Welcome to the John Mark Comer Teachings Podcast by practicing the way.

This teaching was originally given at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon

as a part of the Gospel of Matthew series. We left off last week with this haunting line in chapter 5 if you were here

verse 20 let's read it again for I tell you that unless your righteousness

surpasses that are the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, it's like the religious elite of the day,

you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

And if you were not here last week and you're thinking, wait, what?

What Jesus is saying here is that unless you move past religion in the pejorative

sense of the word,

and the list of do's and don'ts,

a kind of surface-level righteousness

that is about behavior and no more.

And make no mistake, behavior matters to Jesus a lot.

Most of this is about behavior.

But that surface level, unless if you move past that

to a deeper level of righteousness,

that is about a heart that is transformed to love where the driving motivation, the undercurrent of your life is love, then you will certainly not. There is no way for you to experience this new reality of the kingdom. And then next from here to the

end of chapter 5, Jesus lays out six case studies of this new kind of righteousness at a deeper level that he is after.

And I forewarn you, like it's straight out of days of our lives.

It's like so nitty and gritty and human and honest.

He deals with anger and the poison and the heart.

He deals with lust and the objectification of other human beings,

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