We wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings this year! Even with all the craziness we have experienced in 2020, please make sure you take the time to be thankful for the good things that God has blessed you with! Happy Thanksgiving!
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!
I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.
The next two topics addressed in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew both are centered on relationships. One is internal, and the other is more external.
Many of the topics that Jesus address in this passage are topics that are covered in the Old Testament Scriptures. The Jewish people would have known these laws and rules quite well, and the Pharisees were known for keeping the Law to the letter as perfectly as they could. However, Jesus turns all of that upside down and makes the keeping of rules a matter of the heart.
He did that clearly with the topic of murder and anger. Now he turns to a couple of more intimate relational topics: adultery and divorce.
After the Beatitudes at the beginning of Matthew 5, the rest of the chapter is filled with short snippets of texts that are very familiar to our ears. The first one that Jesus addresses is the topic of anger.
“You have heard it said…” That’s how Jesus introduces many of these topics. And for most of his hearers, they had heard it said. They would have been very familiar with the Mosaic Law, and for those who were part of the Council, the Sanhedrin, they would have been intimately familiar with it. They knew it frontwards and backwards. But they were missing the point.
Moses had given them this Law, and had done so while the nation of Israel was encamped around Mount Sinai, after the exodus from Egypt. But even though it came through Moses, he wasn’t the author… God was.
Jesus is about to turn their understanding of both the Law and its Author completely upside down.
He takes a phrase that they would have known well, “You shall not commit murder” (Exodus 20:13; Matthew 5:21), and completely reinterprets it. Murder was wrong, God had told them so when the Law was given.
But Jesus then states, “But I say to you…” He gives a new understanding of the Law. And he does it with the forceful authority of the Lawgiver, God himself. His hearers, especially those in the religious council, would have heard both messages quite clearly: Jesus was giving them a new understanding of the passage, and he was claiming to be God in the process.
Habits. We all have them. Good and bad. Many of the bad habits we work hard to break, or at least reduce their influence in our lives. And we often set goals to build better habits into our lives in place of them. They are a key part of our lives, either way. And one of the most foundational spiritual habits that we can develop is hanging out with God.
Do you have what many people call a “quiet time” with God? I have never really liked that term. I always seem to associate “quiet time” with my mom wanting me to calm down so she could have some quiet. So she would send me off to be quiet for a while with a book or something.
Later, as I grew in my faith, I kept hearing people talk about “quiet times.” Frankly, that never appealed to me because of that association I had in my mind. When I later learned to call it something else, a whole new aspect of my relationship with God was opened up to me. I started to call it, “hanging out with God.”
After all, that’s what I do with my friends. That’s what I do with people from our church. That’s a big part of my life, really. I hang out with others. And because of that, those relationships are deepened and richer as a result. So why wouldn’t that work in my relationship with God?
It does.
For the past few months, spiritual disciplines have been heavy in my thoughts. There are several reasons for this, I think, and examining this has led me to make some stronger choices in this area of my life.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused me to pause and think. After all, I have had a little more time since so much of our culture has shut down or been restricted in some way because of this virus.
On top of that, I have been preaching a sermon series for the last several weeks called Spiritual Makeover: Becoming Who God Created You To Be. In this series, I have been looking at several disciplines and characteristics that God wants to develop in our lives to more fully become who he has designed us to be. The characteristics are quality he instill in us, but the disciplines are more of the part we play in the process.
And when you add to this equation the time I spent in Colorado last month with several other ministers, digging into this very idea, and these very disciplines, you can begin to see why this has been dominating my thoughts so much.
And because it has been so much on my mind, there have been some changes in the way I approach many of these areas. I have improved myself in many ways, and have seen some significant growth in some areas. Other areas are already stronger, and these have received more of an encouragement booster in my life to continue on as I am. Either way, I have been seeing some encouraging growth in my life for several weeks now, and I hope that it is evident to those who are watching.