Whoever has the will to do the will of God shall know whether my teaching comes from him or is merely my own. Anyone whose teaching is merely his own, aims at honour for himself. It is our personal conviction that the teaching of Jesus would provoke about as much astonishment today as it did among the Jews, if it was correctly evaluated. Actually, most of us take what Jesus said and fit it into thought-patterns of our own. We have formulated our ideas of goodness and righteousness and into these moulds we pour the great teachings of the Master and conceive of the crystallized forms we produce as being those of heaven.
Men tend to think of holiness in terms of places and times.
They define goodness in relation to specific deeds. To them, it consists of particular performances in a particular manner. The one who does these things is considered to be a righteous man because he does them. All of this would be regarded by Jesus as superficial, perhaps even a hypocritical approach. We believe that the following principles are very important in the concept of righteousness which was enunciated by our Lord.