Matthew 5:1-2 - May 19, 2024

Mount Zion Community Church

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So maybe this is the moment that we've all been waiting for but not quite because we are getting ready to look at the

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Sermon on the Mount which is just a tremendous, tremendous section of Scripture and I mentioned that briefly last week that we're gonna start getting into this now because this really is it's probably one of the most well -known and well -loved teachings that Jesus has but because it's so significant

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I think that it would be helpful for us to spend our time today setting the stage for what we're about to look at, sort of setting ourselves up, getting our hearts and our minds right for the things that we're about to read and the things that we're about to see in the

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Sermon on the Mount and part of the reason for this is is to consider how we approach the teachings of Jesus and to consider how we apply these teachings to our lives because there are just almost infinite approaches and applications to the things that are listed here in the

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Beatitudes and the other moral teachings and it seems like no two groups of people will agree exactly on how these are to be applied to our lives so we'll have to we'll have to take a look at some of those things.

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We'll also just look briefly at the setting of the Sermon on the Mount, who was being addressed, and take a minute to consider the overall structure of the sermon itself because the text that we're going to be looking at over the coming weeks and probably months is going to cover three chapters.

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It's Matthew 5, 6, and 7. Now one of the first things we want to acknowledge is that there are a lot of parallels between what we see here in Matthew 5 through 7 and the sermon that's found in Luke 6 and it's been suggested that these might not actually be the same sermon.

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Luke might not be writing about the Sermon on the Mount the way Matthew is writing on it and part of the reason for that is the way that these things are translated or just the way they use the language in the

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Greek because Matthew says now as we look at verses chapter 5 or chapter 5 verses 1 and 2 it says now when

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Jesus saw the crowds he went up on the mountain and after he sat down his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and began to teach them so we see

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Matthew wrote that Jesus went up on a mountain but Luke wrote something a little different he said that he stood on a level place leading people to believe that these aren't the same teachings but if you dig into the

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Greek which we're not gonna do right this this second today this suggests that a level plane could be kind of a plateau on a mountain right so if they're going up on a mountain

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Luke is just saying that he found a flat place where he could sit and where the disciples could join him so we're pretty sure that these are still the same teaching so that the mountain in Matthew's gospel and the level place in Luke's gospel are the same so that's just a little bit of trivia for you right now we've got now we've got some trivia out of the way

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I want to talk a little bit about the context and the setting that Matthew uses to give us a lead -up to the gospel or the

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Sermon on the Mount so in chapter four we see two mentions of Jesus preaching but we don't get any details the first is verse 17 chapter 4 verse 17 it says from that time

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Jesus began to preach saying repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand and not that long ago we read chapter 4 verse 23 which said and Jesus was going throughout all

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Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people so we know that Jesus has been preaching we know that Jesus has been talking about the kingdom of God but we haven't heard that many specific words from Jesus until now until what we're getting into so what

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Matthew is doing is he's basically flowing directly he's he's built this entire scenario from the birth of Jesus to his baptism to the start of his ministry to choosing the first four disciples and now the

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Sermon on the Mount gets straight into some of the actual teaching itself now just a second ago we had a little discussion about the idea of the mountain and and Matthew writing that Jesus went up to a mountain to give this sermon and I want to draw attention to the reason that's significant again because I wanted to talk about how this is the same place that Luke is talking about because Matthew's drawing attention to something very specific with the idea of a mountain potentially and and when we remember that he's talking to a

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Jewish audience that would have been hopefully very familiar with the Old Testament we realize and some commentators suggest that Matthew is drawing a parallel with Moses here so he's he's using a type that typology that we talked about a while back with Jesus and Moses because in Exodus 19 we see

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God himself Yahweh calling Moses up to Mount Sinai and he's calling him up to Mount Sinai to receive some of the most important teaching that God had for the

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Jewish people at the time for the people of Israel there so God calls Moses up to a mountain and then

