Note: What follows is adapted from a sermon I first delivered on June 18 at The Chapel Downtown, a Saturday night gathering in a storefront hosted by my church and our local network of churches, with the aim of providing a space for people to encounter the gospel in the heart of the city over dinner and in a more casual setting than Sunday morning services. The lesson series is on the Sermon on the Mount. The original message pulled from the ESV; this has been changed to NASB for the website.

There's a weird law still on the books in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It was first written when cars were new and fairly simple machines, rare on the roads and disruptive to a culture that wasn't used to them. The law states that, when a driver sees a horse coming on the road, they are required to pull over to avoid disturbing the horse. If the horse still seems nervous, the driver must shut down the car; if that fails, the driver must dismantle the car enough that it can be hidden in the bushes and pose no further threat to the horse and its ability to do its job. Now, I've encountered a great many horses while driving around in Pennsylvania, and I've never had to do any of that. The law still stands, but it isn't enforced, and no one really seems bothered by that fact. The reason for this is actually pretty simple: the relationship between cars and horses has changed in the century or so since that law was passed, and as such, the expectations for how both parties address both each other and the law has shifted.

First things first: the Old Testament Law still stands. It hasn't gone anywhere, it hasn't been revoked. Jesus says in no uncertain terms that it's still on the books. The question for Christians is what this means for us.

Now, there are ways we try to work this out, and one of them is that modern Christians tend to recognize three main categories of the Law: the Civil Law, the Ceremonial Law, and the Moral Law. The Civil Law is a category we use to describe regulations that deal with the actual governing of the historic Kingdom of Israel (and, later, Judah) as a nation state. The Ceremonial Law is a category we use to describe regulations that deal with ritual cleansing and temple practice under the sacrificial system. The Moral Law is the category we use to describe that which is inherently sinful and not bound to any specific time, place, or system of practice. These categories are fine, and useful, and there are good reasons we recognize them, but it's important to note that Jesus isn't giving us room here to use that as an excuse to ignore any of those laws. He doesn't state that no stroke or letter shall pass from the Moral Law; He says the Law, the whole body of the Law, still stands. If the Law condemns something, it remains condemned. If the Law declared something as earning death, then that thing still warrants death. Nothing in this regard has changed.

Jesus doesn't even soften the Law. He actually holds people to a higher standard than the Law does! Note what He says about it in verse 20, "unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." That's a high standard! And it keeps coming up in the following verses, such as...

Now, Paul goes on to talk about this, but he tends to do so in a different way. He talks about being under the Law up until his conversion, and he tells his readers that they were also under the Law. He talks about the world being under the Law, and how people who don't have the text of the Law but maintain moral standards serve as a Law unto themselves. But he very clearly talks about the Law as though it is past tense for the Christian, as though Christians are no longer under the Law. It's for this reason, in fact, that some people view Paul with suspicion. I had a Muslim once tell me I couldn't invoke Paul when answering his questions about the Law, specifically because he believed Paul had radically departed from the teachings of Christ and was therefore an invalid and untrustworthy source. Was this man wrong? If Christ did not allow for any relaxing of the Law, and Paul talked about the Law as though the Christian is no longer under its authority, are these two contradicting each other?

No. But how? The simple answer is that our relationship to the Law has changed.

Jesus declared that He came to fulfill the Law, and to understand what is happening here and how our relationship to the Law has changed, we need to understand what it means for Him to fulfill it. To do that, we need to understand what the Law's purpose is; by definition, in order to fulfill the Law, Christ must either remove the necessity for the Law's basic function, or He must Himself perform the Law's function in such a way that we no longer need the Law to perform it, or He must somehow do both. In neither case does the Law go away, but in both cases, Christ changes our relationship to it and need for it based on its essential purpose.

