12/11/2012 - Your righteousness has to be much greater

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For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5: 20

The scribes were people whose main job was to manually copy The Scriptures considering that, in those times, the press had not been invented yet. And because of their occupation they deemed themselves capacitated to do the work of God. Now, the Pharisees were actually religious extremists who boasted about with their false thought of being better than anybody else.

According to the declaration of The Lord Jesus highlighted in the verse above unless our righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees we will never enter The Kingdom of Heaven. What does it mean? What did He say those words for? Wouldn’t this be the very reason why we’re not getting more from God? There are, by all means, many valuable lessons for us in our Master’s messages. He said that if we know The Truth It’ll set us free (John 8: 32). Therefore, we have a clue on which to work.

Christ never said anything which wasn’t utterly relevant for our lives. Knowing The Truth must be a priority for those who want to become conquerors. All the words spoken by our Saviour, directly or indirectly, are recorded in The Bible and He promised that His Words would be totally fulfilled. That’s the reason why we need to feed from them for our spirit to be strengthened to such an extent and then be used by our Father just like Jesus was.

The Son of God is talking about our righteousness which takes place when we put into practice the mission given to us by Him.  It’s good to notice how we apply it because what really counts here is the way we fulfil the divine ordinance. A legalist does the work in accordance with The Word but very often they’re reckless and that’s the reason why their deeds aren’t successful in the end. Only those whose righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees will be successful in life.

Now, I want you to understand the following: Jesus said that your righteousness has to exceed the one practised by the scribes and the Pharisees whose behaviour was quite mechanical as they believed that the knowledge they had of The Scriptures was enough to qualify them to go for the promises in them. Yet, what really counts is doing the work under the direction of The Holy Spirit without neglecting faith and determining with all your heart for the work to be done.

The fact of our righteousness not exceeding that of the Scribes and the Pharisees prevents us from entering The Kingdom of Heaven. When that doesn’t happen our prayers won’t receive the desired answer because they equal that of those people. The truth is that prayer is always to be said for The Word to be fulfilled.

Unless we bear fruits of praises to The Lord our God praying would be absolutely pointless. But when we cry out to Him it’s utterly necessary for us to do it with responsibility, faith, firmness of heart so we’ll effectively be able to exceed the righteousness of the religious.

In Christ, with love,

R. R. Soares