Good Morning Friends,
Today’s lectionary selection is a bit of a challenge to reconcile. Like our very lives we see through a glass darkly. We are to see through the heart, but our emotions are so confusing. Thankfully, God has been working on you and me from the beginning. And if we look back over your lives, especially the grace received and shared, and not get hung up in the pitfalls and reliving of the guilt of the sins committed, a new way of thinking might be revealed to us. Hopefully, we will see that Christ’s faith in us does not renounce its roots and yet graphs us on to a way in which we can live, grow new branches, and leaves to ultimately bear fruit. And when we come to this knowledge of God, the veil is taken away, the blinders are off, and we are changed! The hope is that we no longer see things through our human eyes alone, but we can see more clearly, through the heart of love in the Spirit of Christ. So, this morning while it is still dark, I am exploring some difficult passages from Matthew seen in the light of the life of Christ as shared by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians and ask at the corner of confidence and humility: What Does It Mean To Live Our Lives Gloriously Unveiled?
Scripture: Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory! Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory; for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory!
2 Corinthians 3:4-11 (NRSV)
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:17-19 (NRSV)
But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:7 (NRSV)
The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse— who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9 (NRSV)
Message: Living an unveiled lifestyle, that Christ has made possible, is the way in which we experience the fullness of what is available to us in our restored relationship with God. It is the lifestyle of faith with Holy Spirit power where we encounter the divine in a relationship that transforms. Friends, when we live our lives considering the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, we begin to experience how we can glorify God through the purpose God brings to us too. God longs for us to walk in intimacy directly connected to his wellspring of love. The goal is to experience a more tangible, loving, and powerful connection with our heavenly Father through the life of Jesus revealed in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are to be sanctified in Christ as new creations. The problem is that if we are busy with our false humility and caught up in our past offenses, we are not reaching our potential of how God might want to deploy us for Saintly purposes. So too, if we are busy beating ourselves up about something that we did years ago we fall into an evil trap. God does not want us to be stuck in the past, reliving our sinful nature every day. Jesus would have us celebrate our place in the family of God and shine our light for all to see! You see from the inside out that Jesus has given us through the Holy Spirit the fulfillment of a true relationship with the Father. The Pharisees were interested in external obedience and making their lives conforming to the letter of the law, but the righteousness that pleases God is not outward, but the righteousness that comes from within our cleaned and clear hearts. This is about heart righteousness, just as God foretold it would be with the institution of the New Covenant. God said that it was not going to be like the covenant He made with Moses, where the law was written to tablets of stone, a covenant they broke time and time again, but rather it would be new covenant, where the same laws would be written on our hearts and placed within our minds.
And So, it is that Jesus came to fulfill the Law in this new way, and that the Law was fulfilled in Him. Friends, living our lives gloriously unveiled means following Jesus with obedience to the Spirit and with love of each other. It means being honest. We inherently know that rules do not make people good. We see it with our children, and we see it in our own lives. Laws may show us what right living looks like but not always. When we look at God’s law of love, we see that we have broken it though acts of omission, commission, and the disposition. No number of good deeds can change the fact that we are lawbreakers. We cannot earn God’s favor by trying to be good enough. The good news is that Jesus has made it possible for us to be forgiven and have our sins paid for. Jesus tells us that we are saved by faith, not by what we do but that we will be doers and not just hearers of the Word. If we will trust and obey in Him, we can have the forgiveness we so desperately need.
Pray we are transformed from glory to glory. Pray we abide with Christ. Pray we are changed into the likeness of Christ as our lives become more meaningful and purposeful. Pray we do not buy into the evil lies of the world. Pray we have a new and obedient heart. Pray our soul is set free. Pray the Spirit gives us new life and the realization of our own insufficiency. Pray we realize that the law of the Jewish code was an idea of the expression of God’s will that made possible for a time a moral order and thereby a relation with God. Pray we realize that the new covenant with the laws written on our hearts can bring an even deeper and joyous relationship for they do not incite us to sin producing a sense of guilt. Pray that our obedience to God would spring from insight into his will and love made manifest in the coming of Christ. Pray the new law of love would search our hearts and impose not just the abstinence of negative behavior but positive actions of spirit and deed. Pray Christ’s plan for us be unveiled in a way that glorifies God.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 