Consider meals. We, as humans, don't actually need meals as they presently exist. We need nourishment from food, and we need to eat at intervals that allow our bodies to process the nutritional value of the food without eating so much that we cause other problems. Meals are the means by which we, as a culture, meet that need and teach ourselves and our children about how to select foods and portions that best accomplish this purpose. But if someone, or a household, changes their relationship to the food in such a way that they can continue getting the food they need and practicing proper balancing of foods, without the structure of three square meals, then they would no longer need the socially normative meal structure. Their relationship to the food changed; meals did not get abolished, and their need for the basic function of meals still exists, but it is now being fulfilled through a different (and possibly better) way.

This is the essential nature of how Christ changes our relationship to the Law. The Law still stands, and our needs for its functions still stands, but those needs are being met in Christ and therefore we no longer find ourselves leaning on the Law for them. So, with that in mind, let's explore the functions of the Law and how Christ fulfills them. Because, for every function, Christ both removes the necessity of the Law's function and performs that function in such a way that we no longer need to lean on the Law.

The Law reveals the perfection of God in its content. The ways described in the Law are the ways of God; the Law provides insight into what perfection looks like, and in doing so, tells us about the perfect nature of God. This was part of the function of the sacrificial system itself, as well. It provides opportunity to recalibrate our minds to fix them on God, and declares His perfection in the face of our imperfection. But by walking among us, Christ fully revealed the nature of God and put His perfection on display. We can see in the words and actions of Christ what perfection looks like, not merely conceptually, but lived out in the real world of daily practice and special circumstances. Christ not only displays perfection, He delivers perfection; by being perfection in flesh, He redeems flesh and introduces perfection to it.

When I first delivered this message, I got permission to change the way we did communion for that service. This was because I wanted to allow communion to serve its function as a sign in a robust way by incorporating it into the lesson itself. At this point, then, I called on the people to take up the bread of communion. I told them to remember, as we held the bread, that the ultimate revelation of God's perfection and love was given to and broken for us, and that we will one day enjoy the perfected flesh that Christ now bears in His resurrected body. That Christ took on the function the animals bore in the sacrificial system, and in doing so, fulfilled the function of the Law in revealing God's glory. We no longer need the broken bodies of animals to tell us of God's perfection; the glorified body of Christ is more than sufficient for the task.

At this point, we ate together.

The Law serves to reveal our inability to achieve perfection. Paul points this out when he talks about the Law revealing sin to us and the world. Under the Law, it was made apparent by the level of purity needed to stand before God and the complete inability of people to meet that standard alone. The lofty demands of the Law and the detailed steps to become clean highlighted our constant failings to achieve the perfection of God and stand before Him whole. The Law, then, makes us aware of sin not only as a concept, but as a lived reality in our own personal experiences. Christ fulfills this purpose in our lives; in His death, we see the weight of our sin. His blood, therefore, serves the Law's function of revealing sin in us and in our world. By inviting us into His death, however, Christ goes beyond revelation of sin and brings us into His eternal life; a life lived outside the authority of sin, thereby ensuring that we do not need the Law to reveal the authority of sin in our lives any longer.

At this point, we drank together.

The Law, finally, sets God's people apart. This was evident in the Law, as its practices ensured that the culture and behavior of the Israelites were distinct in their world and made their separation from it obvious.  Consider this segment of Psalm 119, a song that celebrates the content and functions of the Law.

This function is also fulfilled in Christ. By dying to sin, we are cut off from the world and set apart as God's people; the Law, therefore, is no longer the means by which our separation is apparent, but rather, our separation is apparent by Christ in us. In Christ, we are no longer under the domain of death, as the world is, but have been brought into the domain of life and given the work of displaying that life in the world. Through His death and resurrection, then, Christ fulfills the Law by doing more than it could ever it. Not only does He make us appear distinct, but He makes us utterly new creations, set apart and unique among creation. And this is not by our own efforts, not by keeping the Law, but by Christ living in and through us, changing us, making us ever more into people who display His work in us to a watching world.

At this point I reminded them that we are not merely set apart individually, but together; we are set apart as one body, and our sharing of communion declares our unity with Christ and with each other.

