Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to The Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott and this podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life, right here, right now. We're working our way through The Sermon on the Mount for a very specific purpose. Can we talk about why?

Paul Tripp [00:00:20]: Yes, life in a fallen world is hard, and we're talking about how to live a hopeful, productive Christian life in this world that's gone insane.

Shelby [00:00:29]: We need help.

Paul [00:00:30]: Why don't you read verses 19-20, and then I'll set up our conversation.

Shelby [00:00:35]: Matthew 5:19-20.

¹⁹Therefore 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. ²⁰For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

It's a lot.

Paul [00:01:04]: Strong words.

Shelby [00:01:06]: Strong, strong words from Jesus.

Paul [00:01:07]: And let's put this in context again. It's almost like there's a parenthetical moment for Jesus. He's mobilizing his disciples to be an active part of his work on redemption, but there's something he wants he needs to clarify and it's that whole relationship between Jesus and the law, and us and the law.

Paul [00:01:33]: If you're just tuning in on this one and you didn't hear the previous episode, go back to the previous episode. It's a really important conversation. This is a continuation of that conversation. So Jesus is making it very clear that submission- the submission of obedience is the key to greatness in his kingdom: not self-rule, but willing, joyful obedience, submission.

Paul [00:02:10]: And again, we live in a distorted view of what greatness is about. I want to take you to a passage in Luke 12[:13-21].

¹³Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” ¹⁴But He said to him, “Man, who made Me a judge or arbitrator over you?” ¹⁵And He said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” ¹⁶And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, ¹⁷and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ ¹⁸And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ ²⁰But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ ²¹So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Shelby [00:03:26]: Again, powerful words.

Paul [00:03:27]: Now, here's the context of this. This is pretty interesting. Jesus is teaching, a group of people are watching and this guy interrupts the Messiah because he's not actually interested in what Jesus is saying. All he can think about is, "If I can get a piece of that inheritance, I'll be great."

Paul [00:03:51]: And whoa, he doesn't know what's coming next. But imagine you're so full of yourself and you're so full of your potential to be great, that you can't even be patient while the Messiah is teaching. You interrupt him with your question, and he tells a story of this rich man who has so much; all he can think of is building bigger barns so he can enjoy what he has. And then he says, "¹⁹...Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” And Jesus says, God says, "You're a fool."

Shelby [00:04:39]: "You're a fool." Interesting, too, that he uses the word "soul". I could say to my soul, "Just chill. It's fine." It's very interesting that he chooses to use that kind of language.

Paul [00:04:50]: But that culture, that's our culture. "¹⁹...Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Who are the people that we esteem in our culture? They're rich. They're strong.

Shelby [00:05:09]: They're powerful.

Paul [00:05:09]: They're beautiful. They're powerful. So we need this reorientation of what greatness is about. In the kingdom of this world, greatness is about all this material stuff. The kingdom of God has a fundamentally different definition of greatness, and we just have to ask ourselves, "What is the greatness that you hunger for?"

Shelby [00:05:47]: Get down to the roots.

Paul [00:05:48]: The greatness of having money that you can get a good steak whenever you want? The greatness of a pool in your backyard? The greatness of lavish vacations? The greatness of a thick wallet and a big bank account? The greatness of human esteem, cool clothes, cool car? It would be a lie for us, you and me, to sit here and say that stuff still isn't attractive to us.

Shelby [00:06:28]: Oh, yes, for sure.

Paul [00:06:29]: It's attractive to us.

Shelby [00:06:30]: Yes, it's a constant temptation.

Paul [00:06:33]: And what hooks you is if you buy that lie, enough is never enough and Jesus is coupling that with this prideful righteousness. It's religious in front of people, pridefully. I think of this distinction here. We're called to live righteous lives, but it's the righteousness of dependence, the righteousness of submission.

