Intro to the Sermon on the Mount

Sermon On The Mount intro

The Right Side up Life 

Introduction to series 

But by far, the best way to understand life is to have someone personally guide us through it. 

there’s not a single person in the world who has not struggled in how to live in that intersection. Of how to live well. What we will see is what God desires for us, what He desires from us and how He calls us to do that. 

That is actually the upside down life.  It is not life giving, it is life taking. 

Christ is inviting us into the right side up life

John 14:6–7 ESV

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

We are looking at what Scot McKnight says is “bringing God’s future to bear on the present.” The SOTM is not example, not principle, it is obedience for now.  It is a picture of what life looks like now in the frame of divine grace. 

Matthew 7:24–27 ESV

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” 

The words we will look at this morning in terms of introduction are 

blessed and perfect. 

These are words used throughout the Sotm 

We see Jesus talking all the time about the blessed life. 

And then He calls us to be perfect as your father in Heaven is perfect 

Let’s look at these words in turn.  They will help to prepare us for the rest of the Sotm. 

What is God desiring for us?

We have different ways of understanding blessed so we first have to look at the way Jesus uses it. 

Because his usage is strange. Look at the first time He says it 

Matthew 5:3 ESV

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Remember that Jesus is not just downloading new information from Heaven.  If HE did that no one would understand Him. He is Jewish, and coming from a specific Jewish background with ideas of blessedness. 

Jesus is looking for the meaning from the OT. 

Look at Psalm 1:1-3

Psalm 1:1–3 ESV

Blessed is the man

who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree

planted by streams of water

that yields its fruit in its season,

and its leaf does not wither.

In all that he does, he prospers. 

Matthew 5:3 ESV

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus is saying, this is the blessed, the fortunate, the happy life. Even though it doesn’t look like blessedness, we can trust Jesus interpretation of it.  

He’s not dreaming with us to say what things could be like, he is walking around the city center, showing us all the buildings in the sites

This is what he means by blessed, showing us the concrete way that we are called to flourish in the divine grace of Jesus. 

What is God desiring from us?

Matthew 5:48 ESV

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

JEsus is using, not the word, Holy, as we like to think, but He is using the word that means complete or without fragments.

› It means that who understands their purpose, means and end.  It means that which is complete, inside and outside. That is why Jesus makes this inner outer connection all the time. 

› This is not perfection or acting perfect. No one lives that way. No one here, anyhow.  We are imperfect with a picture of a better life and everything we need to live that out. 

As we’ll see in the sermon in the amount, the idea is not that we would be perfect as we understand it, but rather that as we live wholeheartedly devoted to God, we understand the places in which we are not complete or hole hole, the imperfect parts of us. And we understand that we take those to God we bring those before him and he reconciles he redeems he restores. Hole Hearted devoted people take their imperfect parts because they recognize that much better job with him than we do.  whole hearted devotion does not fear imperfection because it knows where to go with it and that God can do a much better job with it than we can.

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