There’s a famous quote by G.K. Chesterton that often shakes me up a bit in my walk with Christ: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” This rattles me into remembering that Jesus called us to follow him in every aspect of our lives. There is nothing we can do to earn our salvation, but we are called to be different. To what extent are we to work at this? This debate has been ongoing for thousands of years within Christianity and we must always return to the teachings of Jesus to see how we are to live.
For much of my life, and I assume for a lot of yours as well, the focus of my Christian walk was “sin management.” This is where you know what the big sins are and you avoid them. For a long time, we shaped youth ministry around this focus: Let’s keep these kids as busy doing good stuff in the church so they don’t have time to sin. This focus of “avoiding sin” does very little to help people walk with Christ.
When Jesus calls us, he calls us into transformation. He calls us to be an act as his body in this world. He calls us to live as an example to this world of what it looks like to be part of the new creation. He calls us to become citizens in his Kingdom. What does it look like to live as citizens of his Kingdom? In this series on the Sermon on the Mount, we will walk through Jesus’s sermon together to see what kind of life we’re called to in following Jesus. We’re following a series of sermons presented by one of my professors, Randy Harris. If you would like to follow this series of lessons along with my blog, podcast, and sermons, you can access to the video series here. If you need access to Right Now Media, please email me at ryan@nodachurch.com and I’d be happy to give you access to this resource (even if you are not a member of our church).
I want this series to be challenging to each of us (myself especially). I don’t believe Jesus calls us to be passive in our faith but to be active. The Sermon on the Mount is a practical guide to the practice of the Christian faith. This practical guide, in the words of Chesterton above, “has been found difficult; and left untried.” We’re going to begin at the end of the sermon and then work our way through it in the coming weeks. Begin with Matthew 7:24-29 and answer these questions:
What does wisdom look like to Jesus?
What does it mean to “practice” something?
Does Jesus believe you can do what he calls you to do through this sermon?
Sometimes when I preach or teach, I can get too deep into the theological or historical framework of a concept of passage and the practical application can sometimes be lost through the nuance of presenting to a group of people with diverse backgrounds and worldviews. Take time this week to sit down and read the entire Sermon on the Mount in one sitting (Matthew 5-7). Make a small note on the sections you personally find the hardest. Throughout this series sit with those passages and allow the Holy Spirit to guide you into why they are a struggle for you. What are you resisting? What would life look like if you took that passage seriously? Does that give you joy, peace, or does it scare you? The best way to approach this sermon is to allow it to speak directly to you and not to others.
Will you let the words of Jesus challenge you into a deeper practice of the Christian faith to where your walk with Jesus makes you look more like him?
Randy Harris’s book Living Jesus - Amazon