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Moses proceeds to teach the people as well and he proceeds to teach him the Ten Commandments but within the comparison there's also a lot of contrast so we're drawing we're drawing a little bit of a comparison with Moses but obviously with Jesus the perfect fulfillment of all these things there's a difference so one commentator

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I read said this the Mount of the Beatitudes has often been compared and contrasted with Mount Sinai where Moses received the law from God on one hand

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Mount Sinai cold bleak barren almost inaccessible situated in the midst of a howling wilderness with its fiery serpents and on the other hand the

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Mount of the Beatitudes with its smiling landscapes and grassy slopes as it were extending a hearty welcome to all and spreading delight by means of its lilies daisies hyacinths and anemones at Sinai God appearing in thunder and lightning and the people overcome with fear in Galilee Emmanuel grace and truth proceeding from his lips sitting down in the midst of his disciples who listened without fear or trembling yet we must be careful although it's true that from Mount Sinai Jehovah revealed his greatness in his glory nevertheless the law was given in a context of love also what was proclaimed at Sinai is not set aside but has given its deeply spiritual interpretation by Jesus Christ those contrasts are where people draw out the idea that God is is harsh

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God is mean God is wrathful and Jesus is love and Jesus has wiped out all the things that have come from the

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Old Testament but as we look at what he's about to teach we see that that's not true because we see

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Jesus fulfilling the law and in fact the Old Testament law is going to be worked so deeply into what's in the

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Sermon on the Mount that there's no way that you can separate them so all that to say

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Matthew is highlighting a connection with Moses just just once again to emphasize who

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Jesus is to emphasize that Jesus is the fulfillment of prophecy that Jesus is the coming

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Messiah we see another contrast here too and that's the fact that Jesus didn't have to receive this teaching from anyone

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Moses received the law from God himself Jesus didn't have to get his teaching from anyone toward the end of this you know we we see and in Mark 27 we see people say this about Jesus what is this a new teaching with authority they recognized that what

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Jesus was telling them and what Jesus was doing was different from the the Pharisees and the other people the religious leaders at the time but that's jumping ahead just a little bit to verse 2 so there's a couple more things worth noting in verse 1 and the first thing that we see is that when he gets to the mountain in preparation to teach he sits down so that might seem odd to us because we're pretty much used to coming to church and somebody standing in front of us and teaching and that's that's just the way we're accustomed to doing things but that was actually a traditional posture for a rabbi to take but it was a traditional posture for a rabbi to take when he was gonna do any kind of serious teaching so if a rabbi was standing that was usually reserved for things that were more informal or lessons that were more unofficial in nature but when a rabbi sat down that implied that this was a formal teaching it was an authoritative teaching so even down to the smallest mannerisms that people would have understood at the time

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Jesus is drawing attention to who he is and how important the things that he was talking about were how important the things that he was sharing were going to be and the other thing from verse 1 that we can take note of is who the audience was so Matthew specifically says that after Jesus sat down his disciples came to him and this is pretty interesting given the fact that we just talked not long ago about how

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Jesus was drawing huge crowds he was drawing all these people miracles were causing people to come from long distances away to come and see him and we can be sure that the twelve disciples and and while Matthew is only detailed calling of the first four if you were to look at what happens to Luke before this you see that they've named all twelve apostles so I'm gonna say the twelve but the reason we can be sure that the twelve were not the only ones to hear the lessons from the

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Sermon on the Mount is because there were huge crowds so most people give this image of Jesus teaching in one spot with the disciples around him his closest disciples and then maybe a little farther back from that were the other followers of Jesus these people are disciples as well they aren't the inner circle but they're true followers of Christ and then outside that a little further we see the huge crowds and these are just people who are probably curious about what's going on they've heard about the miracles they've heard about this

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Jesus and just want to see what it is that he's doing so they're not really followers they're not really disciples they're just curious onlookers seeing seeing what other people are interested in because you know as people when we see people interested in something it makes us interested in it because we want to know why those people are interested and that's probably what they were doing so this tells us that while there could certainly be evangelistic elements to the context of the

