As we follow Jesus, we must engage our emotions in our worship of God.

Our final sermon from The Sermon on the Mount explores Jesus’ words and warnings about hearing and heeding his words.

Fear of #fakenews is everywhere. This fear that people will be duped into believing and acting on false information is nothing new. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches his followers that not everything is what it seems to be … nor is everyone.

Judge not: perhaps the two most popular words Jesus ever uttered. But did he mean to prohibit everything we categorize as judging others? What do we do with his instructions for humbly removing the speck we see in someone’s eye? Moreover, what virtues is he seeking to instill in his followers with these words?

Though he is truly God, Jesus also experienced the full scope of what it means to be human. His entering into our reality is essential to his redeeming all of our pain and brokenness from the inside out. God not only inhabits our praises, but in Jesus he also inhabits our sufferings, bringing His true presence and healing into the hardest parts of the human experience.

Jesus knows we desperately try to accumulate material wealth to feel secure, then worry even more about keeping our stuff. He outlines 3 reasons we can live free of worry in God’s Kingdom that will challenge, comfort, and transform us. God cares for us; we need a relationship with him more than anything else we seek after; and the future is in God’s hands.

The day of Pentecost celebrates the sending of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church.  But who is the Holy Spirit, and how does the Holy Spirit really impact daily living?

Discipleship is always a process of teaching transcendent principles through specific behaviors.

If we will let it, praying the prayer Jesus taught us frees us of chaos, fear, worry, and the tyranny of our circumstances. It leads us out of the frenetic, out of control, disordered life where things that matter less are elbowing things that matter more out of our actual spent time and money and energy and attention.

In the middle of his teaching about not confusing faithful religion with religious show, Jesus teaches his disciples to pray. We’ve become so familiar with The Lord’s Prayer that many of us rarely include it as a meaningful part of our life and prayers. But Jesus said *this is how you should pray*. What if he meant that?