Today Daily Devotional

We started this month thinking about the crowd gathered around Jesus. Believers and skeptics alike listened to Jesus’ great teachings. And in response they recognized that he had authority and did not teach like the religious leaders of that day.

Jesus is one with the Father, and his teachings reflect the will and desire of God himself. His authority doesn’t come from his rhetorical skills or his fascinating stories. It comes from the divine presence of God, working in and through him as he points his listeners to the road of faith and full life.

I hope that you have heard a voice of authority speaking into your life this month. You may still have questions or doubts about what it means to follow Jesus. And you may struggle with the work that you sense God is calling you to do after reflecting on the Sermon on the Mount (I certainly do). But at the very least, you can recognize that you have heard the voice of God himself in this sermon from the Savior.

God invites you to know him, and to be known by him. He also invites you to take your next steps in following Jesus, trusting that he will lead you and guide you in his perfect love for you. “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15).

The Sermon on the Mount takes place near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. People who were building homes in that area would have been tempted to build on the sand, which was firm and stable during the dry months of the year.

However, during the rainy season, there would be storms and flash flooding, and houses that were built on sand could easily get ruined and washed away.

By contrast, a wise builder would dig about ten feet below the sand to find the solid basalt rock underneath. That provided a much firmer foundation. You can imagine how much work that would be in those days, without any power tools or excavators. But the hard work proved worthwhile whenever storms came.

Jesus wants us to have a secure foundation to base our lives on—and that means doing some hard work to put his teachings into practice. It’s not enough just to listen to Jesus’ teaching as we go through life. Jesus calls us to be followers; he urges us to be not just hearers but “doers” of the Word. Obeying his will helps us to avoid unnecessary storms of our own making. But even when we face tough times in life, we can trust that we will have what we need in the sure hope of God’s love for us.

Out of the entire Sermon on the Mount, this might be the most challenging of Jesus’ teachings.

The wide gate and the broad road are full of people who have rejected God and have gone their own way (Matthew 6:13). But there are also people on that road who think they are right with the Lord—people who, from the outside, appear to be doing all the right things. But it can turn out that they’ve actually been far from Christ all along.

The most important thing about us isn’t how many times we have gone to church. It’s not how much money we have given or how often we have volunteered. We’re not saved because we avoid R-rated movies or do not steal.

Instead, the most important thing is knowing, and being known by, Jesus. This means losing our lives in him and putting our agenda aside so that we can honestly say, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). People who try to follow Jesus from a distance risk his rejection because he demands our whole hearts and our whole selves.

If that doesn’t make you a little nervous, it should. Jesus is calling everyone, both in and outside of the church, to do some self-examination: Is my faith genuine? Am I on the right path? Do I really know him? And does he really know me?

Jesus warns about false prophets and teachers who come to us with twisted ideas about belief in God and how to live our lives. These people might use the right religious language or seem to be great leaders. But the truth, Jesus says, is that they are like wolves who will wreak havoc within a sheepfold (the church) if they are allowed to go unchecked.

When we read through the New Testament, we see that the bar is really high for pastors and teachers in the church, because they have a huge responsibility. And the church is right to set safeguards to keep bad leaders away. When leaders mess up and teach something false, they are likely to take other people down with them. So anyone in leadership—­pastors, teachers, mentors, ­elders—should be humbled by this warning. They must make sure that their teaching and ­actions line up with God’s will.

Jesus warns that you can’t trust a false teacher or leader, and he points out that you can recognize them by their fruit (actions). If a leader is unfaithful to their spouse, if they are selfish with money, if they play favorites in the community on the basis of wealth or status or acting like bigshots, if they never apologize or acknowledge their own sin, they are dangerous to the community. And they must be dealt with accordingly.

Jesus lays out a clear choice that each of us must make. There is a wide, easy road that leads to destruction. And there is a harder, narrower road of discipleship that leads to life.

It can be easy to assume that the broad road includes only people who do not believe in God, or maybe people of some other faith who do not know Jesus. So we might ­assume that Jesus is drawing a contrast between people in the church and those who are completely outside of it.

But in light of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, there’s another way to think about this passage. Jesus has been showing his listeners that they need to move from outward religion and ritual into a true relationship with God. We need to go beyond merely behaving ourselves to ­actually walking in union with the Father.

So as we read this passage, we need to realize that Jesus is describing not only a choice between faith or no faith. There’s also a choice between empty, surface-level religion and genuine discipleship.

The call of this passage is to move beyond rituals or cultural faith and to truly enter a full-life relationship with God, marked by dependence and submission to his will.

Some time ago I was at a grocery store looking for something, and I could not find it. Meanwhile, an employee stood by, about five feet away, stocking the shelves.

