IF I THINK back to when I first became a Christian, in college, I learned pretty quickly that there were certain things a “good” Christian was supposed to do. Read your Bible every day, and memorize Scripture. Pray about everything. Find and join a church…and so on. None of these were “laws,” so to speak; no one was actually policing them (well, not too much, anyway). You just knew you were expected to do them.

And if you’re a Christian, I’m guessing you’ve had similar experiences somewhere along the way. Anytime you join a group, you learn the expectations for members of that group, and the church is no exception. Sometimes the expectations are communicated directly and explicitly, especially in more authoritarian settings. Or you may just pick them up implicitly over time by watching others around you and seeing who gets praised, who gets criticized, and for what.

Potentially, there’s great value in all of these activities. When we read and study our Bibles or pray, we get to know God better. When we memorize Scripture, its wisdom and spiritual guidance become more available to us when we need it. When we worship in the company of others and serve side by side, we grow as disciples.

But all of these can also be done as rote behaviors. We might, for example, commit to a yearlong read-through-the-Bible program, but get little out of it because we treat each daily reading like a homework assignment to check off a list of things to do. Our eyes scan the words, but nothing significant sticks. Or perhaps we go to church every Sunday because we think that’s what we’re supposed to do, but spend much of the sermon distracted, thinking about what we need to pick up at the store on the way home.

This is why some people emphasize the difference between religion and spirituality. Religion, they say, is just external behavior, going along with rules and traditions imposed from the outside. But spirituality has to do with internal transformation and matters of the heart.

That can be a helpful distinction. Again, it’s possible for us to engage in religious behaviors in ways that have no bearing on our character or spiritual lives, or on the kind of person we are in relationship to others. And indeed, as we’ve seen in Matthew 5, that’s similar to what Jesus has been trying to teach his hearers about righteousness and the Law.

Remember, for example, what he said about murder and anger? It’s as if to say: You may think you’re innocent of murder because you haven’t taken a life. But your heavenly Father cares about more than that: he cares about how you handle your anger towards others, and their anger toward you. How important is that? Let’s get down to cases. Say you’re being a good religious person and bringing a sacrificial offering to God at the temple. Suddenly, you remember that someone has a complaint against you. What should you do? Put your religion on pause, and go reconcile with that person first. Only then should you come back and finish offering your sacrifice. That’s real righteousness. That’s what the kingdom is about. That’s the kind of sacrifice God wants, a spiritual sacrifice, a humble sacrifice of the heart.

So, it’s true: the spiritual life, a life of kingdom righteousness, can’t be reduced to mere religious observance. But not all religious observance is “mere.” In our individualistic culture, the distinction between religion and spirituality sometimes gets overblown. In its most extreme form, religion is treated as a relic of the past, the imposition of someone else’s outdated rules in ways that limit individual freedom. The attitude is, Don’t tell me what to do or believe. I decide what kind of spirituality I want and will worship the way I choose.

What this fails to take seriously is that there may actually be a God who exists independently of us, wants to be known, and chooses to reveal that knowledge to us through Scripture, prayer, and the like. These are the assumptions behind what’s known as spiritual discipline, which to a believing Christian should not be an oxymoron.

If you want to be a concert pianist, for example, you don’t get to bang on the keyboard anyway you like and insist that you’re making music. You have to submit yourself to the rigorous discipline of practicing simple skills over and over until they become fluid and natural, adding in new skills over time. Only then will you truly be free to make music, and make a piece your own when you play.

If you want to be in the NBA, you won’t get anywhere by chucking the ball at the basket, no matter how many times you do it. You learn the proper form and footwork. You drill yourself on the fundamentals, like free throws and layups. Only then do you have the foundations you need to find what might be unique to you as a player and set you apart for a possible Hall of Fame career.

And something similar is true of the spiritual life. We don’t grow spiritually by doing whatever we please. And if we’ve learned anything from the Sermon on the Mount, it’s that true righteousness often entails doing things we’d rather not do, like turning the other cheek or disciplining ourselves to pray for our enemies.

I say all this because, as we transition from Matthew 5 to Matthew 6, I don’t want our understanding of what Jesus says to be contaminated by the postmodern and individualistic way of thinking about religion that I described earlier. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with “religion,” and Jesus seems to think that this, too, is part of righteousness. Religious practices can be righteous when they express a right relationship with God. As Jesus will teach, the problem isn’t religion itself, but a superficial religion that’s done for appearances.

HERE’S HOW CHAPTER 6 begins:

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. (Matt 6:1, NIV)

At first, this may sound like a contradiction with what Jesus said earlier: “You are the light of the world…let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt 5:14, 16). So do we or do we not let others see our good deeds or righteousness?

By now, you can probably anticipate the answer. Jesus isn’t making a new behavioral rule, or for that matter, teaching two contradictory behavioral rules. He’s speaking to matters of the heart, to the question of motivation. In the earlier passage, Jesus isn’t telling his followers to “go public” with their righteousness; he’s assuming that others will see how they live, and encouraging them to remember that what others see in them matters to the kingdom. The motivation for letting their light shine is to bring glory to the Father.

But in Matthew 6:1, Jesus is describing those whose motivation is quite different: they do ostentatious religious things because they want to be seen doing so. They don’t want to bring glory to God; they want glory for themselves.

Who are these people? Delicately, Jesus doesn’t say. But in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, and indeed of the entire gospel of Matthew, he is surely referring to the Pharisees. I know you think they’re supposed to be the very models of righteousness, Jesus seems to say. But don’t be like them.

And what kind of religious behaviors does Jesus have in mind? As we’ll see, he will give three common examples of piety in chapter 6: the giving of alms, prayer, and fasting. Let’s explore each of these in turn.