Sermon on the Mount Rewind
As we move on in our Matthew series, let’s take a look back at the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and review its message and significance. You can go back and review our previous posts for the Sermon on the Mount in our Matthew series, starting back on Nov. 15 with Matthew 5.
There’s a couple of important takeaways for anyone looking at Christ’s most famous sermon, whether for the first time or the one hundredth time: He’s serious that this is what the values of His Kingdom look like, and in it the Good News is evident.
Too often the church can look like the world, wanting the Kingdom without the King, not taking Jesus’ words seriously, such as the values He lays out in the Sermon on the Mount. If we truly claim Jesus as Savior and Lord, then we cannot dismiss what He teaches as impractical or impossible, but take Him at His word and depend on the Spirit. If as the church we are going to stand out in our culture, let it be because we seriously follow the ethics Jesus taught by loving our neighbor and our enemies, by walking in humility, by turning the other cheek, by remaining pure, and depending on the Holy Spirit, and not ourselves, to produce good fruit. Let it not be from foolishly breaking any of these ethics, much less hypocritically trying to justify such actions.
Remember Jesus explicitly held up the law as the truth and said He did not come to abolish it, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17-20). Jesus has a high view of the law and the prophets, so undoing or redoing anything from Scripture that came before was not His intention, which we looked at in this post on those verses. But the good news is “Jesus shows us through his teaching that God is after our hearts, not just our actions” (Spoken Gospel), which we also looked at in this post as a refresher after Advent to get back into the Sermon on the Mount.
That is where we find the Gospel in this famous passage, that Jesus fulfilled what never had been fulfilled before, and from that we can build a saving faith on Him and His ultimate victory as our firm foundation (7:24-27). And the glorious reality is this wasn’t just ethereal philosophical talk from Jesus, because He went on to live out these Kingdom values all the way to the cross, loving His enemies and praying for His persecuters (5:44) while being unjustly murdered to carry out the Father’s will (6:10) to pay for the redemption of the lost.
I could go on and on about how important and vastly rich the Sermon on the Mount is for the church, to orthodox theology, to the biblical narrative, to the Gospel and so on, but ultimately an intellectual understanding only gets us so far without a heart change. A true change that shapes our identity and forms our actions is found only in the Messiah. So with an understanding of its importance and its beauty, and as we are just now coming out of celebrating Resurrection Sunday this week, let’s wrap up by looking at Paul’s words on Jesus being the Messiah, the fulfillment of the law and prophets and our redeemer. Colossians 1:15-20
“15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
Extra Credit:
A summary podcast on what we see in the Sermon on the Mount and how it forms our identity and values as disciples and Kingdom citizens.