Page 12 - Demo

Jesus wasn’t trying to discourage His followers. He was showing them that righteousness wasn’t the problem. The problem was the way Pharisees sought it. They thought they knew how to get it. They thought you could do it on your own. In fact, they had come up with a checklist of several hundred rules to follow. Just check all the boxes, and God will be pleased with you. That is legalism.
Rejecting legalism doesn’t mean rejecting righteousness. Jesus is telling His followers that they need righ- teousness and that it comes from a different source than they realized.
We live in an age where we sometimes focus exclusively on God’s grace and forgiveness. But God’s forgive- ness and grace mean nothing without His righteousness. Without his righteousness, there is nothing to for- give. God cares about right behavior. He does so not out of a sense of Pharisaical rule keeping, but because righteousness produces life. The wages of sin is death. Sin produces death in our lives. God desires us to have life, so He desires us to be righteous.
Some people mistakenly believe that righteousness is not important for the Christian. We just have to receive the gift of Jesus. The truth is that righteousness IS the gift that Jesus came to give. The issue isn’t whether righteousness is important. The issue is how you get it. In Romans 1:17-17, Paul says that righteousness comes not by trying to follow rules but by being close to the one who is righteous: “16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.”
Righteousness doesn’t mean being right. It means being in right relationship. All the other words we use to describe it, such as virtue or ethics or morals, convey the idea that it is something we do for ourselves, by ourselves, and that we can be good on our own if we try hard enough. Righteousness doesn’t work apart from relationship with God; that is why Paul said that he is “not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” and that the salvation the Gospel gives is simply the “righteousness of God.” Righteousness doesn’t mean trying to be good; it means learning to abide in Christ.
This is why Jesus told his followers, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Pharisees thought righteousness was achieved by one’s own effort. Jesus is telling them that righteousness does bring life, but it comes through being connected with the One who is the source of life.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
1. What does it mean that Jesus came to fulfill the law? How did He fulfill it? How is fulfilling the law different from abolishing or endorsing it?
2. How do we sometimes misunderstand what righteousness is?
3. Where did the Pharisees think righteousness came from? Why were they wrong?
4. What did Jesus mean that our righteousness should surpass the Pharisees?
5. How can we seek righteousness without becoming Pharisees ourselves?
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