Did I ask for help? No. Instead, I turned the other way to avoid making eye contact, because something inside me didn’t want to admit that I needed help.

Maybe you can tell a similar story. It’s hard to reach out for help with small things like groceries—let alone the important stuff in life.

We don’t like asking for help for a lot of reasons. But I think the main reason is that we don’t want it to seem like there’s something wrong with us. We don’t want others to think that we aren’t good enough or smart enough to solve our own problems.

Unfortunately, we bring this mentality into our relationship with God. We act as if everything in our life depends on us, instead of leaning on God and aiming to live in line with his will (Matthew 6:10).

Jesus encourages us to turn to God—just as a child turns to a parent—and to ask for the things we need. We can trust that God loves us enough to provide. And, wanting to do God’s will, we can also ask for all kinds of things that will build up his kingdom!

When I see someone doing something wrong, my first impulse is to lash out. I want to get angry and condemn what I see in their behavior. I like to think I’m doing the world a favor by pointing out their sin.

But in this passage Jesus urges us to slow down and ask ourselves if we have ever done such a thing—or worse.

Do I talk to people that way? Do I treat my kids that way? Do I waste my resources that way?

And if so, what do I need to do in order to change?

This doesn’t mean we never confront others. But doing some self-reflection first helps our conversations to be more helpful, and less critical, because we are coming from a place of humility rather than judgment.

All through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has been challenging us to focus not only on our behavior but also on our thoughts, our attitudes, and our motives as well—even in times of conflict.

Before you pass judgment on someone else, take a good, long look at your own heart. And make sure you have dealt with the plank that’s sticking out of your own eye. Because if you don’t, you will come off as hypocritical. And unhelpful.

Jesus’ early disciples lived with war, violence, disease, and famine in a way that is foreign to many of us. On any given day, people could lose a child or lose their harvest or be robbed by a Roman tax collector. And, unlike today, there were no safety nets. There were no stimulus payments, no social security checks, no food stamps, and no hospitals.

This is not to say that our struggles in 2021 aren’t real, or that they somehow don’t matter. But it’s helpful to understand that even in the harsh environment of the ancient world, Jesus had the audacity to tell his followers not to worry about their lives. He was reminding them that God called them into a relationship with him. And if God watches over plants and provides for animals, if these other parts of creation have what they need, then we can trust that God will provide everything we need. Why wouldn’t we expect our Father in heaven to provide for his children?

Jesus is showing us how to find relief from our worries and anxieties, no matter what they are. For God is our loving Father. If there’s something we need, we can ask him to provide it. If there’s a struggle that we face, we can ask God for help. If we feel totally lost or confused about what we should do, we can ask him for clarity. And as we pray these things, we can trust not only that God can provide what we need, but also that he will.

You might think of yourself as a well-adjusted grownup. But what happens when someone puts a scratch on your new car? What happens when the dog gets a hold of your new shoes? What happens when the market drops?

When things like that happen, we can get upset. And even if we stay calm and collected on the outside, on the inside we might get really angry, grow bitter, and even fall apart. Because that thing that we treasured has suddenly been taken away.

There’s nothing wrong with caring for your stuff, or saving for retirement. But Jesus wants to guard us from the temptation to turn material things into idols. If we’re not careful, we can make decisions based on the size of our paycheck or the gains in our portfolio instead of following God’s leading.

So Jesus rightly warns us when he says that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. Our time, attention, and resources can easily be given over to our money and our stuff if we aren’t paying attention.

Jesus’ desire is that we come to see our relationship with God as our most valuable treasure. Full life with God, the source of our joy and comfort and purpose, is greater than we can even imagine.

In this passage Jesus is again critical of people who try to get attention for the good things they do (see Matthew 6:1). And this time it’s about people who practice fasting in order to be noticed.

The discipline of fasting, like prayer, is meant to draw us nearer to God. When we abstain from food or drink, we engage in what Scot McKnight calls “body talk,” an embodied form of prayer.

Thus we can see why Jesus would be so critical of people who misuse fasting, or any spiritual discipline, by trying to get attention for it. The disciplines are meant to make us “pure in heart” before God. But showing off in front of others only shows how impure a person’s heart really is. And even if some people are fooled by a showoff, God is not fooled. If we are more interested in the attention of others than in our relationship with God, then our attention-seeking is an idol and makes a mockery of God.

Our spiritual practices are meant for God, for our relationship with him alone. So we should be careful in talking about them with other people or posting about them on social media. While there may be a genuine need to process or share experiences with others, we must guard our hearts against the temptation to turn others’ attention into an idol.