When we need our lives put back together and when we long for the world to be put back together, we need Easter.

The promise of transformation - from dust to life, from falling apart to being put together - this is the promise of Easter; that what happened to Jesus - being put back together to live forever - is what God promises to do for His people, and for the world.

It’s easier to be a knower than a doer. It’s easier to acquire insight than to put your insight into practice. But a blueprint that stays on a piece of paper doesn’t do a lot of good.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has given us a blueprint for living a life of flourishing. Now, Jesus is coming to the end of his sermon. He sees his hearers and He knows he has given them a full and impactful blueprint for flourishing. Now, he wants to give them some fuel:  to put the blueprint into action, to turn hearing into doing, to move from insight to activity. 

In his conclusion, he gives us 7 different keys, motivations, and fuel sources to get us not just to understand the flourishing life but to live it!

Matthew 6 provides one of Jesus’ most direct statements about our hearts, causing us to look at our use of money and what that reveals about our hearts. Jesus wants to help diagnose where our treasure is by asking us to look at our approach to working, spending, and giving. What we find will help us see where our treasure is, and how we see Jesus will determine how we respond to what we find.

In this famous section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is inviting us to two things:

1) To see ourselves more clearly

2) To see Him more clearly

Prayer and fasting are valuable practices that can awaken us from spiritual dullness and enliven us to spiritual growth and nourishment. God gives us these practices because he knows the true depth of our hunger and wants to satisfy us. In this message, we discuss some practical approaches to prayer and fasting and then explore the Gospel motivation to fast and pray.

How do you react when you are worried about what somebody else thinks of you? If you are like me, the concern over what other people think is a powerful one, and it usually leads me to live a less full life. This concern with what other people think of us is so powerful that we must take into account how it even affects our practices of faith. As Jesus shows us, the need to impress others can have a strong influence on our motivations even for pious things like giving, praying, and fasting. Whenever we live based on what other people think, we won’t get what we want out of it. But if God sees us, and God loves us, we are freed in a way that change everything.- how we live, even how we give.

Jesus wants to show you what kind of people we are meant to become, people who reveal what God is like to the world, and then to help you understand how to become that kind of person, as we give what we have received from God to the world. This message will look at 3 ways in which Jesus describes what we are meant to become…new people who practice telling the truth, going above and beyond, and loving our enemies.

How can Jesus' teaching about adultery, lust, and divorce possibly be good news? This teaching reveals the heart of God to us. He is faithful to us even in the midst of us being unfaithful to Him. Jesus invites all those who have struggled with being unfaithful to come running to Him for forgiveness and life.

As Jesus transitions to a new section of the Sermon On the Mount, and he begins to unpack the law and its demands on our life, he intends to startle us into asking a tough question: How good do I have to be? To live the flourishing life, to follow Jesus, how good do I have to be?

The answer He gives: Better than you thought…

This sermon begins to unpack what that better life looks like, and how we can hope to live it.

Being salt and light is bringing love and life into the dark and needy world around us. Both metaphors remind us that living the flourishing life includes sharing our flourishing with the world - through sharing the powerful life we have found in Christ, by bringing forth the power of love into a world that is desperate for love,  to offer Christ as we have found Him to a world that is dark and needy.