New Way of Living

Well, good morning, everybody. My name's René, I'm another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. Well, I have some questions for ya. If you have ever asked yourself, why am I here? Clearly, today it's for the ice cream. But generally speaking, why am I here? Or you'd be getting into this Jesus thing, this church thing, but you look at the Bible and you think, what does the Bible even mean? It seems so complicated. Or you look at your life and you just wanna know, what does God want from me? How does God want me to live? What's my purpose in life? You know, serious major questions, and I'm here to say good luck with that, I have no idea. No, let's look at what Jesus has to say about those very questions as we continue our series, The Jesus Way.

That's what we call our summer series in The Sermon on the Mount. This is so great. It's the first recorded talk ever given by Jesus Christ. When he sits down on the slope of a mountain and he starts to explain what he is all about. And if we see it through the crowd's eyes and we hear it through their ears, then we'll begin to understand why Jesus Christ was so pioneering and so disruptive and so innovative in the religious and the political and the social landscape of those days. Why those crowds were completely blown away when he introduces a spectacular paradigm shift.

Now what does that mean? A paradigm is the way you frame reality. It's a world view, it's the way you assume the world just works, right? And once in a while, a paradigm shift comes along to completely change that. What am I talking about? Well, for example, people used to have a paradigm that the sun orbited around the earth. And then along came Nicholas Copernicus and said, "Hey, guess what? Actually, the earth revolves around the sun." And after first saying, "Heresy!" Everybody went, "Ah, that makes so much more sense. The sun, okay, we get that now." That's a paradigm shift.

Or people used to think diseases were caused by evil vapors that lurked in the air and then Louis Pasteur came along and said, "Actually, if you look through a microscope, you'll see there's these little germs. So wash your hands, less people die." And even though at first a lot of people said, "That's ridiculous," they eventually realized, "Oh, he's right, that's a paradigm shift." Or people used to call the last pick of the NFL Draft Mr. Irrelevant and then Brock Purdy, "That's a paradigm shift." You see what I'm talking about.

Well, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is introducing a paradigm shift too. And if you ever feel discouraged, like you're just a nothing, you're a nobody, you're looked down on, or if you just wanna know what God wants from you, or you're bewildered by the Bible, you will love what Jesus says today. So what I wanna encourage you to do is grab those message notes that you were handed when you came in, you can follow along here, and also open your Bibles or your Bible apps to Matthew 5:13. This is still the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus Christ. And he's challenging us to do three things that are complete paradigm shifts.

First, he's challenging us to reimagine our purpose in life, to make it bigger, reimagine why God put you here on earth. Now, remember the context here, Jesus is originally teaching to the downtrodden. How do we know? Well, the end of chapter four, right before the Sermon on the Mount, says people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases in pain, the demon possessed, those having seizures, the paralyzed, and he healed them. So, you know, job offers are not being thrown to these people. There's no ad seeking demon-possessed man for senior management position. Are you an experienced leper? We're looking for you.

Now, there were elite people, of course, in those crowds, but most of these people would have been lower class. And Greco-Roman society in the first century and the Jewish world that was deeply influenced by that society was extremely class-conscious. Society was strictly stratified. I mean, the Greek philosopher Aristotle said, from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. That's just the way it is. Or Plato said, well, it's just for the powerful to have more than the weak. Justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. I mean, that's a completely different understanding of justice. It's a completely different paradigm. But that's the way people thought.

And so most people were just cogs in the machine, worker bees, this is how they thought of themselves. Yet it's from among them that Jesus chooses his followers. And he tells them, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. You. Now, that's a spectacular thing to say. The word for world here that he uses is actually the word for cosmos. You're the light of the cosmos. You can't have life without light. You can't have life without salt. And so what he's saying to these downtrodden, lower class people is you are actually the most important life-giving people in the cosmos. As my followers, even though you don't even understand what it's all about yet.

