Matthew 6:25-34
In our text today Jesus doesn’t ask questions that reveal the nature and creator of anxiety as He has done so far in this passage; instead He attacks the questions of anxiety with one truth that He has been building toward in the entire Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon opened with the Beatitudes, the introduction to the character of God’s kingdom, the conditions of the heart that He possesses, that He values and that He rewards. From the Beatitudes Jesus began to teach us how to form those conditions or that character in our hearts. The statement that all of the following teaching hinged upon is found in Matthew 5:20 “Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” This statement was not to tell men to try harder it was to free them from religious bondage and into a relationship that He was planning on revealing. He taught about the heart, that to God anger in the heart is the same as murder with the hands; that the lust of the eyes is the same as adultery or fornication with the body; that selfish divorce does not free you from the covenant of love and protection; that swearing by a name or power greater than you does not make your word more valuable it reveals that you are willing to break your word without an oath to hold you accountable. He taught that obligation has no place in love and that servanthood doesn’t simply offer what has been requested but instead offers whatever it can give. Finally, in that first section of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gets to the destination of the entire Sermon, the point that He has been inspired to make, the truth from which He has lived His life on earth and that He will urge us to live from as well. He tells us to love our enemies and then He tells us why. Before we get there, did Jesus ever tell us anything that seems more difficult or more impossible or more counter-intuitive than to love our enemies? Fight anger, avoid lust, keep your covenants, let your word be your bond, be generous with your service; those we can all moralize and find something in them that benefits us, which if we are honest, is what appeals to us most of the time. But loving our enemies, how do we do that, even more, why should we do that? Jesus gives the answer that He knows will change our hearts, will transform our minds and that will effect eternity: “that you may be sons of your Father in heaven”. Jesus doesn’t say this is the character of God, or this is true religion, or you will get a reward when this is over, He says, that since all of this is the character of God’s kingdom, the character of God Himself, this is the character you were born for because you are God’s children, even better, God is your Father. This is the point of the entire sermon, it was unknown until this moment, God was God, He was far off, He was powerful, He was in the Tabernacle, then the Temple, His presence was in the Ark of the Covenant, He was feared, He was revered, He was often forgotten but He was not embraced as our Father. Jesus gave new information and then, showing that this revelation of God’s Fatherhood was the emphasis of the Sermon, 10 times in the next 33 verses Jesus would refer to God as “your” or “our” “Father”. Everything changes when you know who you belong to, even more and in our context and the context of Matthew 6:31-32, anxiety, which loves to paralyze us, is completely crippled when we begin to believe, even with just a little bit of faith, that God chose to be my Father and promised to love me as His child. Today for just a few minutes we are going to concentrate on one thing that Jesus has concentrated on for this entire section of the Sermon on the Mount, “your heavenly Father.”