March 12th, 2023 | Surpassing Goodness | Grace Valley Church, Dundas Ontario

This week, Pastor Paul takes a look at Matthew 5:17-20. In this passage, Jesus is addressing the ones who are the ultimate law keepers. The ones who spend an inordinate (and terribly unhealthy) amount of time obsessively following the 613 rules laid out in the oldest books of the bible. But Jesus says no matter what they do, they'll never be enough. He says even their best intentions are still rife with sin. There is no human standard of perfection that they (or ourselves) can ever meet and there is certainly no God-ordained standard of perfection any of us can meet either.

It doesn't matter how Insta-worthy your life looks or how often you attend church or the way you pray or what you're doing while you pray. Nothing can get us close to the standard of perfection that Jesus says we would have to achieve in order to be the "perfect" Christian. To be worthy to stand before God on our own.

But God made a way for us to be in His perfect presence, and that is our union with Christ. Through Him, we don't need to strive to achieve hundreds of rules or around the clock 'goodness'. We just need to rest in Jesus. Resting in Jesus is simply trusting the Holy Spirit to do His work in our hearts because our iniquity is covered by Jesus' love and sacrifice.

Listen in this week as we learn about the ways that Jesus loved us so much that He came to fulfill the law we could never fulfill on our own, making a way for us to live in eternity with Him.

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