Lenny 0:02

Welcome to Waking Up to Grace, where we cut through religious noise, look honestly at scripture, and return to the simplicity of Christ. I'm Lenny. Let's get into it. Anxiety, fear. It's important to look at that in the Sermon on the Mount. If we think we're doing really good and we're sitting around worrying about our life and anxious and self-righteous even, we're failing his message. So at some point we gotta let go of all that and realize that the Sermon on the Mount wasn't designed to give us a list of rules. Alright, so I know this is gonna stir a lot of conversation. So without grace there can't be true peace. We know that. And true peace can't come from anything other than grace. Inner peace is what Paul wished for his audience when he said grace and peace, it served as a steady reminder for those who lived by it to not look away. Right? It only takes a moment to fall, like we've been talking about. But the real question is this does following a set of rules lead us into grace and peace? Or is it something else? And why did nine of the Ten Commandments make it into the apostolic writings? All but the Sabbath? We know Jesus was the Sabbath, most people would agree on that, but they talk about the other nine. You hear say that the law of Moses was a package deal, right? And James points out if we fail at one, we fail at all of it. It's pretty well established. The law is a unit. I was looking around at some views out there, and this actually just kind of came at me, I wasn't even looking for it. I see this view out there, and there's a couple views I want to share with you guys that I came across. One is quoted saying, I believe that the Ten Commandments, as they are interpreted and applied by our Lord and his apostles in the New Testament scriptures, are a real and essential part of our rule of life. In other words, and this is me just summing it up, in other words, these commandments pertain to the new covenant that we have in Christ, and they basically carry over, just not attached to the law of Moses anymore as a unit. Can we start seeing where the idea of getting punished for sin could come from all this?

SPEAKER_02 2:23

A little bit.

