Matthew 5:17-20 (BASIC)

01/28/10
Matthew 5:17-20
BASIC

“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 the 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.”

Tonight, the topic that we are going to talk about is the role that the Law plays in our Christian lives. This is a really interesting thing to think about because, when we look back at the history of the church, and especially the history of Protestantism, we see the church being kind of a pendulum on this issue. We have tended to go back and forth over and over again between two extreme positions and we have not always managed to find some consistent middle way that does justice both to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ which is the center of our Christian lives and also to the intense demands that the gospel has on our lives.

But, you know, it is not only the church as a whole that has tended to go back and forth on this topic, but individual local churches often go back and forth on this, too, as do individual Christians. The first extreme view that we often stumble into is called “legalism,” where our lives are governed primarily by laws, a bunch of rules of what we are supposed to do and what we aren’t supposed to do. Every moment of every day is to be lived according to these strict rules or else we begin to feel that God doesn’t love us, or we are letting God down, or we aren’t pulling our weight in our relationship with God. The other side has historically been called “Antinomianism,” which is basically another name for lawlessness. This view emphasizes that we are freed from the Law in Christ and so we should not live as though we serve the Law instead of Christ. When this becomes real lawlessness, rules are seen as nothing more than a hindrance that we need to shake off if we want to be faithful.

If we could describe the Christian life as a road, we could say that legalism and lawlessness are the two ditches on either side of it. Both of them are bad and we want to avoid them both, but we can’t go completely in one direction or another. We are going along and we begin to notice that we are getting close to the ditch of legalism, so we swerve away from it to miss it. Before too long, we find that we are headed straight for lawlessness, so we turn around again until we have to turn away from legalism again. Eventually, one of two things usually happens, either we will continue to go back and forth for our entire lives, or else we will end up in one of the ditches and stay there.

But why do we want to avoid both of these ways of living? Why do most of us have an intense fear of becoming either excessively legalistic or completely lawless? I think that we have such an intense aversion to these two extremes because we know, because of the fundamental convictions we get because of our encounter with God, especially through the Scriptures, that neither of these ways of thinking quite holds up in light of Christ. We know that we cannot be accepted by God because we have followed the rules but we know that we can’t just do whatever we want to and still be Christians. But we repeatedly get drawn back into these two ways of thinking because, when you get down to it, it is much easier to live at the extremes than to find a middle road.

So most people can agree that we are supposed to live somewhere between legalism and lawlessness, but they do not always agree what that middle ground actually looks like. I think that part of the problem is that we come to the issue of the Law more as Americans, that is, as people who are formed by a particular culture with particular attitudes about how individuals are bound, or not bound, by law, than as Christians, that is, as people who base everything they think, do, and say in Christ. But if, as we say, Christ really is the center of our lives, this cannot be.

So, because we want to take Jesus seriously, let’s look more carefully at the text. He says, “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 the least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” The first thing that we need to notice is that, when Jesus says that He did not come to abolish the Law, it means that the Law does not need to be abolished. This means that the Law is not contrary to the will or purposes of God. If the Law needed to be overthrown, Jesus would have abolished it, but He says quite clearly that this is not the case. The law only is what it is because of who God is and God cannot abolish the Law without going back on His word, which He cannot do.

Now, even though Jesus tells us that He did not come to abolish the Law and so we have His word that the Law is not evil, we need to make sure that we don’t misunderstand Him here. Jesus says that He has come to fulfill the Law, not that we have come to fulfill the Law. It is a really good thing that Jesus is the one who fulfills the Law because we can’t do it. Jesus is the one human being who has lived His life, from beginning to end, in absolutely complete obedience to the Law as God meant for it to be interpreted. This is what Jesus meant when He talked about righteousness exceeding that of the Scribes and Pharisees. Jesus came to fulfill the Law on our behalf and in our place, precisely because we cannot do it.

Now, you might be thinking that this way of thinking will not solve the problem. By emphasizing that Christ has fulfilled the Law on our behalf and in our place, we clearly avoid legalism, but it might seem that we are headed straight to lawlessness. The concern that, if we say that Jesus does this “for us,” we will think that we don’t have to do anything, that we are factored out of the equation and that, when we say that salvation is “all of God,” we can’t help but conclude that salvation is “nothing of us.”

Now, we might come to that conclusion, but we can only say that if we separate what God has joined together. Since we want to make sure that anything we say is rooted in Christ, let us start with what we actually see in Jesus. In Christ, we see the most incredible activity of God for our salvation. In Christ, God has fully revealed God’s self to us. Through Christ, God brings about our salvation. Through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, God has healed our brokenness, forgiven our sins, and transformed us into new creations. Clearly, since salvation is completely worked out by Christ, salvation is “all of God.” However, Jesus is also a human being. What is more, everything that Jesus did as God, He also did as a man. When we look at Jesus, the activity of God did not factor out His humanity, we find that His humanity is included and implicated in the action of God and it is in no way cast aside. “All of God” in Christ does not mean “nothing of man” in Christ, but rather, “all of God” means “all of man” in Him. This means that, even when God does something for us, it does not mean that we do nothing because when God does something for us, He also does it in us and through us.

