Life in the Kingdom

Today on Renewing Your Mind, the Sermon on the Mount.

I'm Lee Webb. I think all of us find it challenging to live in a world that's lost its moorings. How do we stand firm in this cultural drift? How do we live counter-culturally? Well, Jesus tells us in His Sermon on the Mount. Be warned though, living this way isn't easy.

Jesus is directing us to live in a way that may cost us dearly, but we need to keep in mind what it cost Him to live this way. Your teacher this week is Dr. Sinclair Ferguson. I think I was seven years old. Because of a peculiarity of the Scottish educational system, I was being moved up to a more senior class in the elementary school I was in. I didn't go into the details, but as a shy youngster, I walked into the room and I found myself facing 30 other children my age who were all chanting together. And the words they were chanting were these, Jesus went up into a high mountain and He sat down and He opened His mouth and He taught His disciples saying, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I had no idea what they were doing. I didn't even know that this was part of the text of Scripture. But from seven years of age, the Sermon on the Mount, which I was forced at that time to memorize, has been a very significant part in my Christian life. And it's the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew's Gospel, chapters 5 and 6 and 7, that we're going to be studying together. But in our first study, what I want to do is to introduce the Sermon on the Mount because Matthew 5 is not the beginning of Matthew's Gospel. And if we're going to be able to understand what Jesus is doing here, we must first understand where this fits in with Jesus' ministry. What had Jesus been doing before the Sermon on the Mount?

Well, He had stepped forward at the age of 30 and had been baptized. And when He was baptized, His Father had used words about Him that came from the Old Testament, told Him that He was to fulfill the role of the suffering Servant of the prophecies of Isaiah, but also told Him that He was to be the King who was described in the second Psalm, the King to whom the Father would say, ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance. One of the striking things about Matthew's Gospel, as you probably know, is that it both begins and ends with the notion that Jesus is the King.

The great genealogy that begins Matthew's Gospel tells us that Jesus is the descendant of King David. When the prophecies that are to be fulfilled in Jesus are announced by Matthew, they are prophecies that fulfill the words about the coming King. And then Matthew bookends his Gospel, as you know, with the words of Jesus in which he says, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, so you go into all the world and preach the Gospel. It is a message about Jesus who has come to be King. And so when Jesus appears on the scene and begins to preach, what is His message? His message, we are told in chapter 4, is the King has come and therefore the kingdom is near. And because the King has come and the kingdom is near, it is imperative for us to respond in repentance and in faith.

And then something very interesting happens. Jesus announces the presence of the kingdom and then He shows the power of the kingdom. You remember how He does this. There are people who are sick and blind and demon-possessed and Jesus heals them and delivers them.

How is He able to do that? He is able to do that because He has already been in the wilderness facing the evil one, overcoming Him. And in that overcoming of Him, He has gained power to set men and women free and to restore them to God's purposes. And this is what He begins to do.

He begins to, as it were, just show little glimpses of what His final kingdom will be like. Here is a man who has a withered hand and Jesus restores him. Here is a man who is blind and Jesus gives him sight. Here is a man who is deaf and Jesus enables him to hear. He doesn't do it to everybody. He doesn't do it universally.

It's not that time yet. But the kingdom has come and men and women are being restored to God's original purposes. And then He shows the power of the kingdom by the way in which He calls people into His kingdom. You remember how we are told in Matthew chapter 4, He comes on those young men who are in their father's fishing business and He summons them to leave their nets and to come and to be His disciples because He will make them fishers of men. So He has authority to heal and He has authority to call because He is the King and to the King men and women owe allegiance and before the King diseases will flee and evil spirits will be banished. In fact, all of Jesus' miracles are a little like a momentary flash of light that reveals to us what His final kingdom is really going to be like. And then as He has called His disciples in the salmon on the mount, He is essentially saying to them, I have transferred you from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.

