John Ivanowski was 60 years old last year when he was told he had renal failure and needed a kidney transplant. The doctor was honest with him and explained he would probably be living on dialysis for years in hopes that maybe, just maybe, a donor could be found.
John had lost his son a decade ago to a blastoma and rejected the doctor’s request to have his daughter tested to see if she would qualify.
He blatantly refused to risk his last remaining child, even if she was a good candidate.
“I thought, I lost my boy and if anything happened to Delayne, I don’t know what I would do.”
But his daughter, Delayne, was a nurse at the Barnes-Jewish Transplant Center and had the tests ran herself. She qualified as his kidney and donor and began a six-month ordeal of coordinating her tests and her dad’s dialysis without him knowing.
She stayed away the day John got the call so he would have no idea.
“They called me at work and said, ‘We’ve got an anonymous donor,’ and I about dropped the phone and thought are you kidding me?” he recalled. “People can be on the [kidney waiting] list for five, six, seven, eight years and go through dialysis for that long, and I just couldn’t believe it.”
The day of his surgery, Delayne kissed him as he headed off to surgery. Then she made her way to the surgery room as well. Following his surgery, John kept asking who his donor was so he could thank him.
He got his answer when Delayne came walking in wearing a surgical gown and wheeling an IV. They both wept with each other.
Sometimes you can’t wait for the other person to make up their mind. Sometimes, despite the cost, you must do what will make the difference for both of you.
In our text today, Jesus decides to do for us what we could never do. And for that, we will thank Him for eternity.
Matthew 5: 17-20
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes 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. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
We live in a world obsessed with rights. It always has been. Only in the last 200 years have rights been extended beyond the royal and elite. The golden rule was that whoever had the gold ruled. So, it is hard to hear those in power talk about our rights as if we always possessed them.
The American dream has always been to buy your own home and be the king of your castle. I find it interesting that such a right comes with strings. It is a right if you pay your taxes, follow the HOA rules and, of course, make your mortgage payments.
It seems like that is getting harder and harder to do. My last car cost what my first house did. And now they want to make you pay a tax for the water that runs off your property. Heaven only knows how these young people are going to be able to afford the dream when the banks want a 10 to 20% downpayment.
But history teaches us that there’s never been an easy time for rights. Even when our forefathers struggled with the concept when they penned the Constitution. They had lived under the tyranny of a King and wanted to ensure that this nation did things differently, so they declared that we all have certain inalienable rights.
Now the key word there is ‘inalienable’. These were rights that could not be bought, sold or transferred to another person. Rights they believed were given by God Himself. They included the right to life. No man has the right to deprive another man (born or unborn) from that right.
Then there was the right to liberty. Fashioned from God’s gift of free will, they held each man should control his own destiny. Pardon the gambling term but you may not control the cards you get but you certainly control how you play them.
Finally, there was the right to the pursuit of happiness. This right was not cart blanche to do whatever tickles your fancy, but it was the guarantee that you, not some bureaucrat, should decide what you want to do with your life.
And certainly, they didn’t buy the lie preached today that you will own nothing and be happy. All you have to do is do ‘what they say’. No, you should determine your fate as far as possible.
Thanks to the Mosaic Law handed down from Mount Sinai, the Jewish people of Jesus day had their own version of rights. Defined by God Himself, He promised them His blessing if they simply followed His Law.
It wasn’t complicated. All you had to do was tend to your relationship with God by honoring Him with reverence and treat your fellowman decently by not lying to him or about him, not coveting what is his, no stealing and, of course, no killing your fellow man.
Yet their history was a rocky road of obedience and failure. There were high moments, but they didn’t compare to the low moments. They didn’t even wait to receive these laws from God before they fell before the golden calf. God had warned them and even sent them into exile, but He also delivered them back.
Yet, here they were now, under the thumb of the Roman Empire and not overly excited about the religious leadership they had. Like most of history’s elite and royal, those in authority had managed to command most of the wealth and the average man was left to do for himself.
