The Greatest Sermon Ever

Whether Jesus ways our brand new series, hello and good morning. Good morning balcony. Thank you, my name is Mark. I'm one of the pastors and I wanna welcome all of you. We are so glad that you're joining us here both live and on our live stream. And I hope that you're having a great day. You had a great week.

Speaking of great times, how about that time of worship with Trent and the band? That was so cool. And on that last song, our drummer Connor Bruce, you might've noticed, he was burning a few calories. He's on supplemental oxygen right now backstage. So that was very cool.

We are about to embark on a 17-week amazing journey through the Sermon on the Mount. And we're just so excited because in Matthew's gospel, chapters five, six, and seven, Jesus talks about the impact of the kingdom of God coming to earth. Jesus is ushering in a new era, a new reality, a new way of being human. He's really reclaiming what God intended for humankind since the very beginning.

Because if you go back all the way to Genesis 1, God's plan was that human beings would bear his image, which means among other things that we would reflect his will, his love, his good purposes on earth. That's what we were made for. Now, if you know the story, it goes sideways really quick. The Old Testament does not shy away from how many, many times human people have failed just over and over and over again to live out the very ways that we were created to live.

I mean, we can't even live up to our own standards, let alone God's, you know what I'm saying? Years ago, Bono, lead singer of U2, he said this, "I can't change the world, but I can change the world inside me." He's a relatively young Christian, and it's a laudable goal. He's like, "I'm gonna start with the man in the mirror and start with the change there." But more recently, Bono kind of updated that statement and he said this, "I can change the world, but I can't change the world inside of me." He's saying, "Yeah, I've got some influence. I've got agency. I can actually affect change as I leverage my fame and fortune, but I can't change me. Can't change my heart."

Which brings us to the Sermon on the Mount, which is the most quoted, most influential, most studied, most revolutionary, most powerful speech ever, ever. It is the greatest sermon ever. And Jesus didn't just come to change the world. As he declares through this amazing sermon, he came to change your world and my world. Who you live for, what you live for, how you live, and despite living in an age of anxiety and materialism, culture wars, actual wars, where we're left maybe feeling despair or apathy, this is about being and living counter-cultural, about being truly happy, about being a light in a dark world.

This is the Jesus way that he shares in this sermon. So buckle up and be prepared to be transformed. Are you ready? Are you ready, church? All right, we're getting there. Today, I wanna give you an overview because there's so much depth and beauty and inspirational vision that's just packed into this message.

And I was thinking this week, it's kinda like, I don't know if you've ever been on a flight over our state and you were fortunate enough to fly over the Yosemite Valley. Anyone ever experienced this on a flight? I have, and it's really cool to be able to have this bird's eye view of Yosemite and kinda see it all at once, so to speak. But as cool as that is, there's something even better than seeing Yosemite from 30,000 feet. It's seeing it when you're down in the valley and journeying through it and discovering all that it contains or just even, you don't even really, you can't do that. But as much as you can take in, it's amazing.

And so I hope not only today will you find yourself blessed, but that you will also make it a priority to journey with us over the course of these 17 weeks as we plunge into the Sermon on the Mount and see all that God has for us during this time. Today, we're gonna get our bearings. We're gonna do that flyover because again, there's just a lot of material here and I wanna identify just a couple of the major themes.

I'm kind of dividing the Sermon into three major chunks, if you will. You can divide it more than that, but there are three questions that Jesus raises that kinda are the signposts to each of these parts of the Sermon. And the first question goes like this. It is who is truly blessed? Who's truly blessed? What is the good life? What is the good life? We all wanna experience it, but how does Jesus define blessing?

Well, let's begin with some context here because if you read at the end of chapter four, Jesus has been proclaiming that the kingdom of God has come, Matthew calls it the kingdom of heaven, and he is healing people and people are just flocking to Him. He is drawing this immense crowd. And so chapter five begins with this. Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to Him and he began to teach them.

