“Come, let us return to the LORD.
He has torn us to pieces
But He will heal us;
He has injured us
But He will bind up our wounds.
After two days He will revive us;
On the third day He will restore us,
That we may live in His presence.
Let us acknowledge the LORD;
Let us press on to acknowledge Him.
As surely as the sun rises,
He will appear;
He will come to us like the winter rains,
Like the spring rains that water the earth.”
Hosea 6:1-3
“My entire life has been a mission of God’s mercy. I am increasingly awed over my salvation and find the privilege of knowing and loving God to be unfathomable. A long time ago I had to accept the fact that I could do nothing to repay God for His bountiful grace to me, for if I could, grace would be nullified. What I could do instead was pour my life on His altar and make every effort to ‘press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me’ (Phil. 3:12).
Translation? Fulfill my calling. To know Him. To love Him. To serve Him.”
– Beth Moore
“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.”
Matt. 5:23-24
“Now just think of what the quality of life and character must be in a person who would routinely interrupt sacred rituals to pursue reconciliation with a fellow human being. What kind of thought life, what feelings and moods, what habits of body and mind, what kinds of deliberations and choices would you find in such a person? When you answer these questions, you will have a vision of the true ‘rightness beyond’ that is at home in God’s kingdom of power and love.
Of course the legalistic tendency in the human self will immediately go to work. It will ask, What if my brother refuses to be reconciled? Am I never to go to church again? Do I always have to do this, no matter what else is at issue in the situation? The answer is, Obviously not! Jesus is not here giving a law that you must never carry through with your religious practice if an associate has something against you. The aim of his illustration – and it is an illustration – is to bring us to terms with what is in our hearts and, simultaneously, to show us the rightness of the kingdom heart.
We do not control outcomes and are not responsible for them, but only for our contribution to them. Does our heart long for reconciliation? Have we done what we can? Honestly? Do we refuse to substitute ritual behaviors for genuine acts of love? Do we mourn for the harm that our brother’s anger is doing to his own soul, to us, and to others around us? If so, we are beyond ‘the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees’ and immersed in God’s ways.”
LORD, Your peace right now in L.A.
Okay, I confess I’ve been reading ahead on my own time. But I’m gonna back up on some of these because it’s so rich.
“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”
Matt. 5:21-22
From Willard:
“When Jesus deals with moral evil and goodness, he does not begin by theorizing. He plunges immediately into the guts of human existence: raging anger, contempt, hatred, obsessive lust, divorce, verbal manipulation, revenge, slapping, suing, cursing, coercing and begging. It is the stuff of soap operas and the daily news – and real life.
He takes this concrete approach because his aim is to enable people to be good, not just talk about it…so far from being additional laws to crush us or show us we can’t make it on our own (of course we can’t!), the separate parts [of the Sermon on the Mount] are distinct perspectives on the sweet life of love and power, of truth and grace, that those who count on Jesus can even now lead in his kingdom.
…we need to put the idea of [Jesus giving us new] laws entirely out of our minds. Jesus is working, as already indicated, at the much deeper level of the source of actions, good and bad…when I treasure those around me and see them as God’s creatures designed for his eternal purposes, I do not make an additional point of not hating them or calling them twerps or fools. Not doing those things is simply part of the package. ‘He that loves has fulfilled the law,’ Paul said. Really.”
“Going to the source of action is a major part of what Jesus has in mind by saying that one must ‘go beyond the goodness of scribes and Pharisees.’ One must surpass humanly contrived religious respectability ‘if one is to mesh their life with the flow of the kingdom of the heavens’ (5:20).
True enough, he also meant that we are actually to do what the law, as God intended it, says to do. And that too was quite ‘beyond’ the goodness of the scribes and Pharisees. They talked a lot of law, but they did not keep it.
Confidence in the Christ is, correctly understood, inseparable from the fulfilling of the law. People came to him on one occasion and asked, ‘What shall we do to work the works of God?’ (John 6:28). His reply was, ‘You do the work of God when you place your confidence in the one he sent.’ We would now say, and say correctly, ‘Trust Jesus Christ.’ But…the idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.
The tragic result of this separation is seen all around us today. What we are looking at in the contemporary Western world is precisely what he himself foretold. We have heard him. For almost two millennia we have heard him…But we have chosen not to do what he said. He warned that this would make us ‘like a silly man who built his house on a sand foundation. The rain poured down, and the rivers and winds beat upon that house, and it collapsed into a total disaster’ (Matt 7:26-27). We today stand in the midst of precisely the disaster he foretold, ‘flying upside down’ but satisfied to be stoutly preaching against ‘works’ righteousness.
If people in our Christian fellowships today were to announce that they had decided to keep God’s law, we would probably be skeptical and alarmed. We probably would take them aside for counseling and possibly alert other responsible people in the group to keep an eye on them. We would be sure nothing good would come of it. We know that one is not saved by keeping the law and can think of no other reason why one should try to do it.
This leaves us caught in a strange inversion of the work of the Judaizing teachers who dogged the footsteps of Paul in New Testament days. As they wanted to add obedience to ritual law to faith in Christ, we want to subtract moral law from faith in Christ. How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century.
