Matthew 5:31-39 | If God made rules about it, then that means it’s ok, right? No. Jesus makes it abundantly clear in his Sermon on the Mount that God’s standard is his original creation and that he’s willing to work with us where we are to pull us in that direction.

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Matthew 5:25-30 | The Sermon on the Mount continues with Jesus instructing his disciples about adultery. Certainly, we should put on the brakes before we get there! Where does Jesus want us to apply the brakes? In our hearts. He warns us about our desires and the pruning that is needed to keep us far away from this very destructive sin.

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Matthew 5:20-26 | The Sermon on the Mount challenges us to our core because Jesus is getting to the heart of what God intends for humanity. God did not give us a law, a Torah, so that we would then find loopholes to do what we want, or to put legalistic fences around the commandments to hide our own hypocrisy. Jesus cuts through all of that. “You have heard that it was said… and…”

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Matthew 5:14-20 | Jesus taught his disciples that following him will make a difference. They would be salt and light. However, the difference they would make would not replace or render useless the previous instruction of God. Rather, they would point to the one God sent to epitomize everything the Torah and Prophets were meant to convey. They would point to Jesus.

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Matthew 5:10-13 | The final Beatitude isn’t about something that we do, but what others may do to us due to our peacemaking. Effectively pursuing peace may mean that others who benefit from the darkness of our broken world will pursue us in an effort to stop us. Our response is to rejoice since our work is making a difference, in a sense, we’re being the salt of the earth.

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Matthew 5:8-9 | If Jesus is giving us the Beatitudes to show us that path toward mature discipleship, then somewhere along the way we should have a sense of where he is taking us. What is the goal of this whole thing? We find it here in the 7th Beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers…” Trust me, it’s not for the faint of heart, only for the pure of heart.

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Sermon on the Mount #4 | Matthew 5:7-8 | After all the preparatory work of the first four Beatitudes, we finally get busy making a difference in the lives of others. As we do our part to meet the needs of others, we blossom with the active compassion that Jesus has already sown in our hearts. Mercy is beautiful and stunningly effective. It’s so effective that we may confuse God’s success with our own success. Blessed are the pure in heart…

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Sermon on the Mount #3 | Matthew 5:5-7 | Is your life so full of whatever you value that you don’t have space for those who need what God has given to you? Has your heart become numb to the suffering of so many people in our world? Do opportunities to show compassion pass you by without notice? In these Beatitudes, Jesus wakes us up to the cries of those ravaged by our broken world and shows us how to prepare our hearts and our homes to help.

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Sermon on the Mount #2 | Matthew 5:3-5 | Many of Jesus’ Beatitudes seem to be contradictory. Blessed are those who mourn? Blessed are the meek? Huh? Jesus is preparing his disciples to make a difference in this upside-down world. Jesus knows that he must work on our inner world before we can be effective in the outer world. The first four Beatitudes put our hearts and our priorities in the right place so that we can represent the right-side-up reality of Jesus.

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Sermon on the Mount #1 | Matthew 5:1-3 | Welcome to the first episode of our teaching on the Sermon on the Mount. In this episode we set the stage for the sermon by answering some very basic questions. What is the purpose of the sermon? Who is it for? What does it mean to be “blessed” and why does Jeus start his sermon with these “beatitudes?” What does it mean to be “poor in spirit?”

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