Authentic Righteousness: Living in Relationship with the Father

He has come, Matthew tells us, to establish the kingdom of God in which He is king. He has been appointed publicly in His baptism as the king who is stepping onto the arena of history. In a sense, Jesus' baptism is a kind of miniature coronation, is it not? "You are my Son, you are the king to whom I am going to give the kingdoms of this world." [00:37:40]

In Christ, the Law is fulfilled and then in His disciples, the Law reaches a much deeper fulfillment than was ever seen in the scribes and the Pharisees. So, if we wanted one big word to help us think about what is in chapter 5, I think it would be the word "fulfillment." [02:51:42]

He now focuses our attention on a second big word, and it is all over the sixth chapter. I will return to that in a moment, you can think for a little as you listen about what is the big word of Matthew chapter 6? In the first half of the chapter, He deals with the practice of religion. [03:48:62]

He speaks about our motivation in our discipleship, He speaks about the result of our discipleship, and He speaks about the losses that there may be in our discipleship. He says this over and over again. He is saying the hypocrites -- "hypocrite" as you know is the Greek word for the actor in the Greek dramas. [06:34:94]

Jesus is saying, and I think you would see rightly that the more intense people sometimes are in their religious activities, the more prone they may be to this kind of hypocrisy, to keep up the standards for the sake of appearance. And so, Jesus deals with people's motivation and in this case He says, "You know, they are really doing it in order to be seen by men." [07:22:85]

He states they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners. They are so pious, but not only do you see them like the Pharisee going to the temple, but they are just walking down the street and then there is just the little gesticulation, and the eyes raised heavenwards, and they begin to pray. [09:53:89]

Now if you just glance down these first 18 verses of Matthew chapter 6, if my arithmetic is correct, you will notice that Jesus uses the word "Father" no less than 10 times. In verse 1, "your Father in heaven." In verse 4, "your Father who sees in secret." In verse 6, "Pray to your Father," and again in verse 6, "your Father will reward you." [12:46:53]

You will not find a group of 18 verses in the Old Testament in which the Lord is referred to in this personal way as "Father" 10 times. You will not find 18 chapters together as a block in the Old Testament in which the heavenly Father is addressed in this way. [13:59:63]

But you simply do not find in the Old Testament Scriptures the kind of references to knowing God as your heavenly Father that the Lord Jesus is speaking about here, and He is saying that this is the essential problem, and knowing God as your heavenly Father is the essential remedy for this problem of pharisaical hypocrisy. [16:15:62]

And then when you think about it, it is only when the Son is revealed that we would begin to think about the fact that in the Godhead there are three persons. We know the Son. Remember Peter, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," and the implication of that is if He is the Son, then the first person of the Godhead must be the Father. [17:16:14]

What He wants to introduce into the lives of His disciples is a knowledge of the Father that brings them into such intimacy with the Father that their chief concern immediately becomes, "What does my Father think about things? What does my Father think about my life?" And as I am taken up with Him, then less and less am I going to be concerned with what anybody else thinks about my life. [18:04:92]

We give because we love the Father, and we give because we share something of the heartbeat of the Father towards the needy. So in giving, we are not giving out of a motivation of what is in it for me. We are giving because the Father has opened our hearts, and we begin to see people with the Father's eyes and we want, as it were, to extend the riches He has given to us to others. [19:35:61]