Raising the Bar on Kingdom Living

It is sometimes mistakenly assumed that if the church is to be a welcoming place for sinners, then we’ll need to loosen up our standards. Especially when it comes to the matter of scriptural content and lifestyle expectations. That in order for us to be welcoming we must also be affirming. Given the nature of the clientele that Jesus tended to attract, combined with his uneasy relationship with the religious establishment of his day, you might have been tempted to assume that he was soft on scripture and tolerant of permissive living. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus himself went out of his way to dispel any notion that his kingdom’s invitation to the sin ravaged and religiously marginalized was in any way a lessening of God’s standards of either truth or righteousness. There is no clearer statement to that effect in all of scripture than Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:17-20, as we’ll see this morning, in a message entitled, “Raising the Bar on Kingdom Living”.