Now, let's examine this verse a little bit more closely. Notice he says, you are not you ought to be. He's saying you are the most significant people on the planet. This is your identity as my followers. And remember this comes on the heels of what we saw last week in his intro. Jesus has just said blessed to you nine times. And now here he says this, not you might be, not you ought be, not you should be, but you are, you are blessed. You're the hope of the planet, the light of the world, the salt of the earth. And this is what happens when you let Jesus define you. Jesus Christ gives you a gift. It's a gift of divinely sanctioned confidence. It's a gift of knowing that in Jesus' eyes, you are important. You're important to him, you're important to the world.

Now let's keep diving a little bit more deeply. He says we're salt. What does that mean? What did Jesus mean by that? Well, what he says next and right before this gives us some major clues. Next Jesus says, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It's no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. He's warning against becoming unsalty. He's saying beware the potential of diminishing your impact. Now I wanna take this warning very seriously. So what does it mean for us as Jesus followers to not be salty? What's he warning against? Well, I think he has just defined what it means to be salty. He's just finished saying things like blessed are the meek, the gentle, blessed are the merciful, the forgiving, blessed are the peacemakers, the peace creators.

That's how we are the salt of the earth because if we're not like this, the world becomes rancid. It descends into decay and retribution and violence. So if this is saltiness, if that's how we're the salt of the world, the little granules of salt around that keep it from going too far, too bad, then what's the opposite of this? Well, unsalty are the proud, unsalty are the grudsholders, unsalty are the agitators, right? The way I lose my saltiness, in other words, is to be like this. It's to become just like anybody. Then salt isn't salt anymore. It's common, it's road dust, it's powder. It doesn't have its flavor anymore.

Now Jesus warns against becoming unsalty. So let me ask you this. Is what you allow to influence you in the news, on podcasts, on shows, through music, et cetera, making you more or less salty? Is it making you more or less merciful and gentle and peace creating? Because salt means Christ-like character, being like Jesus in character. He's saying, that's who you are, that's what the Holy Spirit is forming in you. So don't counteract that by something that's gonna leach away that flavor from you. And then Jesus says, you are the light of the world, a town built on a hill cannot be hidden.

Now a town built on a hill, I wanna help you picture this, literally the way they would have pictured this. Here's a photograph that I took last year when I was in Israel. This is the slope leading down to the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, and this is actually the traditional spot where Christians have come for centuries to remember the Sermon on the Mount. And it could have been this very slope where Jesus gave this speech, as Mark said when he introed this a couple of weeks ago. We don't know exactly where it was, but it was one of these slopes on this side of the lake near Capernaum, right? So they look across this part of the lake, and this city is Tiberius. So this city existed in Jesus' day. It was a brand new city then built in the Roman style, and of course now it's got modern buildings too, but it was a large city then with big fortifications and castles and so on, so it would have been easily visible from the Capernaum area when Jesus and his disciples and the people listening would have looked across the lake.

Now he says, he's talking about light, right? So a city at night. Well here's a picture I took from that area of Tiberius. You can see it lighting up the night sky. Of course in those days they didn't have electricity, but they still had light at night. I mean they had street lights. They had lights at home. They were oil lamps, and that's where Jesus goes next. He says neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. So they put it on its stand and it gives light to everyone in the house. So what kind of lamps is he talking about? Again, just to help you picture this. Their oil lamps were very small. You could fit them in your palm. You put oil in here and then you lit this side of it and it produced actually a surprising amount of light. And of course they didn't just use one of these things. He says they put it in a stand and they've discovered stands from that era, and this is what the lamp stands look like. They would hang several of these lamps from these lamp stands and so the accumulated light would really give a lot of light. This is what Jesus is talking about when he's talking about putting the lamp on its stand.

And he says that gives light to everybody in the house. In the same way he goes on, let your light shine before others. In your home, in your place of work, at your school, in your neighborhood, so that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. So Jesus defines what he means by life. It means good deeds. Salt means Christ-like character. Light means Christ-like deeds. Now there's a reason he doesn't just say light, he doesn't just say salt, because the world needs both, doesn't it? Let me ask you this question. Can you be kind of a relentless do-gooder and may it just be a jerk? Of course you can be. You can be an arrogant do-gooder because you've got the deeds but you don't have the character. Or you can be gentle and meek and mild and you really want peace, but you're not really doing anything about it. Jesus is saying your salt and your light.