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Sermon on the Mount the primary purpose and the primary target for the information that he's preaching is committed

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Christians committed followers of Jesus so what is the content what's the theme of the teaching and again this is just an overview this week kind of an intro so I just want to talk briefly about how the sermon is structured and generally what kind of content we're gonna see so we see that in verse 2 he opened his mouth and began to teach them and the overarching theme of the message the thing that dominates everything that he's gonna talk about is the concept of the kingdom of God and we saw this before that was one of the first things we saw him say repent for the kingdom of God is at hand so when we talked about that in the first part of chapter 4 we talked about some elements that make up the kingdom of God and just as a brief review those elements were

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God's sovereignty complete salvation for the people in the kingdom of God the church as a representative of the representative of the kingdom of God and the redeemed universe so the content relates to the kingdom of God and we can break it down just a little bit further so one way to look at it is the first section chapter 5 verses 3 through 16 these are the blessings of the kingdom of God we get into chapter 5 verse 17 all the way through chapter 7 verse 12 we see what it means to be righteous this is the righteousness of the kingdom and then in chapter 7 verse 13 through 27 this is to the end of the

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Sermon on the Mount we see the two alternatives for example the narrow gate and the broad way these are two two alternatives that we have now another way we can look at it is chapter 5 13 through 16 is the introduction to the sermon and chapter 7 13 through 27 is the conclusion but then we have a big chunk in the middle and the middle can break down a little bit like this chapter 5 verses 17 through 48 and if you're taking notes sorry

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I'm going so fast don't worry we'll talk about all this stuff just an overview or you can go you can go back to YouTube and slow it down pause it so chapter 5 verse 17 through 48 details the relationship of the law to the new covenant this is how the

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Old Testament teachings will relate to what Jesus is now giving his followers chapter 6 verse 1 through 18 these are good verses as well this is about true versus false piety some of the things that we see here are praying in public to be seen by people or doing your giving or your charity in public so that people will know what you're doing true and false piety and then chapter 6 verse 19 through chapter 7 verse 12 can be classified as social ethics but that's just a lot of words to say that basically what

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Jesus is doing here is giving a discipleship class he's given a class on what it looks like to live as a

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Christian what it means to be one of his disciples however the nature of what

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Jesus teaches and what we'll be looking at in the coming weeks is actually not easy to process and honestly as we look closely at what the

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Sermon on the Mount tells us and what the Sermon on the Mount teaches us it should it should really cause us to think about ourselves a lot and we can tell that these concepts are challenging to interpret and they're challenging to process through because over the course of history a lot of different groups have come up with a lot of different ways to handle the

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Sermon on the Mount whether it's to rationalize part of it away or just ways to live it out in fact as I was reading through commentaries some of them or most of them said that you could probably come up with as many as 36 different individual interpretations of how how to live out the

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Sermon on the Mount now these really boil down to eight major classifications just and this is just so we can see how people have approached the

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Sermon on the Mount Sermon on the Mount in the past so first is the medieval view so a long ago a couple thousand years ago the medieval view was that the behaviors listed here were mostly a code of ethics that applied to clergy and applied to monastic life so the life of monks right well that's very convenient for you now second is

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Martin Luther's view Martin Luther looked at this and Martin Luther was a monk for everybody who doesn't know a little bit about his background he started the

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Reformation because he started to realize that the things that he was learning just didn't make sense and his conversion story is amazing which you have to look at it another time so Martin Luther's view was that the

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Sermon on the Mount represents just an impossible demand on people just like the Old Testament law a perfection that we can't attain a third view is the

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Anabaptist view now what these groups did was they took the teachings some of the teachings and they applied them literally extremely literally and this is why

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Anabaptist groups often are pacifists right because there's you know turn the other cheek don't repay evil for evil so they took these things in the most literal sense possible now then there's there's sort of the liberal theological position this has led to the social gospel and ideas like Jesus is a socialist those kind of things that you'll hear from some people then there's the existentialist view that the

