, and they would ask that question: why did you do that?

Often as a boy, in the nervousness of that moment with not much clarity of thought, I would spout out something like, “I don’t know, just because.”

And all the English experts will tell you that you can’t have a conjunction like “because” just dangling at the end of your sentence, but as a 8 or 10 year old, it seemed perfectly reasonable.

Probably because I didn’t want to own up to my own idea, or the real reason.

And maybe that’s how we reason as we get older too.

We do things, and we don’t necessarily want to wrestle with the reason why - so we just reason it’s “because...” because it’s a habit, because we were taught to, because we had to, etc.

Well, there is always a “because” in our righteousness, also.

And Jesus challenges us that our “because” ought never to be “because we want to be seen by others.”

Now, Jesus does not say here that we are not to have outward, practical righteousness.

We are to - again, these teachings are to transform us, and be transformative in the world around us.

There is great evidence that Jesus’ teachings were transformative.

The early disciples turned the known world upside-down with the spread of the Gospel.

And even those who didn’t bow the knee to Christ noticed the reality of the change taking place around them.

Around the year 125, the Athenian Philosopher Aristides said this about the Christians:

They do not commit adultery nor fornication, they do not bear false witness, they do not deny a deposit, nor covet what is not theirs: they honor father and mother; they do good to those who are their neighbors.…

They love one another: and from the widows they do not turn away their countenance: and they rescue the orphan from him who does him violence: and he who has gives to him who had not, without grudging.…

When one of their poor passes away from the world, and any of them sees him, then he provides for his burial according to his ability; and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs, and if it is possible that he may be delivered, they deliver him.

If there is among them a man that is poor or needy, and they have not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days that they may supply the needy with their necessary food.

So for these people, the practical righteousness of Jesus took hold.

It was real for them.

Real and transformative.

Jesus’ is not telling us that our righteousness must not be transformative, real, and outward - He is simply saying that we must not do it for the sake of being seen by others.

“In order to” is equivalent of “for the purpose of.”

Some have seen a contradiction with this verse and Matthew 5:16

But if we look carefully, again, we see that the purpose statement there is in line with what Jesus is saying here.

“so that they may see… and glorify your Father.”

We live before an audience of one, and our actions are meant to point to that audience.

Our lives as Christ-followers should be transparent in the sense that people should be able to see right through our righteousness and see the God who we serve and love.

If our goal is a reputation, then that reputation will be our reward as well.

But that will be our only reward.

Rather than the eternal and heavenly reward that God may supply, we would have traded it for the earthly and temporary praise of men.

That is why later, in terms of the question of Christian Liberty and Conscience, Paul says that there is freedom on some planes with what we do and do not do.

But whatever we do, we have a main purpose.

Let us move on then to see a couple applications of this teaching.

2. Application One: Financial Charity - 2-4

One thing we notice in these examples, Giving and prayer, and again later in another example of fasting, is Jesus doesn’t start them with “if” you pray, “if” you give you alms.

He starts them with when.

We can see, then, that it is assumed that these followers would be doing these things.

One way we might think of these things is with the word piety.

Piety is a word for religious action, religious deeds.

You could say that prayer, fasting, and giving are religious deeds practiced by people from many religions.

And that was absolutely true of the devout Jew as well.

Jesus didn’t wonder if they would be doing these things - he was concerned with why.

And though we may be coming at this from a different experience - none of us are culturally or ethnically Jewish, but many of us have been Christians and churchgoers our whole lives.

It may be assumed of us that we will give, we will pray, we will do religious things.

And Jesus concern for us would be the same, not just if but why.

So what about Alms Giving, Jesus’ first application?

Again, giving to the needy is expected and assumed here.

And we can go back to the Law for that as we have all of Jesus’ examples.

Moses writes in Deuteronomy 15 about times when someone from the congregation of Israel should fall upon hard times, and he says this:

Now, this is a law about giving to the needy, but there is a principle from this law that extends into the New Testament as well in all of our giving.

Again, that we will be giving something is assumed here.

Charity of all kinds reveals the heart of God who gives freely and abundantly to His creatures.

The charity that God commanded in the Old Testament caught fire in the early church as well.

The church in Jerusalem, particularly, faced great poverty in those first days for many reasons.