Now let's keep digging. What kind of good deeds is Jesus talking about here? In the Bible, in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament that Jesus had, that lists certain specific deeds as being like light a lot of times. But let me just give you one passage. Isaiah 58:6–8 says, Loose the chains of injustice. Untie the cords of the yoke. Set the oppressed free. Break every yoke. Share your food with the hungry. Give the poor wanderer shelter. When you see the naked clothe them, don't turn away from your own flesh and blood. Then your light will break forth like the dawn. And so this is the kind of deed Jesus is talking about when he says, let your light shine before others.

So we've examined that part of the sword on the mouth. Let me ask you this. How is this a paradigm shift for people? I mean, this is just common sense, right? Sure, you want to let your light shine so people see your good deeds and maybe they're drawn to Jesus. This was a paradigm shift. Let me show you what Jesus was not saying. Jesus was not saying, let the light of your scruples shine so people may see your unimpeachable morality. He was not saying, let the light of your Bible knowledge shine so people may know how much you know. Jesus also does not say, let the light of your politics shine so people may see the consistency of your biblical worldview. Now there's nothing wrong with, of course, with morality, Bible knowledge, or politics. I seek to be a moral and biblically knowledgeable and politically consistent Christian. But Jesus said, that's not what's gonna draw people to a life of peace with God. Jesus said, what's going to draw people is good deeds.

Yet he's also not saying, in the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and conclude that you are a good person. All of these things were the old paradigm. I once met a couple who were missionaries to Africa and the woman told me, René, most of my Christian life was about winning the approval of my Christian superiors. I was trying so hard, always thinking, are they noticing? Are they noticing how I am listening to the right music, wearing the right length hemline, drinking and eating the right substances and abstaining from the wrong substances? She said, the question I was always asking daily was, do other Christians see what a good Christian I am? That's, you know, religion, that's the old paradigm.

Here's how this is paradigm breaking. Jesus was not talking about religious acts for religious people, but good deeds for all people. Not let your rule keeping shine for your religious superiors, but let your good deeds shine for all humanity so that those people will be drawn to God and glorify Him, not approve of you. I long to be this kind of Christian. I long for this church to be full of these kinds of Jesus followers because Jesus says that's what's going to draw people to God. That's what's gonna make people glorify to God. And so I'm praying that when people see us as a church, for example, building the Hope Center here over the next couple of years, where thousands will be fed each year as they're already being fed at our people's pantry, free grocery giveaway, when they hear, for example, like last fall, that the church raised over a million and a half meals for Second Harvest Food Bank, when they learned that we as a church support Little Flock, a children's home in India, when they hear how our high schoolers are gonna leave in a few days, spending the first week or so of their summer vacation in Mexico, working with locals there to build homes, and much, much more, that people will be drawn, that good deeds will create goodwill that will lead to opportunities to share the good news.

Because what Jesus is saying is following Him means life is missional. All of life, we're on a mission from God. God's mission is to redeem our broken world through the death and resurrection of Jesus. So one day, all creation will be whole again. And our mission is to live as kind of a little preview of that kingdom now. And Jesus says, when you do that, even in little ways, like giving a cup of water to somebody who's thirsty, then you're the light of the cosmos. And so as a dad, or as a mom, or as a boss, or as a worker, or as a teacher, or as a law enforcement officer, as a student, as a neighbor, you're an outpost of the kingdom. You are salt and light.

So Jesus is saying to these people, don't get cynical about the world. Don't give up about the world. Reimagine your purpose. That's the first paradigm shift. And then the second one is this, reframe the Bible. He teaches them how to reframe the whole Bible. And this is so relevant to us today too. When you look at the Bible, it is so big, so much stuff, so many stories, so many verses, how do you even begin to make sense of it? In Jesus' day, people looked at the Bible and saw it as basically a list of rules, all kinds of different commands. That was their paradigm, and that was taught to them by the Pharisees and teachers of the law who had a rule for every situation. And you really need an expert. There's a reason that they were called lawyers. Because just like today, even though when you're trying to get somebody to help you make sense of California state law, or business law, or something, you have to have a degree to make sense of it all. That was the same thing with understanding the Bible in those days.