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Sermon on the Mount is not an absolute standard but it's just a challenge to you and I here's something you can shoot for but it's not an absolute standard and there's another scholar named

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Albert Schweitzer his view is that the Sermon on the Mount represents just a temporary moral code only to be used before the time when

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God's kingdom returns another view is the the classic dispensationalist view and and dispensationalism is the idea that the church will be caught up in a pre -tribulation rapture so before Jesus comes back the believers will be taken up to heaven and then they'll return with him and then that will inaugurate the

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Millennium so the dispensationalist view is that the Sermon on the Mount those behaviors are only for us when we come back in the

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Millennium and then finally there's just the view that the Sermon on the Mount is the ideal standard to be strived for pursued but something that we can't totally achieve in this life and that view probably makes the most sense for us and as we get into this we'll see why but the interesting thing about a lot of these positions and maybe not all of them but a lot of them is that what they do is they represent a way to avoid the full ramification of these things that Jesus is saying but but we balance this out by looking at the rest of the ministry that Jesus has because so often and we all can be guilty of this so often we want to take just one word or one phrase or one verse and we want to take it out of context and apply it to our lives or if it's something that that we're not crazy about we might still want to take it and apply it to other people so this this is how we get these views because frankly a lot of the things that we will see in the

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Sermon on the Mount will be offensive to us because they'll be directly confrontational to us because there will be something that isn't the way that we would want to live our life but Jesus says it's supposed to be so this is why we have scholarship dedicated to explaining away these things but Craig Keener said something

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I thought was really interesting and very insightful about it and he said this he said to capture the offensiveness of his message in his milieu which is just the setting that the message

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I don't know why I use that word the setting that his message developed in modern interpreters must let

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Jesus's radical demands confront us with all the unnerving ferocity with which they would have struck their first hearers at the same time the rest of the gospel narrative where Jesus does not repudiate disciples who miserably fail yet repent does season his teachings with grace but the kingdom grace

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Jesus proclaimed was not the workless grace of much of Western Christendom in the

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Gospels in the Gospels the kingdom message transforms those who meekly embrace it just as it crushes the arrogant the religiously and socially satisfied and I think that's a pretty compelling idea because what he's saying is

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Jesus puts this out as an absolute standard but when he sees disciples who are striving for the standard yet failing because we all fail he doesn't you know go blast them when people meekly embrace this yet still fall short

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Jesus shows them grace but then he used this phrase workless grace of Western Christendom and what

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I believe that that relates to is this idea that that some churches have the idea that because Jesus died for everyone that we can do whatever we want because grace covers it grace covers our sins and grace does cover our sins but grace doesn't cover your intentional sins it until you repent from them so that that's one of those things that we just we have to be really really careful of and people who are truly born again they can't live that way anyway you wouldn't be capable of living that way because it's so dishonoring to God to sin in whatever way you want and say but Jesus died for my sin if you're born again you can't do that I was trying to think of a way to illustrate this but any illustration that we have of this is gonna fall short because there's nothing that can be given to us that's the same as as the grace that we were shown by Jesus and by God to forgive us of our sins but we can try right so there's a hundred nine acres for sale right at the end of the road down there 1 .1

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million dollars I would love it can I afford it absolutely not I can't even come close to affording part of it and even if I could

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I'd have to live in a tent but what if the owner of that came up to me and he said Maddie I want to give you this land and I you know

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I would just be so so grateful and I would say well why well what do I need to do and he'd say nothing just take it well how do you think

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I would respond to that person I would probably love them like my own family at that point because I would be so grateful right but I wouldn't say well do you think you could give me like a 50 acres that's next to it too or I just treat it however

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I wanted so anyway that's a terrible illustration to show that you can't truly understand

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God's grace and then take advantage of it yet it's not as simple either as just the mindless following of the words of Jesus as if everything here is an absolute rule to be taken literally but this is where things get so complicated and this is a huge part of the reason that I say we have to read the whole

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Bible and not just individual items out of context but even then sometimes the context comes from the life of Jesus like we're talking about here he says these things but and then we watch how he lives and we watch how he lives out these expectations sometimes context in the

