Even if we could muster up the kind of faultless and unflagging outward obedience that the scribes and Pharisees prided themselves in, we would still never make it in. We’d have to exceed that kind of righteousness.
"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48)Remember that in the Kingdom of heaven you are perfectly loved, inside and out, all the time. Unless you and I are perfect the way God is perfect, we have no hope of entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
God understands our failure and has provided His own true righteousness, His perfect righteousness, in place of the righteousness you and I do not have.
Nobody can have true righteousness without repentance and receiving God's nature, being born again of the Spirit. It is given to us freely, without any contribution on our part, as we have faith in Jesus Christ. This is called justification, which means that we are now "made right" or "just" before God on the basis of Jesus' achievements.
God's kind of love, the love He has poured into your hearts and mine, through His Holy Spirit, is sacrificial. The king of kings set aside His glory and His throne so He could associate with the lowly, and finally He gave up His life so that you and I could live in harmony with Him.
He repaid our evil with His good.
This is the kind of love that Jesus said people would immediately recognize as God's kind of agape love, and it is every bit as sacrificial for you and me to display, as it was for the Lord Jesus.
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