In this portion of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, he is trying to illustrate by six different examples of what he means when he said, except your righteousness, succeed that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Think about this. There's a standard of righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. Now, the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees was a pretty high standard of righteousness, let me remind you. Some of us get in the heaven of sort of beating up on the Pharisees and the religious leaders of Jesus' day, but they were better people than we were than we are by and large already. They had their hypocrisy, and there's a lot of things Jesus said to expose them and to let them know that they had not measured up even in their own conscience to the things that God had required. For God's requirements are far higher in keeping any of the commandments, and we've seen the illustration of this, when the Command Matashel not kill has a deeper meaning, it goes all the way to the motives of our heart having to do with hatred. The Command Matashel not committed adultery goes deeper than just the physical act of committing adultery, it goes to the very heart and motive of our inner being, and that is the lust that's in our heart. And so Jesus is rolling these out, and here's the fourth one of these examples that has to do with the taking of oaths, with the taking of oaths. Now, this particular example has to do with speech, and the power of speech. The Bible has a lot to say about speech, because speech is one of those things that marks us out as human beings as being in the image of God. When God created man, he created man, male and female, he created them in his image. And one of the reflections of God is speech, the ability for cognitive activity and thought to come forth with an articulation. God created us with the mind, and all of the vocal apparatus of the tongue, and the palate, and the teeth, and the lips, and the throat, and the larynx, and all of the lungs, and everything that goes into making us capable of speech, and it is that speech in the Bible is powerful. God brought everything we see into existence by the power of his speech, and God said, let there be light, and there was light. There is power, portance, capacity in speech, and due to our fallen nature that dimmed the brightness of the glory of the image of God in us, that has darkened God's countenance around us, that has impaired and impeded the gifts and capacities that we have given to us by God in creation. Even speech has been denigrated and downgraded and minimized and harmed in the fall, and so our speech does not carry the power that God had in the beginning in our speech. And so in our fallenness, and in our sin, we try as best we can to empower our weak and feeble speech, to punch it up, to give it a little more power. We want to have credibility when we speak. We want to be believed when we speak. We want someone to realize that when we speak, it means something. We want to move things with our speech. We want to be able to move people. We want to influence. When we speak, we not only want to be understood, we want to be obeyed. And we speak. We want it to be something that goes forth. And as the Lord said about His word, He goes forth out of its mouth and it does not return, but it is very effective. And it prospers in the thing that the Lord sends it to, the dynamic word of God going forth in its perfection and its power accomplishes that which it is sent to accomplish. Sometimes our speech doesn't. Our weakness in our fallenness and our sinfulness, our speech is sometimes short, pathetic, impotent. And so we try to punch it up a little bit. We want to have credibility. We want to have power. We want to be effective. We want our word to change things and do things and accomplish things. And it doesn't. So we have to give it a little power. And where does fallen man find this power? We find it two places. We find this power up and we find this power down. And so we reach up to punctuate and to empower our speech. And so we use the name of the Lord to give power. We evoke His name. We call upon Him for blessings or cursing. And everything connected with God, the temple is what they were very common. They would swear by the temple but it didn't have quite the punch, quite the effectiveness as swearing by the altar in the temple. And that didn't have quite as much effectiveness as swearing by the sacrifice on the altar. So there were tears and layers just by our standards as we think about it for a moment utter nonsense. But yet in their day they had so constructed their speech pattern that there was a certain effectiveness of man wanting to punch up his speech. He would swear by heaven or by the temple or by Jerusalem. If he really wanted to punch up his speech, he would swear by the altar and if he really wanted to let you know he really meant what he said, he would swear by the sacrifice upon the altar. This sort of escapes us, but we do the same thing. In our daily speech, how many times do we hear people use the words God and Jesus to give their speech power to punch it up. It's one thing to say something, it's another thing to use the name of the Lord. And so we reach up, we reach to that which is sacred, that which is divine, that which is holy. There is a distance and a forbiddenness about the name of the Lord. The name of God is high and exalted and we reach up and try to grab some of that and bring it down and put it in our speech. And so we use language. I wish this wasn't a church meeting this morning. I wish I was talking to some old boy just the two of us. I would use those words to illustrate. But I think you know what we're talking about. The name of Jesus, the name of God, damning and cursing. The Lord had some things to say about using his name in vain and using oaths and swearing in this way. And let me just briefly before I forget about it, give you a little bit of Old Testament background. We go first, of course, to the Levitical Code itself. The 10 commandments, Exodus 20, verse 7, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. For the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. And then with respect to swearing an oath, the next of the last command, but you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Then moving to Leviticus. You shall not swear by my name says the Lord and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord. The English word profane comes from the Latin two Latin words. The word profane means before or outside of and fondness is the temple. In other words, it's speech that is outside the