The law of God marks the movement of God’s kingdom…we step into his ways and drink in his power. ‘If you love me,’ he said, ‘do what I have said. And I will ask the Father and he will give you an additional strengthener, who will never leave you’ (John 14:15-16).
[Jesus] knew that we cannot keep the law by trying to keep the law. One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow. The apple tree naturally and easily produces apples because of its inner nature. This is the most crucial thing to remember if we would understand Jesus’ picture of the kingdom heart…
And here also lies the fundamental mistake of the scribe and the Pharisee. They focus on the action that the law requires and make elaborate specifications of exactly what those actions are and of the manner in which they are to be done. They also generate immense social pressure to force conformity of action to the law as they interpret it.
But the inner dimensions of their personality, their heart and character, are left to remain contrary to what God has required. That heart will, of course, ultimately triumph over their conscious intentions and arrangements, and they will in fact do what they know to be wrong.
It is the inner life of the soul that we must aim to transform, and then behavior will naturally and easily follow. But not the reverse.”
– Dallas Willard
I think this is where our church shines. Discipleship is an essential part of our DNA. It’s been interesting to see this from a different angle, as well, with the outreach. Small groups are willing to do anything “unglamorous” to help the cause. Everyone is willing to be a servant, however small, to show love to women who need it. When people are presented with opportunities to join God in His mission, they are already the kind of people who don’t hesitate to play whatever role is needed.
Of course what God has asked our group to do is not the only thing people join Him in. I see people pouring their lives into others all the time. If that is what I see, I can only imagine the kind of prayer and love and investment and service that goes on behind the scenes.
God, You are so good to change our hearts. We know it is You inside us that is the difference. May we become ever-increasingly Your disciples in holy obedience to what You have told us pleases You.
“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. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks 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 practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 5:17-20
Says Willard:
“Surely it is this radically revolutionary outlook that explains why Jesus finds it necessary to caution, ‘Don’t think I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets’ – that is, to abolish the entire established order as far as his hearers were concerned.
Obviously he had to say this because that is precisely what his hearers were thinking! They could think nothing else! They had not just heard another powerless list of legalisms, however pretty, and they knew it. They had heard an upside down world being set right-side up.
The Law and the Prophets had been twisted around to authorize an oppressive, though religious, social order that put glittering humans – the rich, the educated, the ‘well-born,’ the popular, the powerful, and so on – in possession of God. Jesus’ proclamation clearly dumped them out of their privileged position and raised ordinary people with no human qualifications into the divine fellowship by faith in Jesus.
That is a powerful message, enough to thoroughly confuse a simple people who lived with their noses to the grindstone and knew no order than the one imposed upon them by religious experts zealously defending their own privileges. So Jesus cautions them to respect the law – to fulfill it, not abolish it – as he then moves on to where he will explain what the law really means for human life under God.
Exactly how they are to respect the law and move beyond the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees we shall see…”
Willard pgs. 126-127
It’s interesting. When I decided to start working through Matthew, I wasn’t thinking about how chapters 5 – 7 in that book are exactly what Willard works through in the majority of The Divine Conspiracy. As I’m reading through the Beatitudes in particular, I keep recalling some things he mentions…
“The Beatitudes are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on…They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus.
The Beatitudes simply cannot be ‘good news’ if they are understood as a set of ‘how tos’ for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new legalism. They would not serve to throw open the kingdom – anything but…
Jesus is correcting a general assumption or practice thought to govern the situation at hand. This is seen in Mark 10 about the rich young ruler…Jesus did not say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom. In fact he said they could – with God’s help, which is the only way anyone can do it… He simply upset the prevailing general assumption about God and riches. For how could God favor a person, however rich, who loves him less than wealth?
So with the story of the Good Samaritan…the story does not teach that we can have eternal life just by loving our neighbor. We cannot get away with that nice legalism either. The issue of our posture toward God still has to be taken into account. But in God’s order nothing can substitute for loving people. And we define who our neighbor is by our love…If Jesus were here today, the story would be told differently…To make his point now, Jesus might have said, “the good Iraqi,” “good Communist,” “good feminist,” “good homosexual,” or “good priest.” All of these break up pet generalizations concerning who surely is or is not leading the eternal kind of life.
We all know people who please God and have his blessing without being poor, hungry, grief-stricken, or persecuted. They trust Jesus with all their heart, and they love and serve their neighbors and others in his name. Their hearts are full of peace and joy in believing, and they ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.’
[The beatitudes] serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through the reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us…The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. We respond appropriately to the beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so…
Lostness does not have to wear a stuffed shirt to find redemption. So we must see from our heart that:
Blessed are the physically repulsive,
Those who smell bad,
The twisted, misshapen, deformed,
The too big, too little, too loud,
The bald, the fat, and the old –
For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus…
Also, the flunk-outs, and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV-positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged and the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant-too-many-times, the overemployed, the underemployed…the parents with children living on the street, the incompetent, the stupid…
Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion is his Kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. The pederast and the perpetrator of incest. Those who rob the aged and weak. The cheat and the liar: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee into the arms of The Kingdom Among Us.”
The Divine Conspiracy, a whole bunch of different pages
“Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kings of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Matthew 5:1-12