Now this takes place in Galilee and here's a modern-day Galilee here. So this story we're reading today, this sermon could have very well taken place on one of these hillsides, kind of the form of a natural amphitheater right here in Galilee. We know it's in this area. And Matthew specifically says that His disciples, they came to Him, but there's also the crowd. And so it's hard to think that they all just kind of peeled off like, "Oh, I don't have my discipleship card, so I'm gonna go." But that many of them were actually attracted to what Jesus would be saying.

In fact, we know this because if you get to the end of chapter seven, the end of the sermon, it says that the crowds were amazed by His teaching, saying he teaches with such authority, like no one else we've ever heard. And so many of them were part of this audience and the very first thing that Jesus says to them, the very first word out of His mouth is blessed. Blessed. And I love this because Jesus starts with blessing.

Before He tells them about how to live their lives or this or that, no, blessed. The New York Times once ran an article called, They Feel Blessed because our culture has all sorts of different ideas about what it means to be blessed. We define that on different terms. And so in this article, the author, Jessica Bennett, she talks about how it's become increasingly popular for people to post kind of their blessing moments on social media, right? And so she says just in her own social media network, one person said, "God helped a friend get accepted into graduate school. She was blessed to be there." Well, I would agree.

Another one posted, "God made it possible for a yoga instructor's Caribbean spa retreat, blessed to be teaching in paradise," she wrote. All her coworkers back at work were saying, "Not so blessed." Bennett goes on to say with a hint of sarcasm, "God has in fact recently blessed my network with dazzling job promotions, coveted speaking gigs, the most wonderful fiancées ever, and front row seats at fashion week." So again, does being blessed simply come down to things going the way that I want them to? Where's their board to it?

In the Greek language that Matthew writes this gospel in, the word for blessed is the word makarios. And makarios can, in fact, it does include happiness, but it goes much deeper than that. It has to do with flourishing, has to do with your whole being, and it's about this ongoing state of being blessed, not just the current state of my circumstances. It's very much like the description of the man in Psalm 1, who is called blessed, and he's compared to a tree that's planted by streams of water, and the tree yields its fruit in its season and its leaves do not wither. In other words, it is flourishing, it is blessed.

One scholar I read this week said, a kind of appropriate translation for makarios is what they say in Australia, when they say, "Good on you, mate, good on you." That's a way of saying, "Be blessed." And Jesus says, "Pretty much good on you." God's favor is on you, and specifically, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They may be poor in spirit, but they're already members of the kingdom. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

And I want you to notice that the verb tenses here, they are mourning, but they will be comforted. And so there is, as often called, this now not yet aspect to the kingdom of God. It is here now, Jesus has inaugurated, by coming here, he's inaugurated the kingdom of God. It's in our midst, but it has not reached its climax, its ultimate fulfillment, that is yet to come. And so there is this promise, that the blessings we experience now are a foretaste of blessings to come when the kingdom is completely fulfilled.

Blessed are the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, which brings us to this big idea, the question being, who is truly blessed? Well, it turns out blessed are the Jesus followers, that's who, but Jesus followers. And you may be thinking, well, I don't feel blessed. I don't even look blessed. I got a lot of challenges in my life. I mean, think about it. Poor in spirit, mourning the meek, really? Is that really blessed?

Right now you may feel beaten down. You may be in a period of grief, a season of grief. You may feel like the scales of justice are not tipping in your favor. Or try as you might. Your life is difficult. Your relationships may be complicated. And yet, if you're a Jesus follower, he says you are blessed. I mean, think of what we, the testimony we heard about Carrie Mendoza. And we've been praying for her for many years because of these physical issues and yet there is a beauty that flows out of her and inspiration for the rest of us.

And not to gloss over the difficulties that she has experienced, but here's the thing. For followers of Jesus, it is during these times when we're poor in spirit, mourning and so on that God is doing some of his deepest work. It's these times when God is doing something decisive in you and through you. I mean, let's face it. We all want God to do something about a lot of things. You know what I mean? But listen, when he moves, when he acts, he does not send in the tanks, so to speak. He works through the humble. He works through the meek and the mourners.

You see the kingdom advancing through those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. You see it in the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted because you know what? They pray. They lament on behalf of a wounded world and they are a blessing. They also build hospitals. They bring relief in the wake of disasters. They provide food, clean water, education. They bring the gospel. And you could go around the globe and wherever you find there is a need for love and compassion and mercy and justice, you will find the vast majority of the people and the organizations doing that are the Jesus followers.