temple. It is speech that is before the temple. It uses the power of the environment of the temple, the sacredness and the holiness of that holy place. But yet it is not of that. It is a profane use of the Lord's name. One of the best passages that is anywhere in scripture is Deuteronomy 6. It is the Lord your God, you shall fear him, you shall serve. And by his name, you shall swear. This particular teaching of Jesus brief as it is and difficult to understand as it is, I have no idea what it means when it says do not take an oath by your head for you cannot make one hair white or black. I just didn't search white enough but I did a little bit of, I tried to find out what that means exactly so I could share it with you. But I didn't get that. So if you know that, share it with me. And maybe I'll find out before I get a chance to preach the sermon again. I don't know what that means exactly. I don't have any idea what that means. But I think we get the gist of what Jesus is saying when he says do not take an oath at all covered in this teaching of Christ is this. You have heard what the Pharisees understanding of swearing and oath taking was all about. Jesus said except you have an understanding of it and an obedience to it that's far greater than that. You shall not enter the kingdom. And that's really what the Lord is teaching us in all of these things is that there is a high, high standard. I love preaching grace. I love to tell the story of the amazing, saving grace of Christ. But I love just as much preaching wall because it is the law of God that high and holy righteous standard that God requires to be perfect as he is perfect that sets the stage for grace. It is an understanding that the obedience to God and conduct and speech according to his standards are high and uncompromised and that we have fallen short. All of us have fallen short. One of the problems is that when the standard is lowered some of us think we live up to it. And we develop a self-righteousness and a smugness and a self-satisfaction and no need for grace. But if we ever get a little bit of a glimpse of the high, righteous, perfect law of God which is the transcript of his nature, then we know our sin, our fallenness, our shortcoming. We know our need for some other righteousness to save us, for someone else to step in and to lift us up to where we cannot go ourselves. And so the high standard of righteousness is set forth here in this standard. The Lord says, do not take an oath at all and do not take an oath by your head. Do not take an oath at all. I think the applications for this particular message is pretty simple. Here the Lord is talking to us about our cursing, our damning. I think he's even talking to us about our blessing. Do we ever use the Lord's name in vain when we say, God bless you, when all we heard was a slight sneeze? Is that not a vain, empty, taking of the name of the Lord? Do we not profane the Lord? When we not only will not use his name but we will use his attributes, we would never say, oh, in G, but we would say gracious, goodness, mercy. Not swear by the Lord, not swear by his name but swear by one of his attributes. Every grandmother I've ever known has had the euphemisms of profanity because they would never use the sacred name. And yet have we not fallen short there? Blasphemy, how many times do we in our speech say things that are absolutely blasphemous against God, against His work, against His Holy Spirit? Blasphemy is so serious that that was the charge that was brought against Jesus that stuck in the courts of the Jews that put Christ on the cross. That's how serious blasphemy is. He was accused of blasphemy toward the sacred name of the Lord and swearing oaths, impdios, false oaths, oaths are that which guard the sacredness of truth. It is an oath that the juror takes, that the lawyer takes, the doctor takes, the preacher takes. It is an oath that the public servant takes, the policeman and the soldier that says by God's name and that of course upholds our truth. It is the signing of a promissory note that commits us before God to carry out the payments or whatever it is that the note entails. And yet we have social conventions, legal loopholes to be able to get around and to work around the sacredness of that which is holy and binding. And as the Lord lives, we will be not held guiltless with the scripture said in our speech in this regard. Let me say before I'm done that it's not just a reaching up to that punches up our speech or gives our speech some power and some effectiveness that tries to put some kind of starch in what we say. But it is sometimes, hopefully not so much us, but it is, it's a reaching down. It's a moving down to the things that are beneath and lower. It's speaking of acts of sex, of excrement, that's the filthy language. There's certain taboo there and we violate that by being able to put that out into the discourse that gives us our power. How many times have you watched a movie in the last five or ten years and you've heard the word over and over and over. It's almost they can't even write a line of dialogue without putting in a few words. You know what they are over and over trying to give it some punch. It just shows how powerless we are, how helpless we are. The Lord says here says let what you say be simply yes or no. And the word simply by the way is not in the Greek text. I think that of course is the meaning but it's supplied by our translators. The language just simply says let what you say be yes yes no no. Yes squared no squared yes yes no no. And that's really all we need a simple veracity, an unadorned affirmation, an unmitigated negation and an unalloyed testimony. Before I'm done with talking about swearing let me just point you to one text. It's in the prophecy of Isaiah. It talks about some swearing. Listen to it. This is the Lord speaking. Turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth for I am God and there is no other by myself. I have sworn from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return. The Lord has sworn and his word is gone out in righteousness of course that's Christ the word of God the righteousness of God gone out from from the father to affect the salvation of his people. God did that with a holy oath. Our salvation is based upon God's oath. That's how seriously he takes it. But then there's another oath another swearing that's mentioned in the very next verse or the end of that other verse. To me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear allegiance. You're going to do any swearing to do that. That swear allegiance to a holy and a righteous and a saving and a merciful and a loving savior.