Lenny 2:24

So taking this idea even further, a site called the Gospel Coalition states Jesus' sermon isn't an impossible ideal to show your need for grace. It's not an impossible ideal to show your need for grace. And they go on to say, a common reading of the sermon, especially within Protestantism, is that its high ethical demands are meant to show us the impossibility of being good, thus creating a crisis that makes us flee to Christ for his grace and imputed righteousness. Jesus' call to never lust or hate, turn the other cheek when attacked, do pious acts with perfect God centered motives, not worry about the future, and never judge others, all of these are impossible to do perfectly. This shows us our desperate need for Christ's saving work in our lives. So the story goes. While the impossibility of earning salvation and the need for radical grace are true from a whole Bible perspective, this misses the genre point and goal of the sermon. The sermon is not to use Luther's overly reductionist categories law that make us see our need for gospel, rather it's wisdom from God inviting us through faith to reorient our values, vision, and habits, from the ways of external righteousness to wholeheartedness towards God. This isn't law, but gospel. Jesus is inviting us into life in God's kingdom both now and in the future age. This is grace. No one can perfectly perform the vision of the sermon, except Jesus, but this doesn't mean it's irrelevant to our lives. By faith and through grace, Jesus is inviting us into a practical life of discipleship. We participate in and imperfectly imitate his father trusting, kingdom awaiting way of being in the world. I just quickly interject. The funny thing about this statement from my view is that after a long section on sin, Jesus' own words contradict the statement he just made because Jesus actually said be perfect. So hold that thought for a minute though. The author continues Now standing in this grace, believers respond to Jesus' invitation in the sermon. Our habits and ways of being are deconstructed and reformed through his teachings and model. Being a disciple is the appropriate and necessary response to God's amazing grace, and the sermon plays a crucial role in that. And then here comes the end part. I haven't yet memorized the entirety of the sermon, much to my regret, but I regularly take long walks and recall and recite the portions that I have memorized. I'm always amazed at the fresh power and the new insights, and the cross canonical connections that flood my mind. Things that I never noticed despite multiple readings and through literary study. This is why the sermon was written. Try it. End of quotes. So I'm just gonna quickly give my thoughts on this and then I'm gonna open it up if that's okay with you guys. I see these concepts at the heart of today's Protestant church doctrines. If you don't hear these teachings in your church or something similar, you might not be paying attention. You might be being captivated by your bastard's pious looks rather than the words that he's saying. That may sound snarky, but you know it's happening out there. These teachings sound very pious and alluring. I would even go as far as to say genuine. These people are not necessarily trying to deceive us. In my opinion, they're often trying to help. But this is the pit that's laid out before us and our teachers. Genuine as they may be, they're leading us right into it. When Jesus lays out his teaching on the law and scripture, detailing lust, anger, divorce, revenge, and love for enemies, he ends by saying, Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. I believe this was very intentional, just as everything said was very intentional. Who is he surrounded by? His disciples and a crowd of Jewish people, right? These people, including the disciples, had grown accustomed to rule keeping. As Jesus taught what we can see as the heart of God, it is as if he fully understood the heart of man and abruptly shattered it right at the core. The audience was likely ready to put it on paper and make a set of rules out of it almost immediately. So this is what teachers like those I quoted have done today without realizing the trap they've laid for themselves and those who adhere to their interpretation of the words of Jesus. They give you the rules, and they set you up for forever failure, saying we'll never be perfect, so do the best you can. But Jesus said be perfect. Why did he say that? It was to those that were ready to put a pen and paper and make a set of rules. Then we get a chapter break going into chapter six, but it's all the same teaching. Jesus doesn't suddenly abandon what he was saying and begin an unrelated subject. Ironically, he continues by addressing self-righteousness, worry, anxiety, the very things produced in those who adhere to the principles of a rule keeping righteousness. It's not a coincidence that Lord Jesus addressed self righteousness and anxiety after delivering his teaching on sin at the heart level of man, knowing that most would turn what he said into a list of measures. They most certainly did this immediately in their minds. Jesus knew the heart of man. Paul himself, if you look at Romans 5.20, Paul said that law came in to increase trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. So you see two Christians, saved by grace, can read the same sermon on the mount, and one turns it into a list of rules that he imposes on himself and others, and the other desires to draw wisdom from the words of Jesus simply because he sees value in them. Can you see the difference? So what are the dangers? What are the dangers in seeing the discipleship view that was presented? I think that's the opposite of grace. And the perception is they're like dancing and towing the line with these teachings. Don't they just sound good? And when I started looking at the article, I was like, oh, he's he's actually saying it's not how I see it. Okay, this is interesting. Let's let's read further. And by the end of the article, I had this big weight on my shoulders.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Hmm.

Lenny 8:56

Yeah. I'm just like, wow, that was really heavy. I I was allured by his piousness. And then all of a sudden the weight set in, and I realized where the weight was coming from. Like, something's not right about this. It sounds good, but it's not good. And the funny thing is, he started out the whole writing by announcing how he was blessed to be able to spend his whole life studying the Sermon on the Mount and days and years of time put into it so that he could interpret it for us.

Jack 9:25

Yeah, nice of him, wasn't it?

Lenny 9:27

So he starts out by making me small and then ends in the middle, I'm being allured by his good deeds, because he sounds good. He's uh what's wrong with wanting to follow the words of Jesus? But that misinterpretation drifts us right off of the path of grace, doesn't it? It does. And I don't think a lot of people can see that line. What do you think, Jack? I think that people miss that that fine line.

Jack 9:54

Well, it's all like based on teaching from a lot of that stuff, in that people see what they want to see or what they're directed to see. And uh the Sermon on the Mount uh brings out so much. It's it's such a great uh elixir for individuals because it really reveals their heart. Just as you said, you put it perfectly there at the beginning when you were talking about uh how people perceived what was being said in different points and how Jesus confronted them about real things and actually sort of led them to a place of helplessness. I mean, it's like the guy who goes out the door, you don't have any money, but you don't say anything to anybody about it. A guy comes to visit you, and uh on the way out the door he says, Don't forget to pick up milk and bread and you don't have any money. That's sort of what Jesus did on the Sermon on the Mount. He put people in a place of lack. This is again my perspective of the whole thing. So exactly what you had was sharing is uh is is what I was thinking, right? How much is there that Jesus offered that they could really see? The grace perspective is always based on relationship and everything else uh is based on piety. So uh those who have been awakened to grace go back and read that and they understand the fact that Jesus is talking about an impossibility that can only be restored with grace relationship.