There's not really even a close second, which is why Jesus says, "You are the salt of the world. You are the light of the world." You may recall when I spoke a couple weeks ago, we were just on the cusp of taking our Twin Lakes Christian School seventh graders and some of their parents down to an orphanage on the coast of Baja, California. And while the students and the parents, when they plunged in and they gave so much, the reality is, is they received so much more, way more.

And you know what? That happens every single time. In fact, one of the dads that was with us, he said this to me, he goes, "Man, this is so much better than every single surf trip that I've ever taken to this very same spot." And he had about a dozen of them under his belt. But it's like, wow, you know. Who knew a week at an orphanage could bring that much joy? And yet when you're living out God's creative purposes in your life, that's what happens and you are blessed.

So again, who is truly blessed? Blessed are the who, the Jesus followers. And this leads us to a second key question, second and major chunk of the Sermon on the Mount. How do Jesus followers live? Because if the Sermon on the Mount is about anything, it is about how the Christian life is lived out. And the kingdom of God, it has its own set of values, its own ethics. And as you can read elsewhere in Matthew and in the other gospels, there was conflict with Jesus and other religious leaders around this.

They thought he was kind of soft on the religious rules. I mean, he observed the Sabbath, but not as strictly as the scribes and the Pharisees did. You know, he let his Pharisees pick wheat when they're walking through fields and he actually, heaven forbid, he healed people on the Sabbath. That constituted work in their minds. That was a big no-no, nevermind. He healed people on the Sabbath. It doesn't really matter what day it is. If you get healed, that's a good day. That's a God-honoring day.

And not only that, but Jesus liked to hang out with the sinners and the tax collectors, right? The outcasts in their society. And so in response to the criticism that he's receiving, he says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets." That's shorthand for the Old Testament. "I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them." Now, I want you to circle or underline the word fulfill 'cause this is really key to what he's talking about here.

"For 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. 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. But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."

Wow, that's a mouthful, Jesus. And next weekend, René's gonna be here to explain what this all means. Actually, let me give this to you in a kind of a nutshell. We don't have time for a real deep dive in this minute, or this is our flyover here. But here's what Jesus is essentially saying, at least at the core. All of the Old Testament commands and religious practices, even the sacrificial system, God didn't give them to Israel just as this static thing. They look forward to some kind of fulfillment.

They are leaning towards these ideas of goodness and living in a society that's flourishing. And yes, a means of atoning for and being redeemed. You know, you think of the sacrifices. Well, when Jesus comes and He is the sacrificial Lamb, those things are fulfilled. It doesn't make any sense to go back and start, you know, sacrificing animals. We have Jesus. And again, He is the embodiment of God's goodness. And so we look to Him first and foremost as the fulfillment of those things, as the expression of those things.

And the one who, again, bestows God's grace, God's mercy, and His forgiveness upon us. This is Jesus fulfilling all of the hopes and expectations of the Scriptures. And so he does not come with kind of like, you know, the new and improved version. He says, "No, I fulfilled all that." And by the way, don't be just kind of cavalier about it because those commands are good and wise because they help people understand how their conduct matters, how that they can live lives but again, lead to goodness and flourishing.

And so, you know, it's actually good to have commands like against lying and murder and adultery. Wouldn't you agree? That's a good thing. But even so, and here's the crux of it. You know, you can say, "I've never committed murder." No, I've never committed murder. I'm good. And at the same time, never lift a finger to actually help somebody out. You know, the Pharisees, and they were like black belts and keeping the rules, right? Long on obedience, but short on love.

How dare you heal this guy on the Sabbath? They healed him on the Sabbath. And so yes, the commandments of the Old Testament and the words of the prophets, they expose sin, but ultimately they are not able to transform the human heart. They can change behavior, but we need more than that. And so when God does this, your righteousness will exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees because you are empowered to love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.