If you are reading this, and you aren't in Christ, then you're still under the Law. That is, you remain in the domain of sin, subject to the Law which highlights salvation but cannot provide it. Remember Matthew 5:20 cited earlier, that your righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, the chief law keepers and teachers of the day, in order to see salvation. But this is impossible for us! To rely on your own works is to remain damned. Have you never lied? Have you never coveted? Have you never raged against your fellow man? Please hear me, you cannot meet the demands of the Law yourself; you need to rely on Christ, who has done the work you cannot, and has waiting for you a perfection that you cannot achieve on your own power.

But for the rest of us, for anyone reading this who is in Christ, we have some questions to answer. Are you living like you are in Christ? Or are you, instead, still trying to trust in the Law? I don't only mean in terms of salvation. I'm asking if we're still looking to the Law to do work in us that only Christ can do. Are we being made perfect by Christ, or by the Law? Are we looking to Christ for how to live our lives, or the Law? Are we looking to the Law to tell us who God is, or are we looking to Christ? What is it that sets us apart from the world around us? Do we look any different from the world around us, and if we do, is it because of the radical shift in perspective, the perfect love, that comes by relying on Christ? Or is our own separation found in what we condemn, what we hold accountable to the Law? If we are not distinct, then something is wrong. And if we are distinct, but only in our desire to wield the Law against one another and against the world, then something is wrong. We must be a people who let Christ do what He has promised to do in our lives, and not people who return to faith in the Law for results.

The final session of the Gods at War series by Kyle Idleman presented the claim that all of the other idols covered in the series came down to one root idol: ourselves. That, fundamentally, we must choose between serving, trusting, and giving glory to God or to ourselves. That no matter what form the worship of self takes, it is ultimately about a rejection of the one true God and an elevation of self as the ultimate end of all we do. There was a lot wrapped up in this, but one question stood out specifically to me: have you ever chose not to pursue something because you felt it would lead you further from God? For the first time in this series, rather than God using my past errors to show me what this means, He reminded me of how great it is to serve Him rather than me. But I did not learn that lesson quickly.

I don't know if you know this about me, but nearly every federal election cycle hosts a temptation for me. Now, this is partly a religious thing, a desire to see someone in office who stands for the values I stand for without adding in a bunch of stuff I really cannot abide. But when I'm being honest, that isn't my primary motivation. Mostly it's that I have anarchist tendencies (when I'm being more generous and less angry they can be disguised well as libertarian leanings) and a pride issue and this makes me want to get into the government and start tearing things down and rebuilding it in a way that would actually work. Because, obviously, I'm so great and clever that I could do that better than any of the jokers we keep electing. I now know, on a practical level, that this is nonsense and the process would hurt a lot of people, but no one ever said our temptations had to be good or sensible things.

Understand, it isn't that running for office is a bad thing, it's that my heart wants it for bad reasons. If I go into politics, I can let myself believe that I'm saving the world and doing it my way. But ministry, which I have been called to, doesn't allow that. Ministry has a knack for reminding people that we are just servants participating in God's work, and his plans are far better than ours. When I am fighting off the temptation to turn astray from my calling to pursue public office, I am fighting off a very direct idol of self and trying to reject following and trusting God. This will look different for all of us, but we must not give in to whatever it is that pulls our affection away.

By the time I moved from Norwood to Amherst in 2009, I knew that my future involved church planting. I didn't know what that would look like, I didn't know where it would happen, I didn't even know how to start exploring that fact. But it was a fact, I knew that somewhere deep in my soul. God's process of working on me had kept coming back around to this, it was constantly on my mind, and even though our brief and poorly-handled church planting attempt in Norwood went belly up within a few months, the act of being there for it just burned a desire and joy into me that has never really left. And as I spent time looking at what would be required of me to run for office, campaigning around an area that at the time occupied nearly half of Massachusetts and doing interviews and filling out paperwork and raising money, I was forced to realize that I didn't have time to both run a successful campaign and invest in my church in the way I needed to. I had to choose.

​I never turned the paperwork in.