Paul [00:07:24]: The righteousness of the Pharisees was independent, self-congratulatory righteousness. That's why Jesus says [Matthew 5:20], "Unless your righteousness is greater than the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven."

Shelby [00:07:40]: Yes, that's terrifying and also like, "What is he... what exactly is he talking about here? Who could do that?"

Paul [00:07:47]: And ask yourself the question: do you find moments in conversation where you want to stick in something good that you've done and you're parading it in front of people? Conversations between Christians can degenerate into spiritual one-upmanship.

Shelby [00:08:07]: Yes, that happens a lot even in the missionary world. I remember having those conversations as a young missionary with another single young missionary, talking about how many hours we worked in a week and like, "Well, I did this," and, "I worked 70 hours this week because of blah blah blah," and I didn't even realize that I was doing it. I think back on it now, I'm like, I was trying to one-up the guy, make myself feel better.

Paul [00:08:33]: As a pastor of a small church, it's one of the things I hate about going to pastors' conferences because you'd go out to eat with a bunch of guys; it was like a spitting contest, and I had a small church. Not much to brag about. Hard work and being a pastor in Scranton was like being a pastor in the Middle East. It was this hardened Catholic culture, and no one was interested in hearing the gospel.

Shelby [00:09:16]: Probably easy for you to talk about the ways that you suffered then. It would come naturally to you to be able to talk about that.

Paul [00:09:23]: But so there's a beautiful definition of greatness and of the active righteousness that should be part of our lives, and it is that it's born out of utter submission and utter dependence. The Pharisees were submitting to no one.

Paul [00:09:55]: In fact, they were rewriting God's law, and it wasn't dependent. It was flagrantly independent, and Jesus is saying to his disciples, "You see that every day. That's not it. That's not what I'm calling you to," and, Shelby, even evangelism can be Pharisaical.

Shelby [00:10:22]: Oh, for sure.

Paul [00:10:23]: It can be arrogant, and pride in your righteousness, and your prideful righteousness will never bring anybody to Jesus.

Shelby [00:10:35]: No. In the context of the conversation and talking about the conversation afterward, we like to talk about how our experiences were within Cru, the organization I work for, after we do evangelism, and it can easily turn into a spitting contest.

Shelby [00:10:53]: It could very easily go, "I had this conversation, this guy rejected me," or, "I led this person to the Lord," and while I understand why it's easy to do those kinds of things, we've got to resist the temptation to make it about us.

Paul [00:11:09]: So that's the first piece. It's not that prideful, independent righteousness, self-rule righteousness; but there's a second piece. It's not just external righteousness. It's righteousness of the heart. It's a matter of the heart. That obedience begins with thoughts, desires, intentions, motivations, choices, decisions.

Paul [00:11:44]: It's only when there's obedience of the heart that there'll be the true obedience that Jesus is calling us to. The members of your body will only ever go where your heart has already gone. So in saying your righteousness must not be the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus is laying claim to our hearts.

Paul [00:12:10]: "I want your thoughts. I want your desires. I want your intentions because if I don't own the core of who you are [the heart is the core of your personhood] if I don't own the core of who you are, I don't own you."

Shelby [00:12:29]: Yes, and you've been a huge advocate of this and really taught me that you are your heart. Everything flows from the heart because if you want to find boundaries about what you're supposed to do on the outside, you can correct those things; but ultimately, if your heart is bad in that process, it doesn't count.

Paul [00:12:49]: And as we move through The Sermon on the Mount, we're going to see Jesus teaching in multiple ways the centrality of the heart in human life and one of those things he wants the disciples to understand because they had seen, if I could say this, heartless religiosity (not heartless in terms it was mean, it was mean and we'll see that) but it was heartless in terms it wasn't a sacrifice of the heart.

Paul [00:13:21]: It wasn't "God, I offer you my thoughts. I offer you my desires; I offer you my intentions. I offer you my choices." That is now committing yourself to a truly righteous life because it's not just external obedience, and let me say, parents, that's what you want to form in your children.

