Day 6: The Kingdom of Heaven
"You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel" (Matthew 23:24).
Sovereign Lord, Your law is perfect, Your statutes are trustworthy, Your precepts are right, Your commands are radiant... They are intended to transform us within—to refresh our souls, to make us wise, to bring joy to our hearts, to give light to our eyes. They are meant to keep us, to guard us, to correct us, to warn us... (Psalm 19:7-11).
But we constantly stumble in the law (James 2:10). The Lord Jesus showed us in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) that the kingdom of heaven can only be lived out from a heart transformed to be[come] perfect as [our] heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). And the whole point of Jesus' discourse was to show that He came to make this possible. He came, not to abolish the Law or the Prophets... but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17).
For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (Romans 8:3-4).
That message to the Romans was penned by the apostle Paul, a former Pharisee who was later to embrace the gift of God's grace and renounce His reliance on self-righteousness through the law:
I consider [all former things] garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith (Philippians 3:8-9).
Father, only when we experience the transforming power of Your grace do we understand, like Paul, the dramatic difference between the gift of God and the blind, stubborn pride of "religion" and human "spirituality". And we understand why the Lord Jesus denounced hypocrisy so strongly—why He had no tolerance for harshness, cruelty, greed, and lust for power—masked by slavish legalism and the outward trappings of religion (Matthew 23:2-36).
We have no religion, no spirituality, apart from Your grace—apart from the righteousness credited to us by the sacrificial death of Your Son. And we cannot fulfill the righteous requirement of the law except by the enabling power of Your Spirit.
Search our hearts and uncover all traces of blind hypocrisy, deadly pride, and insidious self-righteousness. Our outlooks, attitudes, priorities, and perspectives lie bare before You. See if there be any offensive way in these (Psalm 139:24), for, Who can discern their own errors? Forgive our hidden faults (Psalm 19:12).
Teach us to extend the love and grace we ourselves have been given. Fit us with the filters of kindness, sincerity, and humility, lest we strain out gnats and choke on camels.
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