In Romans 7, Paul uses the Jewish marriage laws to explain a crucial point regarding salvation - You cannot be married to Moses and Jesus at the same time. The death of Christ represents your death from your first spouse (Moses), releasing you into a new covenant with your new spouse, Jesus!

At the Cross God declares, “Out with the Old, In with the New.” The old method of righteousness has expired – a method of man’s efforts, marred by failure after failure, resulting in death. The new method of righteousness has arrived – one of perfect brilliance, pristine and faultless, achieved by Jesus and received by you!

When you were born again God made you a new container for His glory, His essence, His presence. The old container of the Flesh is incompatible with heaven’s perfection, so God changed your nature. The new creation is now perfectly compatible with God’s own nature so that your spirit is the exact image of the Father!

Jesus changed humanity’s method of righteousness. Before the Cross you were righteous by works of the flesh, which no one could ever maintain. No one. After the Cross this method became obsolete, having been upgraded to the method of faith. Stop going back to your old flame of Moses when Jesus is all you need for right standing with God!

When you were born again you received a heart-transplant. God removed your heart of stone and replaced it with his very own. Is this real to you yet? Because of the Cross, your heart is perfect and blameless, without one single blemish! Aligning your belief to the pure Gospel will always lead to a natural expression of thanksgiving.

In Matthew 6 Jesus continues to emphasize to the Jewish crowd that merely DOING the law of Moses isn’t enough. You must also WANT TO do it from you heart. In The Lord’s Prayer Jesus points out the “things” that are lacking in the Old Covenant, but that are fully supplied in the New. Instead of a life of empty prayers, the Church should be declaring that the promise of life has been fulfilled!

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus brings the badly misunderstood Law of Moses back to its pristine status of impossibly perfect. Under the Old Covenant, “righteousness credits” cannot be earned by simply DOING the law – He now adds that the HEART must be equally driven to obey, putting the proverbial nail in the coffin to righteousness by works. I am so thankful that at the Cross Jesus fulfilled the purpose for which the law was given, giving us the reward of righteousness by faith alone!

The process of progress is evident in all areas of life. It takes time to fix your hair. Getting your education takes years. No one grows into their adult body overnight. And yet, when it comes to completing the greatest process of all, becoming perfectly right with God, Jesus did the work for you. There is no growing more like God in your spirit through a series of steps. When you’re in Christ you skip to the end of the process, receiving a new identity that is completely forgiven and perfectly righteous!

Jesus was the greatest Law Preacher in history. His message in the Sermon on the Mount brought the law of Moses to it’s God-intended height of impossible perfection. While the Law of Moses pronounced the sinner guilty and deserving of death, Grace says that there is no condemnation, empowering the believer to live!

The Sermon on the Mount is not a reservoir of wisdom for the new covenant believer. Instead, it is a red-hot fire intended to clearly display God’s impossibly high standards of perfection. As the beneficiary of a new and better covenant we should find comfort in the words of Matthew 5 – not because we must keep them, but because Jesus removed the threat involved in not keeping them perfectly!