And more particularly, people tend to make what Mary Poppins calls “pie crust promises”-easily made and easily broken. You will be able to rely on him doing what he said he would do.īut not everyone tells the truth. The OT teaches that a person following God, an honest person, will fulfill their promises. Numbers 30:2 When a man makes a vow to the LORD or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said. It already existed in Abraham’s day, over 500 years before Moses.īut the law picks us the practice and talks about the significance of making an oath.
The story of the Old Testament is full of examples-oaths are mentioned almost 200 times! This practice didn’t begin with the law. Matthew 5 Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.'Īn oath was a solemn promise someone made to indicate that they were telling the truth. Just as he did with the previous subjects, Jesus begins with what his followers already knew about telling the truth from the Old Testament. Today we’re going to talk about the fourth of these six contrasts as Jesus teaches us about truth. Although the Bible allows divorce, God’s intention is that we remain faithful to our spouses even when things get difficult. It’s also against the law just to entertain the desire to have an affair with someone else. Next, we saw that Jesus taught that it’s not only against the law to cheat on your spouse.
It’s also wrong to maintain unresolved anger toward another person.
Jesus says it’s not just the external behavior of murder that’s wrong. Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about three of these comparisons.
In each case, he calls us, his followers, to commit ourselves not just to obeying the external requirements of the law, but also to allowing the Kingdom Code to govern our thoughts, our motives and our attitudes. Jesus talks about anger, sexual desire, divorce, lying, revenge, and hatred. Matthew 5 contains six comparisons between this “external performance” and the “internal obedience” that God desires. We also need to honor God with our thoughts, our motives and our attitudes-the inner things only God can know about us. Jesus says it’s not enough to avoid certain external sinful behaviors. When he says something is off limits, we believe that he’s got our best interests at heart and that he’s trying to spare us from the pain and destruction that sin would produce if we gave it the chance.īut as Jesus lays out the Kingdom Code, it becomes obvious that he is explaining not just the letter of the law, but also the spirit of the law, the law’s intent. The reason we follow the rules is because we are already in the kingdom and we trust God to tell us the truth. If you remember, we don’t follow the rules to get into the kingdom-the only way to get in is by trusting in what Jesus has done for us. This particular section of the handbook is about The Kingdom Code, the rules we ought to follow as citizens of the kingdom. This passage is part of the Sermon on the Mount, what we’re calling, “The Kingdom Handbook” because in it Jesus teaches his followers about life in God’s kingdom. 23, where Jesus talks about the importance of telling the truth. Today we’re studying Matthew 5:33-37 and a related passage in Mat.
In third grade I remember getting back a homework assignment the teacher had graded…
In fact, that skill, which begins so early in our life, was never allowed to fully develop in me. (I didn’t know Jesus could hit so hard!) Unfortunately, I’m not saying that I’ve always been completely honest, but for the rest of my life, I remembered that lesson. (I’m quite sure that it wasn’t the first lie I told, because we all start much earlier than that.) But the first one I remember, I was playing with a friend in the yard in front of the house, when my Dad came home… I was about 6 when I told the first lie I remember telling. Just after we learn to talk, we learn to lie. We just have a natural talent for it, that blossoms automatically when we are really young. We don’t even need to have it modeled by someone else. If you think about it, it’s one of the first skills we learn all by ourselves, usually without the assistance of any parent or teacher.