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Bible comes from the scriptures that are around the verse that you're looking at sometimes context comes from the cultural situation in which these things occur and then some things are literal some things are figured or figurative or metaphorical and we have to be wise enough to figure out the difference we have to be discerning enough to understand the difference otherwise we can run off just completely in the wrong direction into something like legalism which

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I know a lot of us are familiar with legalism is the idea that we can earn our salvation just by following the rules so if we look at these things as a rule and we follow it then

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God will love us and that's not how grace works and this is where we get this is where we get the idea that we have to use the

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King James translation and women can't wear pants and men can't ever have long hair you know those those are like legalistic standards that come from literal interpretations of certain parts of the

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Bible without looking at them in context of the whole now there's nothing in the Bible about the King James version of the Bible so that's a little bit of a different a different illustration so there's that but then we can also take these principles and run off in the other direction now that's called antinomianism and and there's a big word for you in case you ever want to throw it around but what it means is that the law is no longer something that has an effect on us and we can behave any way we want because grace we can do anything we want because of grace and that's that's wrong in in the complete opposite way that legalism is also wrong so again we have to be wise and this is why scripture is full of commands to be wise for example

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Proverbs 313 says how blessed is the man who finds wisdom and the man who obtains discernment and of course

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Solomon is writing to his son and he mentions wisdom over and over and over and over again in the

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Proverbs but it's in other places too James 1 5 says this if any of you lacks wisdom let him ask of God who gives to all generously and without reproach and it will be given to him and one of my favorite verses that's kind of related to this topic is

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Romans 12 2 and that says and do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may approve what the will of God is that which is good and pleasing and perfect that's wisdom so that brings me into some principles that I want to share regarding these teachings that we're about to jump into because again

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I said we're gonna be confronted and we have to be ready for this and we have to have a way to think about how to process these things so the first principle for the

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Sermon on the Mount is this and that's that the Sermon on the Mount the principles contained within it are absolutely standards for believers today and they should guide our lives and our behaviors so I mentioned earlier that people have tried to explain away a lot of these teachings they try to explain away as only for a certain time in the future because they're hard to live out now or other people take just the parts that they want to at literal face value and make legalistic rules out of them and both of these approaches ultimately miss the mark even though there's a little bit of truth in each of them there's a little bit of truth in both of those things even though they ultimately wind up in error but we have to understand that all of these teachings like it or not and we'll talk about that in just a second are are the standards that are expected of a

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Christian of a disciple of Christ John MacArthur says the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are for believers today marking the distinctive lifestyle that should characterize the direction if not the perfection of the lives of Christians of every age so for that reason we have to understand so we have to read and understand we have to internalize so that we can externalize the principles and that's for the sake of our lives that's for our own sake but not only for that it's for the sake of the church and ultimately for the glory of God in an interesting distinction here is that these principles are for believers they're not for the unconverted they're not for non -christians because if if people aren't saved they're not going to be able to live up to these standards it's hard enough to live up to them if you are because I mean if we think that this is difficult and I know some of you might be looking at me thinking well these are the teachings of Jesus of course

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I love them of course I'm going to live my life that way we'll get into it we'll start talking about it and I hope you feel the same way at the end but we'll see but if it's hard for us imagine how hard it is for those who've never known anything about Jesus and besides we have enough issues inside of our own churches and inside of our own hearts that we don't need to spend time necessarily worrying about what other people are doing we don't need to spend time trying to force people that don't believe in Jesus to live up to a certain standard because a lot of times what we're doing there is we're just turning our focus on the culture so that it can take the focus off of our own shortcomings right

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I think that we all have enough to work on that we don't need to necessarily go policing other people who are not even part of this body and none of that is to say that the culture is good obviously it's not it's horrible our society is completely lost but part of the problem is that we've allowed certain elements of that culture and that lostness to infect our church and that's why we have that verse from Romans 12 that tells us not to be conformed to this world so how do we know if we have been conformed to this world well we can tell that we've been conformed to the world in some way when we take offense to the plain meaning of scripture so this is point number two reading things like the

