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Jesus says that the wise person not only listens to his words [in ‘The Sermon’], but obeys them. When they do, their ‘house’ is built on the rock and survives the storm.
Jesus warns that there are prophets who may say all the right things and even perform mighty works, but their lives do not produce fruit. That is, they do not do the will of God.
Jesus specifically addresses two kinds of paths. One that leads to life — The other, destruction. Jesus himself is the gate that leads to life — But how do we enter it?
What does this Greater Righteousness in the Golden Rule look like? And is there a way that we could ‘do unto others what we would want done to us’ that doesn’t exalt Christ?
For many of us, the reason we judge others harshly and wrongly is because we really don’t understand the graciousness and generosity of God the Father.
Does Jesus forbid us from discerning right from wrong, good from bad, etc.? Dive in with us as we explore Matthew 7:1-6.
Christ wants his disciples to know what anxiety is, what can cause it, and how focusing on God’s Kingdom and righteousness can help us overcome it!
If the Kingdom vision that Jesus tells us of doesn’t reshape our approach to possessions, then we are not living out the Kingdom vision.
Fasting is the way — at least as it appears in the Bible — to act in solidarity and in true sympathy with those things — with the suffering of the world around us.
There’s so much more to the Lord’s Prayer than many of us realize and exploring its depths brings about a prayer that was both designed to be recited and aid in our spiritual formation.
We need to make time to spend devoted time in prayer and, remembering Luther’s words, make our prayers “brief, consistent, and intense.”
When we aim towards generosity out of a motivation of being seen and praised by others, or even to impressed by ourselves, then we fail to actually pursue the kind of Christ-honoring righteousness he calls us to.
Righteousness, according to Jesus, is whole-person behavior that accords with Gods’s nature, will, and coming kingdom.
Loving our enemies cannot be reduced to mere “tolerance.” We must pray for them and strive for them to become the sort of person/people that God wants them to be!
As disciples, we are willing to be degraded because we recognize we have been upgraded through Christ. We are willing to be treated unjustifiably because we have been justified eternally through Christ.
The word of the Christian is absolutely vital. Being “imitators of God” means our words should be like his — life-giving and truthful.
We approach the topic of marriage and divorce with grace and humility but also with boldness and determination to truly get the heart of what Jesus and the Scriptures say about the topic.
Jesus fully fills the seventh commandment and shows us what a greater righteousness looks like in dealing with sexual lust.
Jesus fully fills the sixth commandment and shows us what a greater righteousness looks like in dealing with our anger.
We must not “unhitch” ourselves from the OT — Jesus did not come to unhitch us from it, but to transform it, to fully fill it.
The “you are(s)” (the salt/the light) encourage us to reimagine our role in the world as God’s agents of redemption — this is no small thing.
The Beatitudes are “not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus.” — Stanley Hauerwas
“The more we explore their implications, the more seems to remain unexplored. Their wealth is inexhaustible. We cannot plumb their depths. Truly, ‘We are near heaven here.’”
The big idea that we wanted to take away was that The Sermon is a vision for receiving the King and His Kingdom and in so doing, we can truly experience God’s plan for true human flourishing.
“The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus. [The] Church, then, forms the context for the ethic of Jesus.” — Stanley Hauerwas