So, when Jesus held out to them the promise of experiencing the Kingdom of heaven, they were all ears. Jesus spelled out those blessings in the Beatitudes. You have a right to a relationship with God if you will first humble yourself before Him and confess your spiritual poverty. Of course, you must want that relationship with God and want it badly. Literally, hunger and thirst for it. That relationship will show itself in a merciful heart, a mind pure before God and a soul that seeks peace among men.
Oh my, Jesus was restating the 10 Commandments of God and promising the experience of being a part of the Kingdom of God. But Jesus was leaving something out. Where were the sacrifices? Where were all the laws, the Temple and what about thousands of years of tradition?
Jesus was like a breath of fresh air. Like chains had been removed. Here was freedom, here was life, here was what could make them happy. But hold on, He warned them. All this comes with a price and that price is that they will treat you like they treat me.
They despise me because I don’t follow all their petty laws. I put relationship above ritual and life above sacrifices, and they hate me for it. They think that I have come to abolish all their laws, but I have not. I have come to fulfill what the law was put there for in the first place.
Go back to the beginning, when the Father walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. That is what the heavenly Father wants, and He had only one law: don’t touch the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil because when you do, you will lose your humility and think yourself wiser than me and you’re not.
But they did it anyway and the rest is, as they say, history. We were banned from the Garden and the presence of God. We were made mortal and lost all the rights of that divine place.
That’s why God came to you in Egypt and called you out. That’s why God called you His chosen nation and led you to the promised land. And that’s why God gave you the laws needed to worship Him and live with one another.
But what happened? What happened in the Garden? What happened in the Wilderness? What happened to Israel that God would have to send His own Son to deal with it?
You can study the history of Israel or the faith of today and you will find three errors that rendered their faith useless and ruined their relationship with God. You can find it in the Garden, at Sinai, in Jesus’ day and today.
It all begins with legalism or man’s tendency to want to see himself better than others. You can find it displayed in the life of Saul before Christ met him on the road to Damascus. He was a Pharisee of Pharisees.
Nobody was better at keeping every detail of the law than Saul, but no one was further from God. His legalism overrode his knowledge of the law, so much so that he found himself hating his fellowman and condoning their death. Such is the power of legalism.
No more blood has been shed in the history of man than by religious zealots who felt they had the best way to God, and they would kill you for saying different. The stain of the Inquisition still haunts the church today, as it should.
There is no place in God’s eyes for an attitude in the believer that wants to see themselves better than others and will not recognize their own spiritual poverty. That’s why Jesus speaks of it first.
Then there is the attitude of ‘relativism’. It’s an odd sounding word but its meaning is simple and tragic. Relativism isn’t concerned about seeing themselves better than others. They are concerned with diminishing others. To them all things are as good as the next thing, and you are less if you question their ways.
Relativism says love is love even if it’s a lust for underage children and you should not judge me. Relativism cares more for their opinion and thinks less of you for yours. It was relativism that called worshipping a golden calf as good as any other way. It is relativism that says you are being bigoted for claiming Jesus is the Way.
Relativism crushes any relationship with God, any respect for the Law and any compassion for their fellow man. There is no mercy, no humility, and no desire for peace with these types of people. They are currently the bane of our society pitting one against the other for the sheer pleasure of diminishing people.
These have no place in the kingdom of heaven.
But the most insidious spirit that plagued the Garden, Sinai and Jesus’ day was complacency. A spiritual attitude of ‘I don’t really care’. You saw it when Adam stood by and did nothing to stop Eve from eating the fruit of good and evil. You saw it when those in the wilderness didn’t have the heart to cross into the promised land when they first arrived. All of them would die in the desert.
While legalism is the sin of the zealot and relativism the weapon of the predator, it is complacency that says, ‘Let someone else do it.’ They are the generation of ‘good enough’ and lovers of welfare systems. They contribute little to the church, its ministry, its outreach or its support.
