I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 5-6.

    Today’s passage contains most of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon contains the core of Jesus’ teachings and is worth in depth study. It contains a lot of instructions which have value. However, I am going to touch on only two aspects of it today. Jesus tells us that what we think and say determine whether or not we are righteous more than what we do. I want to stress that, in my opinion, when we apply these teachings we focus on ourselves, not others; we cannot accurately know what others are thinking. If we think evil thoughts, our actions will not be righteous. I think something my father said about thinking applies here. “You can’t stop a bird from landing in your hair, but you can keep it from making a nest there.” I may get angry, or have some other negative thought, as a result of something which happens outside of my control, but I do not have to dwell on that anger, or other thought. Experience has shown that if I immediately put aside my anger, or other negative thought, the less likely I am to get angry, or have the other thought, the next time an incident happens which might provoke anger. On the other hand, if I spend time thinking about why my anger is justified, or what I can do to make someone pay for angering me, the more likely I am to get angry the next time, and the more likely I am to get angrier.

    The second is related to the first. Jesus tells us that we should not do our acts of righteousness, giving to the poor, prayer, fasting, etc. to be seen by others. We should not seek to be seen as righteous by others. No, that is not right. We should not do righteous things in order to be honored by others. We should do righteous things because they are righteous, not because others will think better of us for doing so. In order to be sure that our acts of righteousness are done out of pure motives we should seek to hide them from others. As I was writing this something struck me. Some of the most righteous people I know do righteous acts in full view of everyone, while working hard to keep Jesus’ teaching on this. However, the reason they do not hide the acts which we see is because they do not consider the acts we see to be noteworthy. The more we train ourselves to do righteous acts just because they are righteous, the less we will think that a particular righteous act is noteworthy.
    I want to point out that there is another facet to why we should follow both of these. The more we allow ourselves to wallow in negative thoughts the more likely we are to act on them. More importantly, if we allow ourselves to remain angry with someone we are less likely to treat them as we should, without our even realizing that we are doing so. The same applies to other thoughts which we should not harbor, they make us less likely to behave as we should. Related to that, if we do our acts of righteousness in order to be seen by others the more likely our acts will be calculated for show and the less likely they are to actually do any good. If we help the needy in order to be seen as helping the needy, our acts are more likely to be an impressive show that does little good for those it is supposed to be helping. Those who strive to put on a good show of being righteous often do more harm than good.