Do you have enough faith to trust that God will take care of you? Actually, how would it change you if you had that much faith? How would it change your relationship to money? In Matthew 6, King Jesus makes a promise that seems too good to be true.

Have you ever realized that giving to the poor or forgiving someone who hurt you are both acts of faith? Both of them will cause you to lose out on something that was rightfully yours, and if you keep doing it enough, you will eventually become needy yourself, won't you? That is... unless you are getting filled up in some other way.

What is the heart of the Law of Christ? If you think the rules of the Sermon on the Mount are all about avoiding lust or avoiding divorce, you might have missed what's really going on. It's so much deeper than that.

If you think of Jesus primarily as a Savior, he's the one that gets you out of the things you don't want to do. But if you think of him mainly as your King, you should expect him to demand something of you.

Citizens of the new kingdom of Jesus are salt and light to the people of the old kingdom, but what does that mean? Here's a hint. It doesn't mean to be a restraining force and it doesn't mean to shine a light of shame on the sins of the world. Still, it is the first command of the new kingdom and how you understand the command will affect nearly everything about how you live in relationship to the world around you.

Last time, we considered one aspect of blessing, but in Matthew 5, Jesus starts really teaching about it. He gives us 8 very specific blessings along with the principles for how you can get in on them. This section sets us up to see the entire Sermon on the Mount with completely new eyes.

What if blessing was already on the way to you? What if you were impatient and wandered away before the blessing came? What if that blessing ended up falling to someone else?

That's what happened when Jesus went to Galilee and fulfilled Isaiah 9.

The story of Jesus's temptation is not a story for us about how we can defeat temptation. Rather, it's a story about the supreme achievement of our king who defeated the most fundamental of all temptations and proved to us that he is exactly the king we need even if he isn't the king we thought we wanted.

Our next passage in the Gospel of Matthew takes us to a passage on judgment. Actually, it's the message John the Baptist gave to warn people about the coming Messiah. For John, the coming Messiah was something to be scared of... John would baptize with water, but the coming Messiah would baptize in fire. This should teach us at least two important lessons about Jesus, our King.

What does it take for a leader to be rejected? What kind of leader will religious people follow and what kind will be despised? Jesus was the kind of leader religious conservatives hated.