But Jesus says, it's much simpler than that, it's a story of love. It's all a story of how we keep going astray. But God keeps wooing us back. And Jesus says, "Now I am here to finish the story." Verse 17, "Do not think that I've come to abolish the law of the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished." Now the key phrase here is not abolish, but fulfill. And the reason he has to clarify this is, he's already been speaking against the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, and he's just gonna turn up the volume against them, right? They're gonna be his foil. As you'll see in the Sermon on the Mount, he's gonna keep pointing to them.

You see them? So don't do that, do this. See them? Don't do that, do this. That's gonna be his continual theme. And so the natural question they're asking is what he's talking about. Is he just trying to throw out the Bible? And Jesus is clarifying, he didn't come to abolish, you know, Jewishness. And by the way, this means if you have a Jewish background, trusting Jesus is not less Jewish, not according to Jesus. Jesus says, here's my relationship to the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, not removing, but reframing. Giving you a new paradigm to see it through, and according to Jesus, it's this, the entire Hebrew Bible points to and is fulfilled in Jesus as Messiah.

Now listen, when you see the Bible this way, this changes how you read the whole Bible. Now, like all the weird and the puzzling stories from ancient times like Adam and Eve's temptation in the garden. You know, they're tempted by the serpent or Satan, they're expelled, and God says to the serpent, he, the man, will crush your head and you will strike his heel. Now we see this as literary foreshadowing of Jesus. He was struck by the serpent on the cross, but then he crushed Satan's power. Or that weird story about Abraham back in, like the barbarian days, on his way to do a child sacrifice. But the angel of God says, no, stop, and directs him to a ram caught in a thicket, and the Bible says he sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. This story started the whole concept of substitutionary atonement, and it foreshadows Jesus as our lamb of God, the sacrifice for our sins.

Or the weird prophecy in Isaiah 53, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him. By his wounds we are healed. For centuries no one could figure that one out. And then it was fulfilled in what Jesus did for us on the cross. Oh, by his wounds we are healed. We get into heaven on his merit, not our merit badges. Jesus reframes the whole Bible. And here's why this is so important and so helpful today. You know, sometimes when people wanna argue about this detail in the Bible, or that detail in the Bible, I get it, the Bible's fascinating, you know, what about this seeming contradiction? In the Gospels, and what about this weird rule about tattoos in the Old Testament? What about the actual length of the days of the creation? 'Cause if there wasn't sun yet, and then what are the length of the day? That's fascinating stuff. But don't get distracted from the point. Don't bury the lead. Don't miss the forest. The message is Jesus.

So stay on message. Stay on message. Or like when I look at the hard to understand Old Testament parts, like all those stories of violence and war. You know it can't be recommending violence and war, because Jesus specifically speaks against it. Jesus reframes it all. Jesus is our interpretive key to understanding the point to the whole Bible. Now, I can tell you that even as Christians, we can forget these paradigm shifts. It's like Copernicus saying, you know, the earth actually revolves around the sun. And I'm sure people doubted that and reverted back to, that can't be true because it sure looks to us like the sun revolves around the earth. Right? And it can be so easy to revert back to the old paradigm of looking at the Bible and forget this.

I can tell you from my own experience, grew up in church, heard hundreds of sermons, memorized many Bible verses. I knew most of the Bible stories. I'd actually read through the entire Bible a few times, every word. But my paradigm for applying the Bible to my life was moral instruction. Be brave like David and don't commit it at all tree, like David. Be wise like Solomon, but don't have lots of lovers like Solomon, et cetera, et cetera. And those were great lessons. They make sense, but they sort of miss the big point. When you're looking at the Bible like that, where's the through line? Where's the continuity? Where's the inspiration? I could learn those lessons just from looking around in my own life.

