New Year, New You: Reconciled in Relationships (Matthew 5:21-37)

This series has focused on you – how you can become a new you in this new year. You don’t live your life in a vacuum though. You have relationships with others – many others. You are interconnected with other people – your spouse, your children, your friends, your coworkers, your neighbor. All those relationships will be affected by what you do and what you don’t do. So, what will the new you do? Thanks be to God that his grace allows us to work through our relationships in repentance and forgiveness, restore and rebuild, and enjoy the blessings of the people God has placed around us.

Transcript

How many of you have seen the gameshow “Family Feud?” Imagine your family is on the show, and you walk up to the red buzzer. Steve Harvey looks at you and your opponent and says, “Name the top obsessions that people have.” What would you guess? Maybe things like money, respect, sex, Netflix shows, going viral? According to atheist social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, none of those answers would be number one. In his best-selling book, “The Righteous Mind,” he writes, “An obsession with righteousness is the normal human condition.” Even human logic affirms what the Bible has always told us to be true. We as people have a natural drive to prove our worthiness, to prove our rightness, and to validate why we exist. I don’t know about you, but I’ve definitely had life moments when I’ve been obsessed with needing to be right or making things right in my life completely on my own. Such a deep passion cannot help but affect our relationships with other people. In fact, sometimes we are so obsessed with being right that we forget to love. Our obsession with righteousness really does lead to family-feuds, friend-feuds, even Jesus-feuds. I know this is a direct question, but it’s one we need to ask: Have you come here today struggling with a broken relationship? Is it with a family member, a friend, or even God himself? You’ve convinced yourself that you’re right and until that person confesses their wrong, or does something to make you feel better, you can’t imagine that relationship being reconciled. If that’s where you are, Jesus’ words are just what you need to hear. 

They were the words the crowd on the mountainside needed too. We took a quick detour last week to talk about the amazing power and blessings of baptism, but for one more week, let’s get comfortable on our 1st- century picnic blanket, as we settle in to hear more of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We’ve been hanging on his every word talking about what the blessed life is. It’s the life we can have only by being in God’s family that makes us blessed no matter what life circumstances we’re in. But that blessed identity can’t stay contained to ourselves. We are then motivated by God’s undying love to be salt and light in the world. We bring that flavor of grace and reflect the light of hope only Jesus can give, but Jesus left us two weeks ago with a verse that shocked everyone in the crowd that day, “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Their world then as ours is now was obsessed with righteousness, and it seemed impossible to attain.

With just four examples, Jesus obliterates any possibility that we can quench our obsessive thirst for righteousness. Some people during Jesus’ time had tried to sugarcoat the law. They made it superficial to make it possible to keep. People would say, “I’m righteous, because I’ve never murdered anyone. I’ve never had an affair. I’ve never been divorced, or I gave a certificate of divorce. I’ve always kept my word when I call on God as my witness.” But then Jesus lays out what real righteousness looks like. “Do not murder” means never holding a grudge against someone who’s wronged you. It means when you call someone “Raca,” or an empty-headed, or “You fool,” demeaning their character, you’re in danger of the fires of hell.

“Do not commit adultery” means not even lusting after someone. If even for a split second you are wishing that a certain person would lust after you, it’d be better to go through life without an eye, or a hand. Jesus isn’t advocating self-mutilation, or harm, but he uses graphic language to make a point: If your obsession with finding righteousness on your own leads you to think that you can take advantage of a person even in your own mind, you deserve the place we especially in our culture don’t like to talk about: hell.

Jesus doesn’t stop there. He calls out men who had divorced their wives over things like burnt food, yes that was a real thing that happened and it is still happening in our world today. Marriage is never intended to be broken by anything, but death and Jesus doesn’t shy away from speaking the truth in love on that.
Then, he talks about how we use our words. He calls out anyone who must justify their words by using phrases like, “I swear to God,” or “I swear on my momma’s grave.” He says if we need to use such qualifiers, we’re speaking with words Satan himself likes to use. Talk about intense! My sinful nature that is obsessive about righteousness gets offended at this. Can Jesus really be serious? He is.

When it comes to the relationships you have in your life, which ones are broken as we speak? Are you picturing a person you haven’t spoken to for days, weeks, months, or even years? Have you convinced yourself that you have done everything right and that it’s on them to reconcile, to make things right? Do you see how your obsession with your own righteousness will never accomplish what deep down you have always hoped would come true? That things will be made right. That things can finally be worked out. When you can hug that person again, or feel that handshake?

 When you think about lust, do you think about the underlying drive beneath it? It’s more than just sexual desire, after all sexual desire is a gift God gave us, one designed to give us joy, closeness, excitement, and escape with the one person who has promised not just to be with you for a night, but for the rest of your life. Lust is objectification. It’s the sinful mindset we have when we convince ourselves that we can use people for our own gain, not out of love, but because our righteousness-obsessed minds think we deserve them. Such objectification has led to almost 42% of US women today having experienced some kind of sexual violence. We so often see people as a means for our own gain, not souls who need our self-sacrificing love.