You're not just keeping the rules. Your whole being is being transformed by God's love and through the power of his spirit, incrementally, day by day. And so it is in the bulk of the sermon that Jesus gets down into the nitty-gritty of life. And he uses these proactive scenarios to get us to think about how love would inform our actions 'cause you're not gonna have a role for everything. But love can inform how you regard others.

For example, something like adultery. I can say, I've never committed adultery. However, if I allow myself to just fantasize about one woman after another, am I really being faithful to my wife? And does not that say something about the nature of my love for her or where it's lacking? Or another example, if someone strikes you on the cheek, Jesus says you ought to turn the other cheek towards him, right? Now is Jesus saying that you should ever and always submit yourself to the abuse of others? Is he saying there's never an appropriate time to defend yourself or your loved ones? Is that what he's saying? I don't think so.

I think what he's doing is he's inviting us to think about the cyclical nature of violence and insult and injury and how human nature is just to get even. And yet the call to love would motivate us to try to make peace, right? It would motivate us to pray for those people we even consider our enemies. And so that's what we're called to. And we're gonna get into these various scenarios in the weeks to come.

But to sum all of them up, Jesus says this in chapter seven, verse 12. So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you for this sums up, literally, this is the law and the prophets. And we call this the golden rule, right? Where I'm called to do right by others in the same way that I want them to do right by me. This is really what Jesus is talking about with the word righteousness here. It is to do right by others for their sake and not just transactionally, but out of love.

So how do Jesus followers live? We live a life of love, a life that leads to flourishing for others and for ourselves. And really the big idea here is that the mark of a Jesus follower is a transformed heart. Your whole being is being changed from the inside out. I mean, going back to Bono, he said ultimately, I can't change the world inside me. Good news, Jesus can, Jesus does. As he conforms all the more to the image of himself.

It's as God said through the prophet Jeremiah, again, fulfillment of the prophets here. God says, "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts" as God changes me from the inside out. And when this happens, by the way, there's a confidence and a peace that my heavenly Father loves me so much. My heavenly Father who's eager to meet with me in prayer or knows my needs, knows them far more than, you know, even he notices the needs of the sparrow, but how much more mine, all this, Jesus unpacks this.

And there's this idea of Father's love is with us at all times. And when I know that and I live in that, I become a conduit of that love for others around me. Now, are you still with me, church? All right, here we go, homestretch here. So far in our flyover, we've seen who is truly loved or truly blessed, I should say, how Jesus followers live. And in the final section, Jesus is gonna invite his listeners, including us, to make a choice.

He's got his challenges along these lines. Will his words take root in our heart and bear fruit in our lives, or will they ultimately be ignored? The final question is this, what do Jesus followers choose? And Jesus illustrates this in a number of ways at the end of the sermon, talks about entering through the narrow gate, as opposed to the wide path that leads to destruction. And his last illustration of this is about the wise and the foolish builders, where he says this in chapter seven, starting at verse 24.

Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on what? The rock. Now the same could not be said of the foolish builder who built his house on the sand, and when those same storms came, Jesus said that house fell with a great crash. In other words, it wasn't just some other option, it fell, it collapsed.

Now, we usually read this in isolation, okay? But it's so much more than just a parable about how to weather the storms of life. It's actually Jesus inviting us, calling us to make a decision here based on what he has shared in the sermon. It's his closing illustration, if you will. And bear in mind, there were two groups there, listening to Jesus that day, wasn't there? There was his disciples, those who had already decided to follow him, and then there was the other group, which was the crowd, very good.

And you know what, amongst the crowd, and I'm sure even amongst his disciples at times, there were lots of people who were amazed. They were amazed by his teaching and the authority that he taught with, and so he had many, many admirers. But here's the thing, there is a difference between an admirer and a follower. To admire someone is just to respond to something you think is cool or beautiful or whatever. To follow is to choose.

And so I'll close and illustrate the difference with a story, and I wanna give credit to John Ortberg for reminding me of the story and some of the thoughts he made about it. Did you know the greatest tightrope walker in the history of the world is a guy named Charles Blondine? He was the very first person to walk on a tightrope across the Niagara Falls, and on June 30th, 1859, he crossed the 1,100-foot span over the Niagara Gorge on a cable made out of hemp. Hemp is that old-style rope, right? It was about two inches thick. He wore pink tights and a yellow tunic. He was quite the showman. But he never ever used a safety line or harness or a net, never.