Jesus said it right when He said they were like salt that has lost its saltiness and good for nothing else but being walked on by others. That seems to be their lot in life. They know they should have a better relationship with God, but they just haven’t gotten around to it. They know that they should stop doing some of the things they are doing but don’t seem to worry about it. They know they should pray more, give more, do more and be more but don’t.
But read our text again and you will discover that Jesus wasn’t calling on them or us to fulfill the Law. It was Jesus who came to do what no man could ever do. To fulfill the Law of God. To live a perfect life with no sin, to keep an intimate relationship with His Father, and to break the hold that sin had on mankind.
Jesus came to fulfill what the law intended, the redemption of mankind. He came to write the Law upon our hearts and not on stone tablets. He came to make us what we were intended to become. And He came to bring to us the power to fulfill the Law as never before.
How? He would move His presence from the Temple into the bodies of men. He would place His Spirit into ours and grow us like fruit on the vine, better and better every day.
Jesus came to redeem us by His perfect life, His perfect sacrifice, and His glorious resurrection.
The apostle Peter knew what to do with that perfect gift when he said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”
Jesus completed what the Law intended which was to allow Him to live within us and remake us into His image.
All this can be yours if you don’t strangle the life out of it with legalism; corrupt it with the confusion of relativism; or simply do nothing about it at all.
But what happens if you do give yourself to Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven? I cannot say but I know you will never be the same. Just ask Elizabeth Payson.
Elizabeth Payson was always frail and sickly. Her father had been one of New England’s best-loved preachers, and from him she inherited his empathy and his eloquence.
It was to no one’s surprise that she married a minister. Despite her physical infirmities, she cheerfully fulfilled her role as a pastor’s wife and mother to the couple’s three beloved children.
But disaster struck when during an epidemic, two of the couple’s children died within a few weeks of the other, and for months Elizabeth was inconsolable.
In her diary, she wrote, “Empty hands, a worn-out, exhausted body, and unutterable longings to flee from a world that has so many sharp experiences.”
During this time, she wrote this poem:
I thought that prattling boys and girls Would fill this empty room;
That my rich heart would gather flowers From childhood’s opening bloom:
One child and two green graves are mine, This is God’s gift to me;
A bleeding, fainting, broken heart, This is my gift to Thee.
In those dark days, she would seek solace in the life of Christ. Her heart so broken; she began to know the Man of Sorrows as the only one who could truly understand her pain.
One night, pondering these things, she composed her own poem, writing all four stanzas in one evening. Though it gave her great comfort, she didn’t think her poem worthy of publication and didn’t show it to anyone for thirteen years.
Here is what a broken heart says to the Lord when all else is gone:
More love to Thee, O Christ, More love to Thee!
Hear Thou the prayer I make On bended knee;
This is my earnest plea: More love, O Christ, to Thee,
More love to Thee.
Once earthly joy I craved, sought peace and rest;
Now Thee alone I seek—Give what is best;
This all my prayer shall be: More love, O Christ, to Thee, More love to Thee.
Cherish the words of Christ as you cherish life itself, for they will give you life eternal and an eternity to be with those you love. Do not bend or relax His words for any reason of man, for pride, convenience, or human indifference.
Share the truth of these words and this Savior with others and you will be called great by those in heaven. And yes, your righteousness will be greater than that of the scribes and Pharisees because you do what is right out your love for God and your fellow man.
And one day, when He is ready, you will enter the Kingdom of Heaven and kneel before Him who came to finish what His Father started so long ago.
BENEDICTION
Lord God Almighty, we thank You for the light of Your Word we have shared today. Through the teachings of Your Son, Jesus, You have revealed the unchanging truth and the eternal purpose of Your law. As we depart from this place, but never from Your presence, let the seeds of Your Word take deep root in our hearts and minds. Empower us by Your Holy Spirit to pursue a righteousness that comes from a heart transformed by Your grace that embodies the true spirit of Your commandments. Keep us steadfast in our commitment to uphold Your decrees and to live as faithful witnesses of Your Kingdom in a world that desperately needs Your light. In the precious name of Jesus Christ, we pray, Amen.
Intentional Faith 