Many of you here today have gone through a divorce. You know the pain of a broken relationship. You’ve seen the effects. I don’t need to tell you how much it hurts when a relationship that you thought would always be there is now gone. All of us know the feeling of breaking a promise, or how it feels when someone breaks one made to us. 

In all these scenarios, you and I can’t help but look down in shame as Jesus tells us the true meaning of righteousness. We can’t satisfy our hunger for it on our own. We can’t quench our thirst. What’s even worse is that in our failure to have righteousness, we’ve hurt the people around us. We sit on that mountainside with Jesus, and guilt is all we feel. If that is how you feel right now, the law has done its job, but don’t keep your head down for long. Look up! Do you see where the good news is? Do you see God’s grace here in Matthew 5? You can only find what you’re hoping for through the One who has spoken to you: Jesus.

The righteousness we’re obsessed with, the kind we could never earn, Jesus did. What I’m about to share with you from the Bible is paralyzingly powerful. From the moment Jesus was a one-cell embryo to a 33-year-old grown man, he never lost his temper, he always loved each person he interacted with in the perfect kind of love, he never called someone a moron, he never lusted, he always proudly talked about God’s design for marriage, and he always kept his word. It’s stunning! It takes me 3 seconds into my day to mess up, and Jesus never had a single moment of weakness. Even though Satan threw everything he possibly could at him. Even though Satan attacked him with temptation after temptation: The temptation to lash out at people including his closest friends who misunderstood him, the temptation Jesus must have faced for lust especially due to the influence he had, the temptation to speak what people wanted to hear, not what they needed to hear, and Jesus as true God, never gave in one single time. It’s an amazing accomplishment, but there’s something even more amazing than the bare facts of Jesus’ perfection. The motivating factor that compelled him every second of every day of his life and still today: You.

Think about this. You were on the mind and heart of Jesus from the moment he was conceived to the moment he shouted for all of history to hear, “It is finished” on the cross. Jesus wasn’t just carrying your sins on Good Friday. He carried them from the moment he entered our story. He knows deeply what you’ve been through. He knows the struggle you are thinking about right now. He knows the people you long to reconcile with. He knows. He knew how sin had broken your relationship with God, and he left the altar of heaven at just the right time to be the bridge we could’ve never been. He came to people like you and me who wanted nothing to do with him and he intentionalized making every step no matter how painful to bring you to your heavenly Father. He came to quench your and my obsessive thirst for righteousness. He was thrown into the prison of hell we deserved, he paid every last penny of the debt we owed God, and he did it all out of sheer love for you. We rightly keep the cross and empty tomb as the focus of our life and worship, but don’t ever forget the 33 years that came before that. How personal Jesus’ life is for you. How personal you are to Jesus. 

The Savior who speaks to you on the mountainside today is the same one who will give you the drive by his grace to make that first step to reconcile relationships. The same Jesus was obsessed so much with fighting for you and rescuing you that he won’t let his own life stand in the way. He would die, he would rise, all because his intentional love for you couldn’t be stopped by sin, death, or hell. He would give you righteousness through his blood. He would reconcile you to God. How can that very fact not radically change how you and I live by God’s grace through faith in our Christian lives?

Because our relationship with God is now so tight that our identity is enveloped by him, we don’t seek superficial righteousness, but we seek to grab hold of Jesus and never let him go. What does that look like? It means that if there is a relationship that needs to be reconciled and Christ’s love is compelling you to make the first move, you have every right to leave worship right this second and go make things right. I couldn’t be more serious about that! Because you’ve been reconciled to God, you don’t feel offended or insulted when someone says to you, “You are so uneducated and uncultured as a Christian” because you avoid things that may cause you to lust or things that generate wrongful anger toward others. You’re willing to be culturally “maimed” if it means clinging to Jesus and his truth. By faith, you are more than okay with missing out, you don’t have FOMO, you instead treasure the greatest gift of all: Jesus and his grace. Because you’ve been reconciled, you say what you mean and mean what you say. You don’t need to add any qualifiers. You let the world see the salt and light of Jesus simply by how you talk, and you don’t feel pressure to join in gossip, instead you pray that God use your words to lead others to his Word so God can do what he does best: change lives and hearts. From babies to teens to parents to bosses, whatever people we have connections to, Jesus has given us the gift of injecting his love and truth in a world longing for both. 

 If you’re going to be obsessive about something, be obsessive about the righteousness you have in Jesus. Be obsessive about showing the world what God’s view of relationships has always been: unconditional love, grace-motivated accountability, selflessness to reconcile. As we’ve talked about your “New Year, New You,” let’s never stop pointing each other to the resolution God made before the world even had a year, his resolution to rescue you, redeem you, reconcile you, and restore you. You are God’s resolution. He knows. He loves. He fights for you, and he has the perfect end in store for you. Live reconciled. You’ve been made new by Jesus, and now by grace you are excited and motivated to bring the healing only Jesus can give to the broken relationships in your life. I can’t wait to hear the stories of healing God is going to give you! And all God’s people said: Amen.