WRITTEN BY MICHELE HANSEN
Based on Revelation 19:6-8, this year we are exploring how the Believer’s righteous acts cover us in Christ’s righteousness and represent our Savior to the world.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9, NIV)
“You have heard it said,” is the continual lead-in to the sermon on the Mount in chapter 5 of the book of Matthew. He continues to challenge the accepted norm in chapters 6 and 7. Christ’s audience would have understood the rules that Christ was talking about, but He continually flipped the script on the established rhetoric set by the Jewish ruling party in the Law from the Old Testament.
The 10 Commandments. The list of rules that God gave to Moses for right living before the Lord God Almighty. The perfect standard by which we are to conduct ourselves summed up in a statement by Jesus when He said… “You shall love the Lord our God and your neighbor as yourself”.
In the sermon on the Mount, Christ taught His followers “a new commandment”. To love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul and spirit and when He taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves, He spun the narrative so that we were given the way to love others as ourselves…by His power.
We can read the Sermon on the Mount and breeze through it without really thinking it through. Ok, I will say, I breeze by. Many times, I have just focused on the Beatitudes that bring Chapter 5 into view. This time I was drawn to the sentence before the teaching started. It says, in effect, Jesus saw all the people gathered…a whole lot of people…so He “sat down” and started to teach.
He sat down.
In my mind’s eye, I see Him pull up a patch of dirt, on the ground, in line with all the people who were sitting in the dirt, and I see Him relate. That word, relate. He wanted to relate to the people, not “Lord over them” as was His due in His station in this life. He did not puff up and grandstand, look down on, belittle, lecture…He just talked to His sheep like a good shepherd would. How else would His sheep learn His voice if not by listening to Him?
As Jesus went through many of the standard rules of living the Pharisees had built into a beast of a burden for the people, He started removing the “heavy items” from their backs. It was eye-opening and hard to understand. They were being told that the way they had always lived was not the way God intended to have us live…
It wasn’t just the people of Jesus’ time. We read these chapters from 5 through 7 in Matthew and nod our heads, agreeing completely with the scripture and know for sure that it is the will of God. Later, we are yelling at the kids, cussin’ the neighbor and his dog as it tears up our yard, contemplating the demise of the guy who just took our parking place at Walmart, eating half a box of Oreos because our basketball team lost the championship, discussing “prayer requests” with our friends from church…am I completely wrong?
When God created us “in His image”, we were created with a sense of justice, fairness and righteousness. When man sinned and the pure heart of God in man was tainted and squewed, we developed our own sense of what was right and fair. Like the perversion of truth, we became our own gods and decided we knew better.
Ya, that worked.
So, when Jesus started teaching from the mount and turned all of our best laid plans to little piles of ash, the great unwinding of our empires began. We needed to have our tiny towers torn down and our selfish ambitions and machinations “Etch-a-sketched”.
When Jesus sat to teach, He met them where they were at. He related to them. He was firm and sure of Himself and yet reached out with His heartfelt message in a way that could be understood, even if it made no sense. His overarching desire to “draw all men unto Himself” gave Him the compassion to reach down from heaven and present His brethren with the tools they would need, for generations upon generations to come.
Jesus meets us where we are at. He knows that there are many things in life that don’t make sense and things that this broken world calls normal that God says, “I have a better way.” We may not understand, but God can and does give us what we need to have godly decisions and responses that reveal His righteousness.
Dear Heavenly Father,
It’s so hard sometimes to just “be still and know” and surrender to Your will and Your timing. I confess that I feel a whole lot better when I know what’s going on. Your word clearly states that Your ways are so much higher and in them is total perfection. You see the beginning from the end and I…don’t.
The truth is that we can trust You. You are able to bring us from eternity to eternity even when we are absolutely clueless.
Help me not be afraid and in that peace, trust and let You do Your God business…which is not my business.
Help me to honor You with my life by trusting and walking with you in the wonder of Your completeness, displaying Your righteousness through my faith in You.
In Jesus Name,