In 2017, I was invited to preach at my friend's church in Vermont while he was out of town. He gave me a passage to preach that would lead into a series he would be starting the following week. The actual message I preached was about taking seriously the fact that we, as Christians, are representatives of Christ and the things we obsess over tell the secular world what God obsesses over. The things we oppose tell the world what God opposes. Do we represent Him well? Do we showcase in all that we do that our trust is in Him and His grace, rather than governments or armies or even our own works? When we advertise what it means to be a Christian, are we making more noise about God's love and grace or His judgment and law? In the service they had done a congregational reading of the ten commandments and so I asked, how quick are we to beg with tears that monuments of the ten commandments stay posted in our town squares as a sign of our faith, and how does that compare to how quickly we preach the gospel to the homeless who sleep under those monuments? Are we as serious about the things Jesus described about what a Christian life looks like as we are about the rules? What do you think the world believes about the gospel when all they hear is rules?

Now my friend and I have joked about the fact that, afterward, there were emails about that sermon. I got emails about that sermon. He got emails about that sermon. These were not terribly encouraging emails. I haven't been back to his church. The real reason is that my family moved two hours away and I got pretty busy with another church so the opportunity just hasn't been there as much, but when we ran into each other at the Small Town Summit I joked that it was because of the emails we got from that sermon. My pastor sat in on the sermon and when he heard about the emails he told my friend that he wasn't really surprised. It truly is an act of grace that my pastor let me preach at our church after that.

But in one of those emails, a member of his church asked me what he seemed to think would be a gotcha question. "If you knew that being elected would ensure that you could stop abortion right now," he asked, "and save the lives of so many precious little ones, would you do it?" He was trying to get me to confess to a certain reliance on political power that I had condemned in the sermon, and oh, how tempting that question was. Not only because I am pro-life, but ever since the 2016 election I had been struggling even more with the temptation to get elected and burn the whole system down from inside. This guy was pushing exactly the right button, and I realized it wasn't an accident. So I prayed before I replied.

"I would not run," I answered. "Not because I do not value that cause, because I do value it; but because God has called me to a different path and I would rather turn down a great work than refuse that which God has commanded." I hit send and never heard from that guy again. And that moment has given me great comfort ever since.

I tell you all that so I can tell you this: nothing in my life has brought more joy, peace, and growth than following the road God has chosen for me. Whenever I have sought after my own will, He has reminded me of His call and forced me to make a choice. Idleman noted that God consistently does this throughout scripture and in our own lives. He will not share us with any other lovers, and whatever we choose apart from Him, he will ensure that we must make a choice at some point. He did it in my life when I was seeking political power. He did it in my life when I wanted to give up on Boston and go back to PA but knew that doing so would ensure I fell right back into the same vices and idols I'd been chasing after before He started His intensive work in my life. He did it when I was pursuing a degree in Astrophysics and realized the only school I could reasonably apply to would be a two-hour drive one way and my wife and I came to the conclusion that if I was going to sacrifice my entire day between classes and commuting I better be certain that it is to pursue what God has for me. I do, as it turns out, drive two hours one way to school now during semesters when I'm enrolled in classes; but the degree I'm working toward is pastoral ministry with a minor in church planting.

When people ask me why I feel called to serve in full-time ministry I usually tell them that God has told us as much, and has confirmed that calling multiple times. What I don't mention as often is that He has also made it very clear that I don't belong anywhere else. Any time I go off and start trying to make my own plans and serve my own interest about things that I think will make me feel important and powerful and successful at forging my own path and saving the world because obviously I'm really equipped to be the savior of the world, He makes me choose. And each time, I have to stop and look at the door I'm trying to force open and be reminded of the one He's put my name on, and I have to let go.

And it gets easier. There are things I still struggle with and I'm sure there always will be, but they're diminishing and changing. As I have matured and grounded my joy on Christ more, I have found myself pushing off in my own direction less often. Because in the end, none of my attempts to make my life work by my rules ever brought me lasting joy or peace. Just look at the rest of the posts in this series and see a sampling of the pain I've endured and inflicted on others through my quest for self-fulfillment. When I serve me first, I can drift off into becoming a true monster, and it isn't worth it. Are you any different, really? Does your idolatry of self improve your life and soul and mind any more than mine has?

