Explore the compelling narrative of how Jesus’ teachings extended beyond Jewish audiences to engage the world at large. We dive into the Sermon on the Mount, presenting a thought-provoking analysis of how Jesus articulated His core messages. Discover why His advocacy for humility, mercy, and righteousness was revolutionary and remains powerfully relevant. Learn how Jesus’ call for his followers to be a ‘light unto the world’ still challenges believers to lead lives of integrity and compassion.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Jesus was a man of few words, and so we want to pay very close attention to the words he did say. When he spoke, he was often enigmatic in what he said. Sometimes it was hard to figure out exactly what he meant. As often as not, he would make his point with a question, or perhaps with a question followed by an action. For example, Jesus was a Sabbath keeper, but he managed to be very much at odds with the scribes and the Pharisees on their interpretation of Sabbath observance. They were Sabbath keepers too, but they had a lot of differences. In its origins, the Sabbath was a liberating law. It set men free. The original commandment, for example, is found, one version of it is found back in Deuteronomy chapter 5, where it says, “…keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days shall you labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work.” You, nor your son, nor your daughter, your manservant, your maidservant, your ox, nor your ass, nor any of your cattle, nor even the stranger that’s in your town, you do this so that your manservant and your maidservant may rest even as well as you do. Now, why are we doing all this? He said, well, remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and a stretched out arm, and therefore he commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. Now, what’s the idea here? Well, the idea here is, look, you were slaves for all these hundreds of years, and you had to work seven days a week. One of the things we’re accomplishing by getting you out of there is we’re going to be able to give you a day off every week. You don’t have to work seven days a week. You’re liberated. You’re free. And therefore, you’ve got to let your manservant and your maidservant rest just like you do. The commandment is, look, give all your people and your animals the day off. Your boss was no longer allowed to work you seven days a week. He had to give you a day off. Now, the Pharisees had managed quite a feat of logic here. They had managed to turn this liberty into a burden. They had managed to take something that people would have rejoiced over and say, oh, hey, this is terrific. We don’t have to work seven days a week anymore. Isn’t this wonderful? And they had managed to turn it into something that was really very burdensome. They had a list of do’s and don’ts as long as your arm. Well, according to Jesus, they had lost touch with what the Sabbath was all about. So how did Jesus then, who was a man of very few words, make his point? Well, I’m going to tell you a story and combine the accounts of Mark 3 and Luke 6. It came to pass on another Sabbath, he entered into a synagogue and taught. And there was a man sitting there who had a withered arm. His right hand was all withered up like a piece of wood, a stick. And I expect that man had been there for years. Everybody in the synagogue knew him. They’d seen him this way many, many times. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him, whether he would heal on the Sabbath day that they might find accusation against him. Now, I still shake my head over this every time I read it. I think to myself, why on earth would anyone who would recognize that this man standing up here has the power to heal people who are sick? Now, how would I ever come to the conclusion that I have to watch this man to see whether he’s going to heal someone, make someone well on the Sabbath day? Well, Jesus knew what they were thinking, and he said to the withered man, would you stand up And so the man stood up. We haven’t done anything bad here yet, have we? No, we just asked this old boy to stand up. And Jesus said to you, to everybody sitting there, I’m going to ask you one thing. Is it lawful on the Sabbath days to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it? Now, I want you to keep in mind, these people would have quite freely have untied that animal and taken it down to the water hole to get a drink on the Sabbath day. Or if one of their animals had fallen into a ditch or a pit and couldn’t get out and was struggling, they’d get some guys together on the Sabbath day, and they would go down there, and they’d get that animal out of the hole. Fair enough? They would have done that. So Jesus said, let’s ask the question here. This poor guy’s standing up here with his withered arm. Everybody knows. Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good or to do evil? Save life or take it? I mean, which is it? And they wouldn’t answer him. They all sat there and stared at him like a bunch of statues. And he looked around at them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their heart. The fact that these men wouldn’t even answer him, it made him angry. He didn’t say anything about the anger. He just looked at the man and he said, stretch forth your hand. Now, what’s Jesus done? Tell me. What has he done that anyone could possibly accuse him of? He asked the man to stand up. Then he says, is it lawful to do good or evil on the Sabbath day? When no one answered him, he just said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he stretched it out. And his hand was restored whole as the other. You’re sitting there. Let’s imagine you’re sitting there on the front row in that synagogue, and you saw that. Now, if you conclude that Jesus did that, that he actually healed a man, that he was the one that did it, well, then haven’t you seen a miracle from God? Haven’t you seen someone who is full of the Spirit of God and is able to do a work of God? Or if Jesus didn’t do it, well, then there’s certainly no reason to be mad at him. But the account tells us that they were filled with madness, and they communed with one another what they might do to Jesus. Oh, he really got in their face this time. And he did it on purpose. He was determined not to accommodate this foolish doctrine that one cannot heal on the Sabbath day. Bear in mind, though, how low-key Jesus was in doing it. He didn’t argue doctrine. He didn’t quote Scripture. He just asked a question and then asked the man, stretch out your arm. Then the Pharisees went out and held a council against him, how they might destroy him. It’s not easy to fathom this response. You know, you would almost conclude these men were insane, plain crazy. They had seen this man in the synagogue for years with that arm, and they had seen the arm healed with their own eyes, and they still wanted to kill the man that did it. Go figure. I don’t understand the attitude. But it went very deep. It went very deep to the structure, the social structure of the time. Who’s in charge here? Who does this man think he is? And, of course, Jesus was a very great threat to the religious establishment of the time. And they wanted him dead. When Jesus knew it, He withdrew himself from there, and great multitudes followed him. And he healed them all. He was healing people all over the place from these crowds that would follow him around, but he charged them that they would not make him known. Why would he do a thing like that? Well, he did it, according to Matthew, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, “‘Behold my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul is well-pleased.’ I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall show judgment to the Gentiles. Excuse me? To the Gentiles? The word in Greek means nations. In other words, the nations of the world, not the Jews. All of a sudden, here’s this thing about Jesus is going to the Gentiles again. He will not strive. What he means by this, he’s not going to argue. He’s not going to be involved in debates. He’s not going to be struggling with people over ideas. He’s not going to cry. No one’s going to hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench. till he sends forth judgment unto victory. He is gentle, a reed that is already bruised. He’s not going to do anything that’s going to break it. He’s not going to pour water on the smoking flax, which is probably getting in your nose and your eyes and becoming an irritation. That’s not what he’s here for. And he goes on to say, in his name shall the Gentiles trust him. It was time for the knowledge of God to break out into the nations of the world. The time had long since passed when God was content to be the God of the Jews. In fact, the New Testament is the story of that breakout. At this point, we come to the great Sermon on the Mount. And there are two versions of this sermon in the Gospels, one in Matthew and one in Luke. They differ a little bit in what is included in them, and they differ somewhat in the wording. And the sermon in Luke seems to come a little later in Jesus’ ministry than the one in Matthew. Now, the reason for this is really very simple. Jesus was an itinerant preacher. He didn’t give a new message everywhere he went. He gave the same message over and over again, with variations, of course. And as a result, we have different versions of what he said in different places at different times, but it all basically says the same thing. It’s just that the wording is different. This is why we have the Gospels telling us in so many places that Jesus taught, but without telling us what he said. The message was included elsewhere in the accounts, and they didn’t think they needed to include it here. In the Sermon on the Mount, we have Jesus’ most comprehensive teaching, his longest recorded discourse. This is the place where he kind of pulls together the general message that he is telling people. That is, Luke and Matthew pull it together. I was talking to my wife last night about it. I said, how long do you think the Sermon on the Mount was? How many words, if you were going to guess, are actually in the Sermon on the Mount? She thought about it a while and corrected herself once and said, I think maybe around 3,000 words. I ran the thing through a word processor, cut it out, as it were, out of the electronic Bible, and had a word count done on it. 367 words in the Sermon on the Mount. You know, when you think about it, I would have liked to have had 3,000. I would have liked to have had more words of Jesus. But being the case, we better pay all the more close attention to the few words this man used. We’ll talk about those words when I come back after this message.
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Will God heal the sick today? Really? We know he can heal the soul, but what about the body? And when you have prayed and have not been healed, is it because you have no faith? When Jesus saw the crowds, he eased up a mountainside, and when he settled himself there, his disciples gathered around to listen to what he had to say.