Another thing that we absolutely have to keep in mind is the nature of our Christian life. If we believe the New Testament that, since we have received the Holy Spirit, Christ is living His life through us, we cannot think about our Christian life over here and Christ’s life over there. If we think that somehow our Christian lives are utterly separated from the life of Christ, we are trying to save ourselves behind Christ’s back. Our entire life is rooted in the life of Christ. We can only escape the impact of Christ living His life in us and through us if we reject what God has done and are trying to save ourselves. If we really think that, because Christ fulfilled the law on our behalf and in our place, we are off the hook and are not called to live out Christ’s obedience in the Spirit, it means that, in the end, we are not really in Christ, but in ourselves.

I want to direct your attention to Galatians 2:20. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” Paul’s entire argument in Galatians is about the place of the Law. He doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about it. We might even say that Galatians is the strongest attack on legalism in the entire Bible. And yet, even in the midst of Paul’s attack on the effectiveness of the Law, he does not run into lawlessness. He says that Christ lives in him.

This means a couple of things. First, it gives us a guide to understand the place of the Law. The Law helps us by saying clearly and directly some of the things we need to know in order for us to live like Christ. The Christian life is Christ living His life in us through the Spirit, but if we have a hard time figuring out what that looks like, if we have trouble picking it up from the stories of Christ Himself, we can look to the Law and see it spelled out. However, it is important that we remember that the Law serves Christ, and not the other way around.

But what is even more important, is that Paul is saying that, at the end of the day, the life that is in him is not his own, but it is the very life of Christ’s obedience to the Father being worked out in his own life through the power of the Holy Spirit. He is saying that though he is alive and living the Christian life, the life that is in him does not come from his own willpower, his own discipline, but comes from the life of Christ.

So, what does that mean for us? It means that we are not factored out of the equation. Just like “all of God” did not mean “nothing of man” for Christ, the same is true for us. “All of God” means “all of us” for our salvation. This is not seeking our salvation by works, but realizing that, when God works in our lives, it isn’t like He works only on certain parts of us. No, when God moves and transforms our lives, He works and transforms all of our lives. It means that our salvation does not just involve our souls, but our minds, and our bodies, too.

So Paul says, “I live, yet not I, but Christ in me.” Saying that Christ lives in us includes everything, but I think we might be able to draw out a few other ideas. Paul might have said, “I repent, yet not I, but Christ in me,” because, you know what? I think that sometimes we make it seem like repentance is easy, that anyone can do it if they just try hard enough. The fact of the matter is that real repentance is impossible unless the Holy Spirit unites us to the repentance that Christ has made on our behalf when He was baptized in the Jordan. When we really let go of our sins, it is because God has worked out that repentance in us.

Paul might have said, “I pray, yet not I, but Christ in me.” The New Testament tells us that, not only did Christ pray for us while He was on earth, but that even now, seated at the right hand of the Father, Christ still prays for us. We all know that sometimes, we aren’t very good at praying. The words come out all wrong, we say the wrong things, we might even make statements that are simply incorrect, and yet, we should not lose sleep over it because the Holy Spirit takes our prayers, those weak and broken words, and unites them to the perfect prayers of Christ that He prays on our behalf and in our place.

You know what? Paul could even have said, “I believe, yet not I, but Christ in me.” When the Holy Spirit takes what is Christ’s and makes it ours, He even takes the faith of Christ and works it out in our lives. And you know what? It’s a darn good thing He does, because we all know just how weak our faith can be sometimes, right? However, we can rejoice because this same Jesus who took our cry of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” and turned it into, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” can take our most weak, broken, and even feeble faith, redeem it and make it worthy of God, even when we aren’t.

All of this is to say that we should not be surprised if, when we look carefully at what Christ has done, we find that He has fulfilled the Law on our behalf and in our place, because every other aspect of our Christian life has been done by Christ on our behalf and in our place. And yet, because of the very nature of the Christian life, the Law still has a role to play. Sometimes, we read the Law and we feel conviction because we realize that our lives don’t live up to what the Law says. How can we be surprised if the Law still stings when we have not surrendered our lives so that Christ can live through us completely? When we feel that conviction, we shouldn’t think of it as a call to action, as if we could, by our own strength and willpower, fulfill the Law on our own. We should consider it as a reminder that we are not the ones who are in charge of our lives but that we can only find peace when we stop trying to live our own way and let the Spirit make our life line up with Christ’s life, because it is only when we stop trying to do it on our own and let God fulfill the Law in our lives that we grow in obedience.

So, I want you to be encouraged. Peter, in the book of Acts, says that a legalistic view of Christian faith is a burden. He calls it “a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear.” We have been freed from that yoke; we are not justified by our works but by faith, because of God’s free gift. And yet, we are not left without guidance for our lives, because we know that God wants to live out the life of Christ in us. So we should not only realize that this takes the burden off of our shoulders and places it on Christ’s, who alone can bear it, we should expect that God will indeed live Christ’s life through us through the power of the Holy Spirit. I pray that you would leave this room with the strength to face the world because you are not sustained by your own strength, but by the very power of God. Let us pray.

AMEN