The Leader's Guide had us close the final session with Psalm 16, and while the whole psalm is worth consideration, I want to highlight two verses as I end my thoughts on this series.

Everything in this series has challenged us to seriously analyze our hearts and our lives to identify and tear down the idols we have erected, and replace them with the Lord God. This has not and will not be easy or comfortable to do; but it has been my experience, and I hope it has and will be yours, that the act of breaking idolatry is much better when we really, truly understand these verses. That not only in God is there fullness of joy and pleasures forever, but there is nothing truly good for us apart from Him. God will always make us choose, He loves us too much to be happy as our side piece; but when we recognize that we are choosing between true joy and poisoned pleasure, how much easier and satisfying it is to choose Him daily.

Our study through Kyle Idleman's Gods at War this week focused on money. Our discussion time was actually heavily distracted--the nature of the questions spawned a lot of rabbit trails--but there were a few things that came up in the video, questions, and discussion that are pretty important to remember.

One thing that came of the discussion was that nearly everyone in the room came from some degree of poverty. None of us are there now, but the stories of our childhoods had significant overlap in that way. And it seemed fairly clear to me that there had been a sense in some minds there that this sort of background inoculates people against the idol of money. Idleman noted in the video that this isn't actually true, but the narrator for the video told a story that focused on being at least briefly rich, and that raises the question: what does it look like when money is an idol? I mean, if it doesn't look like the rich person hoarding all their wealth (or at least, doesn't only look like that), then what is the common nature that is shared across demographic lines?

As Idleman has been saying throughout the series, the core issue is trusting in anything other than God to do what only God can fully do. It is trusting in anything other than God for our salvation, whether eternal or immediate. The idolatry of money looks like treating money as our functional purpose, our immediate savior, our great help in time of need. It looks like basing our identity on our net worth. My one friend back home, who lived in a lower-income part of town, showed this idolatry when he refused to let our friend from a nicer part of town enter his home for years because of what he assumed the higher class friend would think of him on seeing his house, just as surely as the 1% show it by flaunting their wealth.

It's so easy to fall prey to this one, far easier than we tend to acknowledge. After all, money goes a great distance in defining our daily lives. Study after study has shown that our income bracket has a direct impact on the economic and higher educational opportunities available to us, our access to healthcare, our mental state, our likelihood of crime and drug addiction (and the punishment when we're caught), and the quality of our public schools.* We are judged constantly on our income, inside and outside the church. I have been turned away from a preaching class hosted by my pastor because my two work incomes still weren't enough to get us off food stamps and I was deemed "worse than an unbeliever" and therefore unable to preach based on a particular, and I believe twisted, read of 1 Timothy 5:8. I've had disputes with people, Christians and non, about whether or not I was allowed to use those same food stamps to buy something nice for my family once in a while instead of just the bare minimum every meal. These are Christians defining their views on morality based on income (amusingly enough, these same Christians will condemn the prosperity gospel without ever apparently seeing the connection they have to it).

It's natural to want to avoid these things, we want to avoid being the ones who get judged and dismissed and ignored because of our socioeconomic class. I can tell you that living that life is not comfortable or enjoyable. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to give our families a better life, to oppose injustice, to engage with our culture in a different way. But what can happen is we can view the trials we face as being bigger than the God we claim to serve, and put the opinions of individuals and our culture above the view God has of us. And once we do this, once we allow ourselves to be defined by something other than our identity in Christ and rely on something other than God for our immediate salvation and hope, we have set up an idol.

Our self-examination on these issues needs to go beyond the obvious. We need to be willing to submit to actual scrutiny of our intentions, our desires, our hopes and fears. And whenever an idol is found hidden away in one of these corners, we need to have the humility to repent and hand its place over to God.