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And he opened his mouth and taught them. At last, at last we’re going to get to hear what Jesus’ doctrine was. At last we’re going to hear what he taught on. He settled down some time to really explain to people what he wanted to say. Well, he starts off with a simple little section called the Beatitudes by most people because it starts off with blessed are the poor. And that’s related in turn to Beatitudes or blessings that he gives to people. These are familiar to most Bible readers and churchgoers for the simplest of reasons. Every preacher, when he starts out cutting his teeth, will go to an older preacher and say, well, what sort of things should I preach about? And he’ll come back and say, son, you can never go far wrong if you just go to the Sermon on the Mount and preach on the Beatitudes. And so every one of us, I think, sometime within our very first few times to stand before people and preach from the Bible – We’ll preach from the fifth chapter of Matthew. Well, Jesus opened his mouth and taught them, and here’s what he started out to say. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed. You know, blessed is a familiar word, and it may be too familiar. What does it mean? Some translations, in order to try to get to something you might understand, will say, happy is the man. But that doesn’t even come close to what this passage means. In the Bible, man blesses God, and God blesses man. The central idea is approval. Man approves of God, and God approves of man. That is, God approves of the man who does these things. Now, beyond that, the idea of blessed or blessings seems to have to do with the idea that good things happen to people who are blessed. Be blessed means good things happen to you. So good things happen to people who are poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Now, what these sayings are about, these blessings that we’re going to be reading about sequentially here – These are the kind of people of whom God approves. And these are the kind of people that he sees to it that good things happen to them. To be poor in spirit is simply to be humble. There’s a proverb back in the book of Proverbs that says, The poor use entreaties while the rich answers roughly. I can understand that. A man who is poor will come to you with his hat in his hand. He needs help. He’ll need some guidance, some advice, maybe even a little bit of financial help. The rich man who has everything he needs will tell you where to go. Now, this doesn’t require for a man to be poor to be approved, but what it does require is for him to have the attitude of the poor as opposed to the attitude of the rich. So good things are going to happen to the person who is humble, who has the attitude of a poor man, no matter how much in terms of this world’s wealth he might have. Next, Jesus said, Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. This is kind of strange in a way because it almost sounds like the Christians should go around dressed in black and they should be miserable all the time and mournful all the time. But I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about here. There’s a passage in James 4, verse 8 that says this. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be afflicted and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and he will lift you up. But you see, this is in the context of cleansing your hands and purifying your heart. In other words, when the awareness comes that you’re a sinner, when the awareness comes that you have done wrong, he says, be afflicted. It means to fast, which is a sign, an outward sign of humility, and mourn. Humble yourself before God. Be sorry for what you have done. Humble yourself in the sight of God, and he will lift you up. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Now, that’s interesting, because meek may not mean what you think. To be meek is to be humbly patient, even under provocation. And this is the kind of person of whom God approves. Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. Now what does that mean? Well, it means to me that blessed is a man who really wants to live a good life, who wants to live a clean life, who is really thirsty, hungry and thirsty for getting his life straightened out on the straight and narrow and to live a life that’s pleasing before God, but also that is even righteous in the eyes of man. We all would like to have a good reputation. The man who wants it, the man who’s hungry for it, he says will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Jesus will elaborate on that theme later on in his ministry. It’s a sobering thought. I mean, I say it’s sobering. It’s encouraging in one way, that if you can find it in yourself to be merciful to other people, God says it’s going to come out well for the man that does that because he is going to obtain mercy himself. So whatever it is that you want to come back to you, give it away. Give it to other people. If you want severe judgment to come upon yourself, give it to other people. If when you’re in trouble you want mercy, well, show it to other people. Life will work better, he says, for the people that do this. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Pure in heart. I wonder how a man gets there. Well, of course, we repent of our sins. We turn to God. We are forgiven of our sins. Jesus Christ’s blood cleanses us from all of our sins, and we’re made righteous with God. And yet, which of us who have come to God, even through the waters of baptism, who have tried to live before God, do not at times feel rather impure in heart? How do you get from here to there? In a way, I suppose you do it by hungering and thirsting after righteousness, as he said earlier. But I really think probably the most important aspect of this is truth. Truth. Being really honest about what’s going on in your heart. For if you go to God in prayer and you pretend that you’re not angry with your brother when you are, That’s not pure in heart. In one sense of the word, the man who is angry with his brother and furious with his brother and goes to God and says, God, I am angry with my brother. I want you to punish him. is honest with God, he is more pure than the man who denies it. You know, I remember once being really angry with a brother. I remember once being furious and getting on my knees and starting to pray that God would really, really punish him for what he had done, and I couldn’t do it. Once I really was honest with God about what I wanted about the man, I came to realize that what I wanted was wrong. The way to purity of heart is truth. Blessed are the peacemakers, said Jesus, for they shall be called the children of God. I want to tell you something, and you might not think about it in this. Being a peacemaker is not necessarily getting in between two people who are fighting and trying to make peace between them. There’s another proverb that says, he that passes by and meddles with a strife that doesn’t belong to him is like a man who takes a passing dog by the ears. You’re going to get bit. And a lot of times people use this idea of being a peacemaker as an excuse for meddling in things that are none of their business. I think what Jesus is talking about when he talks about the peacemaker is peace. Blessed are the people who make peace with their own brother, who make peace with the person they’re at war with. In other words, it is one of the parties of the dispute who has the capacity for being the peacemaker, not a stranger, not a third party. Now, if you want to be approved of God, this is the kind of person you want to be. And you can be. All these attitudes are within your grasp. They’re well within your grasp. You can reach them. However, there may be some consequences that come along with them. We’ll talk about that after these words.
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You have tried to have these attributes in your life. He said, blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. And that’s good. We all want to live a righteous life and a clean life. But later he says, blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness sake. for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Now, I can understand being approved of God for thirsting after righteousness and living a righteous life. Then the question is, are good things happening to you when you are persecuted for righteousness’ sake? Well, Jesus went on to say, Blessed are you when men will revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Now, you would think that a person who met all these attributes would be approved by men as well as by God. You’d think, my, these are good people. We’d like to have these people as our next-door neighbors. We would like to have these people as our co-workers at our job where we work. Well, apparently not. Jesus met all these qualifications, and they wanted to kill him. Human nature is strange, and sometimes it’s hard to figure people out. And Jesus did say that all who would follow him, as one of the apostles said, all who would live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. And Jesus said, if they persecuted me, they’re going to persecute you. And I guess he’s telling us that when men persecute us for having his attributes, we should rejoice because we have a great reward coming in the future. Well, I guess it takes faith, doesn’t it? Somehow or other, you’ve got to look down inside yourself and find out, yeah, it really is worth it because I know that he is and I know that he lives. I know he’s coming back and I know that I can live forever with him. He went on to say, you are the salt of the earth. But if the salt has lost its savor, what’s it good for? It’s good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot of man. You can put it on your sidewalk to melt the ice. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Men don’t light a candle and put it under a bushel. They put it on a candlestick and it gives light to everyone that is in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven. You know, it’s interesting. He does not give us the option of hiding out. He doesn’t give us the option of going off and living in a cave and living our righteous life. He said that we are like the salt of the earth. You take a salt shaker and you sprinkle the salt around on your food and a grain falls here and a grain falls there. You don’t put it all in one place. And apparently he intends for those blessed people who meet all these attributes that he’s talked about up here, he wants them to be salted around the world, that they might in turn be a blessing to the community, that they might in turn be a light in the middle of the darkness that exists in so much of the world and so much of people’s lives. He says, I’m going to light you like a candle, and I’m not going to let you hide. I’m going to put you on a candlestick, and I’m going to set you up high, where you can be seen. Because when I do this, you will then glorify your Father which is in heaven. Even in the persecution that will come upon you because you do the right thing, it will be a condemnation to those men who persecute you and a glory to God. So now we’re beginning to get an idea of what Jesus really taught after all. He taught about attitudes, about the kind of people we ought to be, about the way we ought to live our lives and the way we ought to respond to the people who are around us all the time. What Jesus is doing, whether we realize it or not, is defining the difference between the winners and the losers. But that’s not all he had to say. The Sermon on the Mount is rich. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart, and you were born to win.
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