If you don't recognize that Jesus is the interpretive key to understanding the Bible, you will substitute your own interpretive key, which usually will be moralism. But the Bible is not some disconnected, random bunch of morality stories. It's the story of God reaching down to us in all of our complexity and flaws and foibles and failures and providing a path for us to him so he can love us. And that leads into the final paradigm shift. Jesus invites people to redefine righteousness. Righteousness means living right with God and living right with people, living right. And everybody at their core wants to live right. But what does that mean? Well, the old paradigm, which the Pharisees and the teachers of the law had all figured out, we saw how they expanded. Last week, we saw how they expanded the 10 commandments into thousands of amendments.

Like don't look in a mirror on the Sabbath, don't lift a heavy fork on the Sabbath, keep all 2000 rules like that, and then you're good. But of course, nobody could. So Jesus shifts the paradigm in kind of a sneaky way, thought-provoking way, watch this. Therefore, anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. In other words, don't worry, I'm not going to abolish the Old Testament. But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Key word there, practices. Oh, the Pharisees and teachers of the law, they love to study it and get granular about it. But they actually missed the point, to actually do it. You know, to do the act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with your God part. The Bible's not just for academic education, it's for practical transformation.

And then here, and then Jesus, this is the last verse we're gonna look at this morning. This is the key to understanding the entire rest of the Sermon on the Mount. This is it, this is the last sentence of Jesus' introduction. And here's his thesis statement right here, very mysterious, very clever, next verse. For I tell you that unless your righteousness, he's about to redefine this, surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. What? Now people had to be saying, you have got to be kidding me. The Pharisees and teachers of the law were righteousness like world champions, the way they defined it in their paradigm of righteousness obeying all these 2000 rules.

And so when they heard this, it was kind of like I was thinking the other day, years ago, my brother-in-law and I at their house in Dallas, we were shooting free throws to see who of us could shoot the most free throws on his little home basketball court consecutively. And I got up to 12 and then 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 consecutive free throws. And I'm kind of thinking, I'm pretty good at this. I wonder, I said out loud, what the world record for free throws consecutively is. And so we looked it up, you know what it is? 5,221. So I was close. Well, this is like saying, yeah, unless you're righteous, unless you can shoot over 5,000 free throws, then I don't even wanna consider you for my team. But they were like, that's impossible for a normal human being. But this is clever of Jesus 'cause now he's got their attention. And for the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, he's gonna talk about what he means by that 'cause he's gonna look at the teachers of the law and the Pharisees and he's going to say, so this is the way they would define righteousness, this scrupulous, legalistic bullet point, keep these laws, amendments, and commandments righteousness.

But what I want you to do surpasses that because it's like this. For example, later he tells a story about a guy who gets mugged on the side of the road. And the Pharisees and teachers of the law, the priests and the temple workers, they walk right past him and don't even pay any attention. They're busy being religious, busy being scrupulous. But a Samaritan who's not even religious at all by their standards, in fact, he's got a whole different religion that they consider a cult. Can you imagine? And this guy who's just a businessman, he stops, he sees the guy, and he gives out of his own funds to take care of them. He comes back on each business journey, checks on him, really, really takes care of him. And Jesus says in God's eyes, who's the righteous guy in this story? The, when Jesus says the non-religious, non-temple-working, non-priest is actually the righteous guy. That guy's righteousness surpasses these guys. The people listening to the tops of their heads are blown right off. That's a paradigm shift.

And for the rest of the siren on the Mount Jesus is going to elaborate on this. Like, what does this mean practically to you? What's righteousness look like, for example, if somebody ticks you off or cuts you off or flips you off or insults you or entices you or enrages you or cheats you? What are you supposed to do then? Kind of like you can be nice to a starving kid, but what about the jerk who took your job? Well, Jesus is gonna talk about exactly that next weekend. But for now, the point to all this is this. God is writing a story, a love story to the world. And it's all through the Bible. And Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of that story. And he's saying to the crowd, "You get to be in the story." So live the story of God's love.

