So Jesus seems to indicate, that at the end of the day, the people who think they're in, are actually the ones in the most danger. This is a radical new concept. This is a concept that Jesus is coming, and He's blowing away their ideas of clean and unclean. He's actually making it more about the heart, than He is about behaviour or status. He comes in and He does this, and He begins to publically defeat this. Ultimately He publically defeats it on the cross.
You understand that the cross was a radical new way to live. It wasn't just about forgiveness. It was about a radical new way to live, because the revelation of God progressively got nicer. It went from: not knowing what to do to please Him; to bringing a sacrifice, one sacrifice per family per year; it went from that to that, then Jesus shows up and says: no, it's one sacrifice, for the whole world, for all time. So the revelation of God progressively got kinder. It progressively got nicer, and all along the way there were people who did not want God to be nice. Something about that threatened them.
So when Leviticus was written, there was a group of people who said: no, God cannot be this nice. We've got to make it harder - and they did. Then Jesus comes along and goes: no, no, it's even easier than that. The writer of Hebrews, he says: didn't you know, that all along, it was impossible for the blood of sacrifices to take your sins away? In other words, he says: didn't you know God didn't need that all along? He simply set it up, because you needed your conscious appeased. In other words, you thought you needed it, so God set it up so you would need it; and that made you feel closer to God, but all along God didn't need it.
Then the writer of Hebrews goes on to say: didn't you understand that Jesus died at the culmination of the ages? The culmination - does that sound like something boring? No, no, no. The culmination of the ages - that sounds like a rock concert doesn't it? Like where'd you go last weekend? How was the concert? Man, it was the culmination of the ages! It was awesome! We went to the culmination of the ages - that's what it sounds like.
Jesus shows up, and He begins to revolutionise their ideas of righteous and unrighteous. What does He do mainly to revolutionise it? This is what He does, He says: your righteousness really has nothing to do with your status, or even your behaviour, as much as it has to do with what you're hungering and thirsting for in your heart. He begins to turn it upside down.
So what did it mean to have a Tzedakah spirit? Matthew 5:20 says this - this is Jesus now, He's really messing with people. He says: for I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees, and the teachers of the Torah, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. He's being sarcastic. He's saying - because these were the most righteous people on earth. They made all the rules, and then kept them; so He's saying listen, if you want to attain righteousness that way, if you want to go that route, you can go that route - but here's what I'm telling you. If you choose to go that route, your righteousness has to surpass theirs, or you're not going to make it.
What's He saying? It's impossible to be righteous that way. There has to be another way, which leads us to a question. What does it mean to develop a righteous spirit? We've been talking all week about establishing the kingdom of God in our lives, and this message tonight is the culmination of that. It is the life application of: what do kingdom people look like. I want to talk to you for the rest of the night about what it means to develop a righteous spirit.
Now what is righteousness? Righteousness - this is not a word about withdrawing from evil. That's what I was taught. I was taught that if you didn't drink, you didn't smoke, you didn't chew tobacco, you didn't dress immodestly, you didn't watch the wrong movies; for women, if you didn't cut your hair, you didn't wear make up, you didn't wear the wrong kinds of jewellery, you didn't want to give men the wrong idea, you didn't learn to do any of this stuff, you didn't swear or curse or anything like that. Alright, so if you didn't do these things, then you were righteous.