Holy Week: Righteousness Did Not End at the Cross

There is a dangerous misunderstanding spreading through modern Christianity: that because Jesus died for our sins, righteousness no longer matters. That the cross was an ending rather than a beginning. That grace means we can live however we want.

This is not what Jesus taught. This is not what the cross accomplished.

Jesus was explicit about this in Matthew 5:17. He did not come to abolish the Law—He came to fulfill it. The New Testament is not a replacement of the Old, but its completion. The moral standards God established did not expire at Calvary; they were embodied perfectly in Christ and then passed to us as our new standard of living.

When Jesus said "It is finished" on the cross, He was not declaring the end of righteous living. He was declaring the end of our separation from God, the end of the sacrificial system that could never fully cleanse, the end of trying to earn salvation through works alone.

But He immediately followed His death and resurrection by commanding His disciples to teach others to obey everything He had commanded. The core of what Jesus taught was obedience—not as a means of salvation, but as the evidence of it.

This is the tension we must hold: We are saved by grace through faith, not by works. But genuine faith produces obedience. James tells us that faith without works is dead. Paul warns us not to use our freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.

The cross does not give us permission to sin. It gives us power to overcome it.

If your understanding of grace allows you to continue in sin without conviction, you have misunderstood grace. Grace is not God overlooking your sin—it is God empowering you to walk in victory over it.