The Bible tells a great story and you get to live it. I was reading the book, "The Colors of Hope" by a pastor up in the Seattle area named Richard Dahlstrom. This is Richard Dahlstrom today. But he tells a story from early in his ministry. He says he wanted to do some evangelizing at an open-air New Age music festival in the Pacific Northwest. And so he's a very young pastor, very bold the way that only young people can kind of be sometimes. And so he made some pamphlets that he thought were pretty good. And at this New Age rock concert, he's like, "What is my audience?" And so he starts by paraphrasing John Lennon. Imagine there's no war. Imagine there's no division, no theft, no disease, no hungry people, no unhoused people.

And then when people opened this little leaflet, there were Bible verses on page two about how Isaiah prophesies what the world is going to be like when Messiah returns and makes the world just like that. And then on page three, there's warnings about avoiding the antichrist. And then on page four, there was an invitation to receive Jesus Christ. And Richard was convinced that as soon as people read this, they'd want in on it. And he was prepared for any question about how to receive Jesus. And so he rents a booth and he's there when the gates open, Bible in hand, waiting for the harvest. It never came. He says lots of people stopped to read, but as soon as they got to the Bible verses, they walked away. And Richard says he told himself, "Well, the Bible says many are called, but few are chosen. So this projection only proves that you're being faithful." Which taken to its logical conclusion, of course, would mean the fewer people respond, the more faithful you're being.

But he says, "At last, a thoughtful man picked up the pamphlet, actually sat down and read it page by page." And then he walks up to Richard and he says, "This is great stuff. I had no idea that God was interested in any of this stuff." And Richard says he was busy congratulating himself and getting ready to close the deal. When the guy says, "So, Isaiah talks about feeding the hungry. What's your church doing about that?" And Richard thought, "Oops, wasn't expecting that question." Oh, and the Bible talks here about helping the widows and the orphans and the poor. Which of these things is your church involved with because that's exciting? And Richard writes, "I think he genuinely wanted to know and I genuinely had nothing to say." At the time, we didn't do kingdom stuff, we just did getting people saved stuff. The problem wasn't that what we did was wrong, it was that it was just a part of the story.

Like telling somebody about a great baseball game you saw, but quitting after a marvelous description of the pitcher putting on his uniform. Since that time, our church has been welcomed to refugees, started a food bank, partnered with other churches to help the unhoused and more. We still declare the gospel boldly. Now we also make the gospel visible. That's living the story. And I believe this is what Jesus is saying. Now look at this paradigm shift. Maybe this is all kind of a paradigm shift for you right now because you kind of felt like your purpose was to be a worker bee, kind of like, you know, do a good job, rise to the top, get the C-suite office. Jesus says, "No, you're a light to the cosmos." And maybe you kind of saw the Bible as a list of rules or moral fables. Jesus says it's a story about God's love for the world. And maybe you thought of righteousness as obeying some list. Jesus says it's about loving God and loving people. Ah, it shifts everything.

But this really all starts with the biggest paradigm shift of all, like a Copernican level shift, which is moving from kind of the default paradigm of yourself as center of the universe, as the thing everything revolves around, to seeing yourself as centered on Jesus. And then all the rest falls into place because then you're going the Jesus way. Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this profound paradigm shifting teaching. And my prayer is that if there are people here in this room right now who want to follow you that they would say, "Well, you know, Jesus, I'm trying to hear you the way you actually were heard and I can see how paradigm shifting this is from kind of the default human position about religion and about influence. And I don't understand it all, but I want to keep moving in that direction. In other words, I want to be a Jesus follower because this is different and this is what the world needs and this is what I need. And so I want to put you at the center of my life. I don't understand it all, help me to understand it more, but I'm taking that first step, I want to follow you."

And Lord, for all those who made that prayer perhaps years ago, yet our paradigm can shift back in so many ways to all those old ways of looking at the Bible and life and righteousness. So I pray that we would move from them back to the way you define those things, that we get to be part of the story of God loving the world so much, he sent his one and only son. So whosoever believes would not perish, but have eternal life. And we thank you for that God in Jesus' name, amen.