The final session of the October 19th summit was delivered by both Stephen Witmer and David Pinckney, and focused on some of the ways our joy is hindered in ministry. This was not an exhaustive list--we were asked to discuss our own joy-killers in groups after the presentation--but they are common ones to arise in small-place ministry. This will also serve as my final post on the event; normal blogging will resume next week.

In almost every post so far, I've noted something that makes small-place ministry difficult. It's worth noting that I doubt small-place ministry is more difficult than any other kind of ministry, simply that there are difficulties one type of ministry faces that others may not. But when you're in the thick of one kind of ministry, it can become very easy to see the difficulties you face and not the difficulties others face. This is a fairly mild issue, and is common to almost any kind of work; the problem arises when our eye is pulled so often to the benefits of another's ministry that we grow envious.

The big question raised when discussing envy in the session was, "what does my envy say about who or what I actually value?" The very nature of envy is such that it reveals our desire for something other than what God has granted us, and this raises the question: are we seeking after Him and His glory, or are we seeking after something else? Are we more concerned with fame or money or validation than faithfully serving our Lord in whatever capacity He has determined? When we grow envious of the ministry someone else has been called to, we reveal that something about their ministry is so valuable to us that the gifts of God in our own lives don't quite make up for not having it.

So what do we do about it? ​Fundamentally, they said, envy has pride at its root. We fall into envy because our idea of ourselves says that we deserve what these other people have. So the first step in fighting our envy is to fight our pride.

How often do we fall into this trap? Even if we believe our work must make much of God, we can still think it should also make much of us. Are we willing to actually decrease if that will better glorify God?

But addressing our pride is just the first step. We cannot simply remove the desire to be great and not replace it with something else. That there is joy in serving God and serving others in His name, and we can pursue that joy as something greater than our markers for success or our own ideas on what a perfect ministry would look like. Ultimately, the cure for envy is the joy of the Lord in whatever we do.

Small churches also tend to have very few staff, so a lot of work falls on the shoulders of the people who are serving. It can be easy to get so wrapped up in all the responsibilities of the mission that we fail to take time to rest. Even taking one full day off per week can be difficult, but this is necessary. Our health, and our ability to do the work God has for us, rely on our taking time to rest. We must be good stewards of our time, and that includes not using so much of it up that we burn out and cannot continue.

Taking time to rest also glorifies God in its own way. It was noted that taking time to rest reminds us and others that God doesn't actually need us; He can see to it that the church is tended, even on our days off. It also showcases the fact that we, as Christians, rest in the completed work of Christ. We are not constantly striving and pushing and breaking ourselves to honor Him, but rather we can trust, and rest, and enjoy Him in all that we do.

Ministry is not a field that is designed to bring a lot of glory to the ministers, if it's done right, and small place ministry may be even less likely to do so. These do not tend to be the pastors who draw big crowds and have books to sign or thousands of devoted followers on their podcast and twitter. And, of course, limited resources in small places have led to the rise of the bivocational (or covocational, in some circles) pastor, who works part-time at a day job to pay the bills and ministers the rest of their time. If we let ourselves expect good things to come our way as ministers in small places, we will likely face much disappointment. Envy or disappointment, left unaddressed, can quickly lead to bitterness. How do we prevent that?

They pointed out that Jesus is, ultimately, the One who will both honor us and provide our needs. These are things He promises to do in His word, and when we put weight on our churches to do that beyond their ability (or ours, often in the case of honor) we feed that disappointment and encourage bitterness. Ultimately, what we want from our churches when we go down this road is something that only God can provide, and we need to repent and trust in Him to do what He has promised to do.

What things do we allow to steal our joy? What does it look like to repent, and to trust God?

Near the end of last school year, I shared a very short sermon I gave in class called Living the Life. I knew at that time that the topic would need more time than the parameters of the class allowed, so I stated I would be returning to it when I had the opportunity to preach at my church. That sermon was called Snapshot of the Christian Life and was delivered at Highland Baptist Church on June 9, 2019.

The second sermon delivered as part of my Homiletics final was a 10-minute sermon. My text is Malachi 3:7-11, reading from t he NASB.