Lenny 11:28

Yes.

Jack 11:28

But the pious crowd goes back and read it and think, oh, there's gotta be a better way of us uh attaining this. There's gotta be a way to a way for us to attain what he's talking about so we can have a measured mistake. Relationship is what it's all about. Grace and relationship cannot be separated.

Lenny 11:45

Yep.

Jack 11:46

Because grace is Jesus and relationship is Jesus.

Lenny 11:51

And I think people would hear a grace message or somebody talking about it in such ways and it and their mind can only perceive you as saying as promoting as if you don't think that those desires are good. Like what are you trying to say? This is the Lord's heart being revealed here. You don't think that those are good desires to have?

Jack 12:14

Yes.

Lenny 12:15

That's not what we're pointing. We're not pointing to the desires to please the Lord, who is our greatest relationship in this life. We're porting to the desires that don't come from making a list of that and setting a bar. And there's just such a crucial difference there.

Jack 12:31

One of the bottom line things that I always think about is this whole sin thing. Sin's overrated. You know, that's my personal view again. So sin is overrated because it's been dealt with. But the world in its piety wants to bring sin to the surface. The socials carry that constantly, the sin thing. It's that competition. Those of us in the grace community look at that and say, that's all you got. That's all you have is this sin thing. But the sin that separates you has been taken care of. The sin that we have now is the frailty of our life, the frailty of humanity.

Lenny 13:10

Yeah, and it's not that we disagree with the moral views. No! It's how we perceive it, though, and it's how we approach it, and it's how we keep it. And you have one person that says keeping the law means actually being perfectly obedient to it physically, and another person keeping the words of Jesus is just holding them in our hearts as value. We value them and we keep them in our hearts. That's keeping the commands of Christ. Yeah. Keeping them in mind, we're keeping them at heart. We're not literally physically keeping them because now we just set ourselves up for I'm sorry, Lord, today I failed, I failed, I failed. Yeah. I failed, or look at me, look at me, you should be like me. You can only really go one or the other way. You know, I mean, otherwise, what are you? Just in the middle? You're a mediocre Christian. You're doing pretty good. I'm satisfied here. I'm just gonna sit in the in the audience and be mediocre. But none of us are mediocre, according to Christ.

Jack 14:12

We're totally accepted. We're totally accepted. So that mindset of being totally accepted blows away the piety of religion. Because they always want to fight to be accepted by keeping the law. But there is none. That's why Jesus said, I'll I'll teach about grace. I'll say, Listen, the most important thing is I'll tell you what, you love God and love your neighbor. See, I gotta go now. And everybody says, Okay, so uh what's that mean?

Lenny 14:43

Exactly.

Jack 14:44

What am I supposed to do? Not who am I? The true gospel states the place of the believer, not the job duty, the place, the placement. It's who we are as we go through our day. It's who we are when we see the squirrel on the fence, it's who we are when we're in the oil burner, it's who we are when somebody uh cuts us off as we're driving. I was taught when I grew up that sin made God sad, so don't do it. What a ridiculous thing. The psalmist said, hey, any sin that you do does not affect me. And there's a eternal truth to that that says when we miss things, it doesn't affect God, it affects us.

Lenny 15:28

It's not an argument against what you said, but I also think there's a side where we've got to realize that God's an emotional being. Otherwise we don't have a relationship with a real person. It's not that he's sitting there mad at us, because under the new covenant, he's turned his wrath away from us, and so he's working in a different way. So he's working to construct us and form us and sculpt us. If he's like, boy, you know, I I'm so frustrated that Jack's doing that today. He he does something to help us. He's patient, he's merciful, he's all those things. But it doesn't mean he loves when we act out of unbelief, but for some reason he can just uh work it all out for good and still never stop seeing us as accepted. But that doesn't mean he has to be like, you know, that behavior's acceptable. Don't worry, that's cool. There's fine lines there. It's pretty hard to see because grace is so big. It's pretty hard to understand that we have a Lord that can hate sin, and if everything that doesn't come from faith is sin, he can hate sin and still fully accept us and not be guiding us in any kind of way that is trying to justify us before a rule or a set of measures anymore or anything like that. He's using that all patiently, and you think of how patient he was with Israel. How many thousands of years did he deal, you know, with them and all that they were doing? And he waited so long to do the final the final judgment, final destruction of the temple. He was so patient after Christ did his work at the cross to wait to make that final destruction of the temple so that those who would believe could be saved. So patient, you know? And his patience is incredible.

