Daily Devotional
"For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
Matthew 5:20
Verse 20 is one of the most shocking statements in the Sermon on the Mount. To grasp its force, you have to understand what the scribes and Pharisees represented to the people listening to Jesus. Morris notes that they had catalogued 613 commandments in the Torah, 248 positive and 365 negative, and they tracked all of them with minute thoroughness. These were not frauds in the eyes of the crowd. They were the most biblically serious, most religiously devoted people in the entire culture.
And Jesus says their righteousness is not enough to enter the kingdom of heaven. That would have landed like a gut punch. If those people are not getting in, then who is? But France helps us see what Jesus is actually doing: ‘As long as righteousness is understood in terms of literal obedience to rules and regulations, it would be hard to find anyone who attempted it more rigorously than the scribes and Pharisees. The paradox of Jesus’ demand here makes sense only if their basic premise as to what righteousness consists of is put into question.’ Jesus is not raising the bar in the same competition. He is announcing that they are playing the wrong game entirely.
The Puritan David Brainerd described his own experience of this trap with startling honesty: ‘When I had been fasting, praying, obeying, I thought I was aiming at the glory of God. But I was doing it all for my own glory, to feel I was worthy. I realized that all my struggling to become worthy was an exercise of self worship.’ George Whitfield made the same diagnosis: self-righteousness is the last idol to go. It clings tighter than any other because it dresses itself up in religious clothing. It looks like devotion, it smells like faithfulness, but it is the deepest form of self-worship.
Ortlund calls this problem one of ‘of-ness,’ a fundamental operating system. The Pharisees were not just doing too much; they were oriented in the completely wrong direction. Their basic framework was works: what they could achieve, what they could present to God. And as Adams observes, by that standard they were zero for 613, because not one of their deeds was done from a heart genuinely submitted to God’s righteousness. External compliance, internal emptiness.
Today's Challenge
Brainerd said he 'healed himself with his own duties.' Is there a way in which your religious activity, your church attendance, your Bible reading, your service, has functioned more as a way to manage your conscience before God than as a genuine response to his grace? Where do you most feel the pressure to perform for God or for other people? What would it look like to bring that specific area before him in honest confession today?
Prayer
Lord, expose the self-worship hiding inside my religious activity. Where I have been checking boxes to feel worthy of your love, forgive me. I cannot earn what you have freely given. Strip away the last idol. Let me come to you not with a scorecard but with empty hands, trusting only in the righteousness of your Son. In Jesus' name, Amen.