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Sermon on the Mount reveals the true state of your heart so there's an interesting quote that I read and I was trying to find who said it but so many people have claimed it that it was really hard to determine but basically it boils down to this someone said the

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Bible is the only book that reads you as you read it so the

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Bible is a living document and it reads you more than you read it and here's how

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I interpret what that means you'll know just how committed you are to the things of God as you hear or read things in the

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Bible because again for all of us there are things in scripture that will directly confront our thoughts and our feelings and our opinions they're gonna be things that we hear or that we read and we say well there's no way

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God meant that now here's one example in the time that I've been in ministry

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I heard somebody say this they said I don't believe in a

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God that would send people to hell that's not my God well you may not believe in a

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God that would send people to hell but it's very much impossible to reconcile that idea with the

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God in the Bible and with the words of Jesus with the clear teaching of Jesus in the

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Bible and if you have reached the point where you say that that's not your

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God well you you do have a God that you're worshiping but it's a God with a small g and it's certainly not the

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God of the Bible and when you do this we call this idolatry you've created your own

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God and now you're worshiping it you don't like what the Bible says so you create a

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God that would never send anyone to hell and worship it sending yourself to hell in the process worshiping a false

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God not the one true God and and this is also why people just twist themselves and twist scripture into all kinds of knots in order to defend something they want to do this is something that happens for example with homosexuality right now or with female pastors people will take anything but the clear reading of scripture in those cases and then they'll turn around and they'll say something like well do you wear clothes with polyester in it do you eat shellfish that's in the

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Old Testament but these things these things ignore the context the larger context of what's happening in Scripture and throughout the whole narrative of the

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Bible but guess what well it's easy for me to stand up here and pick on people that I disagree with that are clearly in opposition to the

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Bible we do it all the time ourselves we do it just in a different direction because again picking on people is easier than facing our own issues like we might we might take a verse out of context or twist a concept around particularly something like Christian Liberty in order to defend regular trips to the winery or to involve or to to justify being involved in an enterprise that requires being at a place like that on a regular basis that's not a biographical example by the way

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I'm not calling any of you out hopefully it'll happen on its own but this is what we do we take we take a concept like Christian Liberty and we twist it around so that we can do the thing we want to do and the point of all this is your true position on Scripture and your true feelings about what the

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Bible says are revealed by what you pick and choose by what you take or leave from Scripture but make no mistake there that's not the way it works 2nd

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Timothy 3 16 says all Scripture is God breathed and profitable for teaching for reproof for correction and for training in righteousness and God breathed means it came from God and if it came from God it means it's perfect if it came from God it contains no error none of that applies to us we're not perfect we've been tainted by sin which means it's not up to us to judge what is right or wrong about Scripture it's up to us to judge what is right and wrong about ourselves in light of Scripture which leads me to my third point which is you can't live the

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Christian life halfway so being a Christian is literally all or nothing and here's the reason why

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Jesus Christ is our Savior but Jesus Christ is also our

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Lord and he's Lord over everything first Corinthians 8 6 says yet for us there is one

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God the Father from whom are all things and we exist for him and one

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Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things and we exist through him in Matthew 28 18

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Jesus says all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth and in Mark 9 40

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Jesus says for he who is not for us is against us and don't forget that Jesus as kind as he was as loving as he was was unflinching in his demands of the people who followed him we see this in places like Luke 9 62 he says no one after putting his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God and again that doesn't mean

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Jesus is heartless because everything about his earthly ministry as you read through all four of the

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Gospels everything shows us that's not the case but at the same time everything you read in those