Paul [00:13:49]: Don't teach them to be Pharisees. Don't teach them how to play the obedience game to get your favor when there's no heart behind it, to parrot respectful words when they don't actually respect you. Teach the theology of the heart to your children.

Paul [00:14:07]: That's what you want, husbands and wives. You don't want to whip your spouse into order, so they do the things that make you happy because you can do that. You can have a marriage where you learn to put pressure on one another to get the other person to behave. That's Pharisee righteousness. That's not what God's called us to. That's not what God honors. That's not a truly righteous marriage in any way, shape, or form.

Shelby [00:14:33]: Yes, you're building robots when that happens, either with your kids or with your spouse, and you know that's not a true heart inside of a robot. You're just doing behavior modification, making sure that they slip into whatever requirements that you have for them.

Paul [00:14:48]: So I want to take us to a passage then, that really describes what we're talking about. It's Matthew 23, Christ confronting the Pharisees.

²³Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. ²⁴You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!

²⁵Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. ²⁶You blind Pharisee[s]! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, [and] the outside also may be clean.

Now, no one talked to the Pharisees this way.

Shelby [00:15:52]: Nobody.

Paul [00:15:54]: So, Jesus is rising as the authoritative Messiah and speaks in this moment, but I want to go to the very end of this. "For you clean the outside of the cup and plate." That's externalism. "But the inside, they are full of greed and self-indulgence."

Paul [00:16:15]: Imagine you've had a thick soup for dinner and everybody's eating as much as they can eat, but the soup is sort of stuck to the inside of the bowl and your wife, Rachael, cleans the outside of the bowls and puts them back into the cupboard. You would think, "What is going on here?"

Paul [00:16:44]: That's the Pharisees, always polishing the outside when the inside is full of moral, ethical dirtiness. Then he says this. ²⁶... First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, [and] the outside also [becomes] clean.

Paul [00:17:01]: You can't do that with your dishes at home. You can't clean the inside of that bowl, and the outside will magically become clean, but that's exactly [what] happens with the heart. When the heart is clean, the behavior begins to become clean.

Paul [00:17:19]: So that illustration, just as a reinforcement of what this passage is teaching, that your righteousness must be greater than the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, it must be a righteousness of the heart that's reinforcing, again, that the burden of the law has been lifted, the requirement of the law still remains, and the requirement of the law is a heart requirement.

Shelby [00:17:43]: Good, yes, love that. And you might hear that and feel the burden of, like, "How do I do that?" which the question itself is somewhat self-reliant.

Paul [00:18:01]: I mean, every thought and intention of my heart?

Shelby [00:18:04]: Yes, impossible. Not possible.

Paul [00:18:08]: Do I go through a day? Well, that's not the question. Do I go through ten minutes? Do I go through a minute? And so, here's the encouragement I want to leave...

Shelby [00:18:24]: Yes, where's the hope?

Paul [00:18:24]: ... us with. This is Philippians 2:12-13.

¹²Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence [this is Paul speaking], work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

And I go, "There it goes again. Where's the encouragement, Paul?"

Shelby [00:18:42]: Yes, "Do it, do it. Get it done," yes.

Paul [00:18:43]: ¹³For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

Shelby [00:18:51]: So great.

Paul [00:18:53]: So God is at work. He has covenantly committed himself to be at work to produce in us righteousness. God is at work even when I'm not. That's such a beautiful thing. It's the incessant ministry of grace, grace upon grace, that God has now inhabited me by his Spirit, and he works inside of me so that I would have the desire and the ability to do what is good.

Shelby [00:19:29]: Yes, it's not "buckle down and get it done yourself". It's "submit to God and allow him to do it through you".

Paul [00:19:35]: Burden lifted, requirement remains: the requirements of the heart, but I'm not without help because God now inhabits my heart, and he empowers me to obey.

Shelby [00:19:46]: Amen.