Matthew 5:21-26 - The Heart is the Horse
This past Sunday, Nick preached on our next section of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus calls out our anger and the deeper underlying issues it points to. Remember when looking at the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus isn’t merely adding to or reiterating old laws, He’s challenging assumptions about what is or isn’t righteous behavior to point to what’s most important: the heart.
What Jesus uses to challenge their understanding of righteousness here is connecting anger and murder. We know the Old Testament law, specifically the Ten Commandments, set the standard that murder is wrong (Exodus 20:13). What Jesus is doing then is showing the real issue is not whether you’ve literally stabbed someone, but what is your heart towards others. Taking that idea further He calls out our attitude of superiority over others when we get angry and call them derogatory names, which demonstrates our sinful hearts and minds where that attitude has festered.
What is really being called out is that God isn’t concerned with merely our actions, but our heart. If only actions mattered then Christianity would be a religion based around behavior modification, and not heart transformation, as Paul tells us in passages like 2 Cor. 5:17 “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” Like Nick said on Sunday, “The heart transformed will change your behavior; behavior transformed gives false security.” That’s why Jesus did not come preaching new ways of following rules, but preaching new life, starting with a transformed heart.
The Bottom Line from Sunday was this: Salvation is the reconciliation of the heart to God, through the settlement of our debt, by Christ’s death for us. What the human heart often misses, such as the Pharisees of Jesus’ day did, is that God isn’t looking for boxes to be checked, but for prideful hearts to bend the knee to Him, our loving and righteous Creator. The restoration of the divine-human relationship is the central theme of the Bible from beginning to end (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).
“Salvation is the reconciliation of the heart to God, through the settlement of our debt, by Christ’s death for us.”
This reconciliation has always been the need and the point of God’s work of redemption, of which Jesus is the completion, as we saw last week when looking at Matthew 5:17. That means without the work of Christ on the cross on our behalf and through the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts through faith, we ourselves cannot complete the two main things Jesus points us towards, loving God and loving people, and sharing the Gospel (the Greatest Commandments, the Great Commission, The Lord’s Prayer). All the law and prophets are fulfilled in Jesus, and all the law and prophets are summarized by the Greatest Commandments, that’s why true heart change is really the only thing Jesus points to as the fruit of salvation, and without it there would be no way for us to actually live out the Greatest Commandments. This is why using anger as an example in the Sermon on the Mount works so well. How can you truly love God or people created in His image if you hold hate in your heart or speak hurtful words towards others? We all struggle with it, and the only way to truly overcome it is through a genuine heart change. And as Nick pointed out on Sunday, just like you don’t want to put the cart before the horse, you don’t want to put behavior change over heart change.
Jesus did not come preaching new ways of following rules, but preaching new life, starting with a transformed heart.
On the topic of reconciliation, I preached last summer on the Ministry of Reconciliation, and how the message of reconciliation is the relational aspect of the Gospel, and how it tears down the walls of separation between the individual and God and between individuals and each other. I have been posting summary articles of points from those sermons, and will be posting a few more in coming weeks.