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Gospels all the love all the care Jesus healed people because he loved them you know we talk about people that he didn't condemn like the woman at the well but these are people that are meekly trying their best not people that think they're too good to follow these rules or think that they're following them when they're not we see in looking at the life of Jesus that while he cares he makes it clear that following him in some cases requires you to sacrifice everything he required the rich young ruler or he told him if you want to go to heaven you have to sell all that you have and give it to the poor now preaching a future sermon but that was for him so we don't take we don't take a literal approach to that specific verse and say well let me go on out and sell all the stuff that I have and give it to the poor that was the thing that was preventing that person from being able to receive the kingdom of God it's not the same for everybody and again we'll get into a lot of that but I being a

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Christian means you give your entire life to God not part of it but don't despair you're getting something better in return so Philippians 3 8

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Paul writes this more than that I count all things to be lost because of the surpassing value of knowing

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Christ Jesus my Lord and the reason I tell you all these things is again

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I know I've said this a bunch of times already you're tired of me repeating myself over and over and over but we're about to dive into one of the biggest teachings that Jesus has we're about to dive into the one of the most significant sermons that we see and this is the first big thing to come up in Matthew and it might create some difficulties for us it'll place expectations on us that don't line up a hundred percent with our comforts and our preferences but part of devoting our whole life to Christ is approaching the

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Bible seriously and not approaching it casually as a guide to our lives and the fact that we don't always do this is part of the problem with our church today not necessarily our church but the church as a whole particularly in the

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United States we think that it's good enough that we show up on Sunday that we give a little bit of money that we care for a few people that we like and we think that that means we're good we think that that means we're

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Christians the scripture demands something totally different scripture demands your life to the glory of God Colossians 317 and whatever you do in word or deed do all in the name of the

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Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father through him and first Corinthians 1031 whether then you eat or drink or whatever you do do all to the glory of God again the

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Sermon on the Mount is going to give us the guidelines for life as a disciple of Jesus but only through Jesus can it be done and that's who it's for and that should be for all of us so I want to make sure that you're ready as we get ready to go into these verses that's why we didn't talk about any of them yet so one thing

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I want to leave you with is this quote from David Martin Lloyd -Jones he was a pastor in the

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UK I think he died in 1985 or something like that but he was just a tremendous preacher a tremendous man of God and he in preaching on the

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Sermon on the Mount said this he said do not say it has nothing to do with us why it has everything to do with us if only all of us were living the

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Sermon on the Mount men would know there is dynamic in the Christian gospel they would know that this is a live thing and they would not go looking for anything else they would say here it is and if you read the history of the church you will find it has always been when men and women have taken this sermon seriously and faced themselves in light of it that true revival has come and when the world sees the truly

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Christian man it not only feels condemned it is drawn it is attracted then let us carefully study this sermon that claims to show what we ought to be for it not only states the demand it points to the supply to the source of power

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God give us grace to face the Sermon on the

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Mount seriously and honestly and prayerfully until we become living examples of it and exemplifiers of its glorious teaching

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I haven't really talked about this today but it is Pentecost Sunday where we celebrate the coming of the

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Holy Spirit to the church and that's something that churches have been chasing ever since a movement of the

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Holy Spirit and a movement to revival but we have all these man -made ways we go about it we try to stir it up with music or putting up a tent outside and you know just getting a whole bunch of people there and then doing an altar call but like this quote said from Martin Lloyd -Jones in the history of the church true revival only comes when we take seriously the

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Word of God but not only take seriously the Word of God but we put it into our lives we live the way scripture says we should live that's what a revival is it's not a feeling it's not an emotion it's not something that you can stir up and create in some kind of situation and this is the the revival that we're going for so I'd be surprised if all of you haven't read the

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Sermon on the Mount and if all of you haven't read the Sermon on the Mount over and over and over and over again but my prayer for all of us as we get ready to work through it is that it encourages us but it also challenges us and it changes us in the way that Jesus intended for it to and as it changes us

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I pray that it changes our church as well let's look at these things in here and then look at the things we do in church and say to ourselves do we do this because it's in the

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Bible or do we do this because it's the way we've always done it do we do it because it's it's just what we're used to it's what we're comfortable with if those things conflict with the plain teachings of scripture guess what those should change too even if it makes us uncomfortable so I want to wrap up this is the last thing this scripture