Jack 17:15

Yeah.

Lenny 17:16

But I mean, grieving the spirit, we have to understand that there's a sense of direction going on there. The spirit's like, then he's going the wrong direction. And I'm a little concerned because I care, you know.

SPEAKER_03 17:28

God's an emotional being, but he's not holding the sin against us.

Jack 17:32

What does he use as a measuring stick? What does God use as a measuring stick to say that what we're doing is not acceptable?

Lenny 17:41

It's whatever is faithful, whatever isn't faithful. He knows our heart, so he knows if we're doing something kind of like what Moses did, where he looked both ways and then go went and murdered that guy and had to run and he was scared. Do you think that was a faithful move? Yet he thought he was doing it to help. But he didn't look up. He looked both ways. He wanted to make sure nobody was looking. And then he commits his deed. It wasn't faithful, you know, what he had done. And but what measuring stick, I mean, it's just to me there's there's life and there's death. Yep. And if we're behaving in ways that reflect death, it's not like God doesn't see it. But I I think that as far as helping each other through those things, the Lord is working in us internally, but I also, like in Corinthians, I see God using the church. Paul makes some strong statements with his apostolic authority, if you want to call it that, he calls it that. And making some strong statements, and then at one point he was talking about judgment and things like that, and it can be perceived as God was judging them in some sense. You got these people dying, and there's all these things going on, but what I see, and I I think I've covered that in the Does God Punish Christians message a while back a little bit, and I was wanting to talk on it more again at some point because it's interesting, but I see God using the church to help each other. So if we're in fear and anxiety, uses the church, and that's why it's so important that we're not one being, just led by the Spirit, because when we see that passage about the new creation, we're new creatures or a new creation in Christ. There's a lot to do with this, I'm gonna say corporate perception, but it's not like a corporate business model. I'm saying corporate as in like the body as a whole. Like Paul coming from Israel, Israel was always a whole, a whole unit. If they were gonna purge something, they purged it for the sake of the whole unit, the whole body. They were one people. And so in Christ it's the same way, and we're all essential, we're all valuable. So the new creation is not only us individually, but it's us as the body of Christ, is the new creation. There's a lot of areas where if you look at that perception, Paul saw the church as a whole in a lot of cases, the corporate view of things. There's certain passages where that understanding really helps shed light on things, because you're like, ooh, why is he saying that to one person? But a lot of it's a corporate view. So I think in Corinthians we see God using the church. One interesting thing on that note, in the last several episodes, I kept coming back to the sexually immoral brother, we were talking about that, and I kept drifting into that because I we were looking at that, and I just had some interesting thoughts on it. And if we look at that immoral brother, and you think about Paul's perception as a Pharisee, that immoral brother, what did the immoral brother deserve for what he had done under law? And Paul had been a Pharisee not that long ago. It's actually pretty striking. Leviticus 20, verse 11, death was prescribed for a man who slept with his father's wife. But yeah, Paul, he completely dealt with it differently. It was like, oh, you know, why don't you just let him be in the world a little while because he'll come around? And he depended on the spirit to bring him back, as we talked about. But the cultural background study Bible said something interesting that struck Melissa, and she said that they suggested that there was a possibility that that immoral brother in Corinth was somebody that way they would have seen as high standing, like possibly somebody that spoke among them a little more than another, maybe a leader or an elder. And if we mix that reality with the fact that they were meeting in synagogues and going into meeting places that had Jewish people and Jewish leadership, and as we saw at the Jerusalem Council, they were asked to behave accordingly around Jews, respectfully, because they were all supposed to be reflected. Christ together. So it's like, okay, don't do those things that the Jews are going to go crazy over, right? I mean, think about the implications of what could have really been going on there that we don't see in the reality of that church where maybe the word was going to go around in the synagogues or in some of these Jewish meeting places that this brother was doing this stuff and he was a leader, and Paul's like, you can't lead like that. You can't lead the Christian movement. You can't go speaking in synagogues and sleeping with your father's wife. And having that be a known thing, you're gonna get us all in a lot of trouble here and lead to, you know, some real bad problems. That's gonna reflect the gospel really poorly. Think about the magnitude of that. So when Paul comes to speak in the synagogue, they're not gonna take him seriously, you know. So I think there's a lot of historical things. I just wanted to bring that up because I think that the magnitude of that problem could be so much greater than what we see just reading it quickly. There's so many details often missing. We were just like, oh, I wish he could have given me a better window into that, you know?