So over 100,000 spectators watched on June 30th of that year in amazement and horror. In fact, one person said, "You could not pay me a million dollars to watch him do that again." A million dollars is a lot of money in 1859. It's a lot of money today, but still, wow. It says that when he was about a third of the way across, Blondine shocked the crowd by sitting on his cable and calling for a bow, the Maid of the Mist, to anchor temporarily right beneath him, and he lowers down a line and hauls up a bottle of wine. He was from France. And so I don't know how much of the wine he drinks, but he drinks whatever he wants, and then he starts off again, and he gets past the low point, the midpoint. He runs the rest of the way over to the Canadian side of the gorge.

Just days later, on another crossing, when he was halfway across, Blondine laid down on the cable, flipped himself over and began walking backwards the rest of the way. On the journey back, he wore a sack over his body so that there was no way that he could actually see where he was going. He crossed at night with the locomotive headlights fixed to each side of the cable. He even crossed with his body in shackles. In one of his most famous exploits, he carried a stove and utensils on his back. He walked to the center of the cable, started a fire, and cooked an omelet. Can you imagine? Again, did I mention he was French?

And then it gets better because when it was ready, he lowered the breakfast to passengers on the deck of the Maid of the Mists. The crowds went crazy. They were amazed and said, "This man walks the rope with such authority." And then came the day when Charles Blondine tightroped across the Niagara Falls with his manager, a guy named Harry Colcord, riding on his back. Yeah. And before he set off, Blondine said this to his manager. He said, "Look up, Harry. You are no longer Colcord. You are Blondine. Until we reach the other side, be part of me. Mind, body, and soul. If I sway, you sway. Do not attempt to do any balancing yourself. If you do, we will fall with a great crash." We, we, we will. It was something like that.

Now, of course, they make it to the other side. The crowd goes crazy. And you know, he crossed over the Niagara Falls over the course of a summer 300 times. Never had a net, never had a harness. And as a result, he had hundreds of thousands of admirers. But there was only one man who ever truly trusted Charles Blondine. It was his manager, Kerry Colcord, who literally put his life on the back of Charles Blondine.

Now, when Jesus calls us to follow him, he's not merely asking for our admiration. He's calling us to trust him. To choose to put our lives, our futures, our everything in his hands. To choose the way of Jesus, and not the way of the world. And listen, if you have never chosen to follow Jesus, to place your trust in him, and to build your life on the unshakable foundation that he provides, you can today.

I mean, maybe you're here this morning, or you're watching online, or you're gonna see this in the future on the internet. And in that moment, in this moment right now, he's tugging at your heart, and he's beckoning you to trust him. Follow me, follow me. And you recognize that, yeah, you know, I actually am poor in spirit. I don't have anything to offer Jesus except the messes that I've made. And yet, if you realize this, and you say yes to him, good on you, mate, 'cause you are blessed.

And Jesus will gladly receive you into his kingdom, and carry you through this life, and into eternity that awaits us. And so let's go to him right now and pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your goodness and your grace, we thank you for your love and mercy, and we thank you most of all for your Son Jesus Christ, who came to redeem and renew all that was lost when sin and evil entered your good creation.

And so Lord, I wanna specifically pray for the person who's right now listening to the sound of my voice, and they know this is the moment they choose to follow you, Jesus. They choose to receive your offer of forgiveness that you achieve for us on the cross. They choose to receive your love and the life that you give us in all its fullness. And if that's you, you can just simply say, "Lord, yes, yes, I choose you. Thank you for choosing me well before. Thank you for loving me long before I ever thought of loving you in return."

And now Lord, help these folks, each one, to walk in your ways, to become part of your family. They already are, but in terms of just the network and the friendships and the belonging, the closeness. May you build these things over the course of time as you build their heart, as you transform it. And make it new, like you do for all of us who call you savior and Lord. We pray these things in the matchless name of Jesus Christ and all God's people said, Amen.