Jack 23:07

Yeah, I think Paul, what Paul was really projecting to the church was that they could not dictate that man's life. And his decision was something he was going to have to live through. And Paul was like the grandfather, you know, that the that the uh son or daughter goes to and says, Oh, I'm so concerned about my son. I mean, they are really living a riotous life and everything. And Grandpa says, Give him some time. Give him some time. Sort of simplifies it for me, that Paul was confident in the grace of God. He's confident in the ability of the grace of God. See, that's the thing that that's the thing that is paramount as we grow in grace, is releasing those things and allowing God to be the personal God He professed to be. The more I deal with my Father and my Creator in my life, and see the grace that he's given to me, the more I'm able to allow him to do it in Lenny's life, in Melissa's life, with confidence. See, he changed me, he's transformed me. He's doing it on an ongoing basis, and I'm sure because of that, the reality of Christ in me, the hope of glory, is doing the same thing in Lenny's life, in Melissa's life, and all your lives. That's a confidence that we hold to because grace is unsurmountable. I I wrestle with ways to convey that to individuals that would cause a release in their life.

Lenny 24:39

Do you know that passage um offhand where uh I think it was Paul that wrote it, he said to be careful if you're trying to help your brother out of sin, but be careful that you don't get snared as well. It doesn't consume you that you don't get snared as well.

Jack 24:55

Yeah.

Lenny 24:56

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So I think that that passage is critical when it comes to us going too far judging people, and speaks on what you're saying. The trap that we fall into, if we lose sight of how we're operating under grace and start going off the checklist of the Sermon on the Mount and judging, we have to be careful how we do that. Paul's perception was that grace would bring him back. So yeah, even despite all that I'm saying, you put it even simpler. It doesn't even have to be any of those things, but it could be.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Yeah.

Lenny 25:29

The whole main point is exactly what you said is that he trusted grace to bring him back, not rules and regulations. If we start using that, uh it starts to turn into a discipleship program of our own. I think that's the trap that happens if we're helping our brothers out of sin. We have to be careful not to get caught up in that kind of an attitude or that kind of mentality. Like, why can't they behave like me? Yeah. I overcame that. It's easy. Come on, what are you doing?

Jack 25:58

It's sort of like this the husband and wife and the toothpaste cap. And the whole thing about the wife going in and seeing that the cap of the toothpaste is off. So she puts it on for the first six months. And then it really starts to get to her. And so she says to her husband, Would you just put the cap on the toothpaste, please? For the next six months. She keeps saying it, he does it sometimes, he doesn't do it sometimes. Then she walks into the grace message and she realizes that it's not what she infers on her husband, it's what she's responsible for in her life. So she stops saying anything about the toothpaste, she forgets about the toothpaste. She's involved in God's grace in her life. Six months later, she looks back and realizes about three months ago, her husband was always putting the top back on the toothpaste. That's grace. That's how grace works. I gotta go. Hey, you guys, great being with you.

SPEAKER_03 26:54

You too.

Lenny 26:55

Grace and peace to you.

SPEAKER_03 26:56

Thank you for sharing today with us.

Lenny 26:58

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Okay, you've been listening to Waking Up to Grace. Find the companion study and continue the conversation at wakinguptograce.com. Remember that the work is finished and rest confidently in Christ and keep waking up to grace.