That light is not yet fully and finally shining and until that light fully and finally shines, you are going to be living in a world that is full of difficulty, full of all kinds of spiritual dangers. And I want you to come with me, He goes to the mountain. I want you to come with me, He says, so that I can teach you this new life that I'm calling you to live in the kingdom of God. There is a sense in which we can summarize the first chapter of the salmon on the mount as we have it in Matthew chapter 5 with the word fulfillment. Jesus is the one who fulfills the prophecies and promises of the Old Testament and Matthew has used a number of quotations from the Old Testament to show us this. Jesus is the one who brings fulfillment to broken and bruised lives. And Jesus is the one who fills His people full of life that has lived for the glory of God. And so as we come to the salmon on the mount, this is the context in which Jesus is preaching the salmon. And within that context, He's wanting to show us the difference between life without Christ and life with Christ, the difference between living for ourselves and living for the glory of God. And if you leaf through the salmon on the mount, you'll see how He does this. He speaks first of all about blessings that come to our lives that are altogether different from the blessings of the world.

They seem to reverse the standards of the world. As we'll see later, He says, it's the meek who are blessed and inherit the earth, which seems to run in a very counter-cultural direction to the way in which we ordinarily think and what we actually usually experience. It's not the meek who inherit the earth, it's the ambitious and the driven and the proud and the get-out-of-my-way who inherit the earth. And so He is teaching us that when the kingdom comes, when men and women are restored, their lives are transformed, and they are new and different from those who are around them. And then He goes on to speak about the impact of that different lifestyle.

You know, from what you would think would be an objective point of view, you read the life of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus, the tenderness of Jesus, the compassion of Jesus. The last thing in the world you would think would happen to such a man would be that he would be crucified. And yet isn't it interesting that as Christians we often don't make the connection to what happened to him with what happens to us.

We need Peter's rebuke. He says, don't think it's something strange to you that people oppose you or persecute you. It's completely normal because you're becoming like Jesus, and that means by definition you are different. And so He speaks about the way in which those who are transformed by Jesus will in a strange way experience persecution. And then He says there's another thing that's different about my people. It is that the righteousness of their lives goes down deeper than the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. We still use that word Pharisee, don't we?

We mean somebody who believes that he or she is completely correct. It's somebody who intimidates us with the rigor with which they keep the law of God and the way in which they make it clear to us that they don't think we are doing it. And Jesus says a very strange thing. He says, unless the righteousness of my disciples is greater than the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, there is no place for them in the kingdom of heaven. So not only are the disciples different, but their righteousness is different, and it goes down deeper. And then when Jesus moves on, He's really dealing with a problem that He knew was in the minds of some of the people who are listening to Him. They are sitting there saying, but this man has said nothing about God's law.

Does he not believe in God's law? And in the second half of Matthew chapter 5, Jesus explains the role of the law in the life of the Christian believer and how the Christian believer's righteousness really does go down deeper. And then He moves into the central section in The Sound on the Mount. If the theme in chapter 5 is fulfillment, Jesus fulfills the promises and Jesus fills us full of righteousness, then the theme in chapter 6 is Father. And He teaches us that being brought into the kingdom, we have been brought to know our heavenly Father. And that's the thing that transforms the whole of our lives.

And that whole chapter 6 as we have it in The Sound on the Mount is taken up with the way in which knowing the heavenly Father is the key to living in the kingdom of God. It means that our spirituality is just different. It means that our ambitions are transformed.

It means that there is a poise in our lives that we never knew before. And then when He moves into chapter 7, He begins to speak to these His disciples about the transformation of how they make judgments in life and what it means for them to make key decisions and what it means for them eventually to build their lives on a solid rock in the Lord Jesus Christ. And at the end, isn't it interesting that at the end the response that the people make to this sermon is, we have never heard anything like this before. He speaks as one who has authority and not as the scribes and the Pharisees. And you see, even although they couldn't put their finger on why this was the case, they had a sense that the King had come and that the King had spoken and that the King had authority.

The big question, of course, was how they were going to respond to that authority. And the rest of the gospel tells us that some of them responded in faith and others responded in unbelief and disobedience. So, that's the Sermon on the Mount as a whole as we introduce ourselves to it. And I want us to think for a few minutes now about some of the implications just of that summary of the Sermon on the Mount.

The first is this, that the difference that Jesus is speaking about must have a supernatural origin. I have often found during my Christian life that people will say to me, you know, I don't really believe in Jesus the way you believe in Jesus, but I really love the Sermon on the Mount. I'm almost weary saying that when people say that, it's a clear sign they've never actually read the Sermon on the Mount.

They may know what they think of as the golden rule and they especially love that statement of Jesus, don't judge lest you be judged. But the truth of the matter is that this Sermon is apparently the most beloved sermon in all the world and probably the most frequently misunderstood sermon. Because when you read through the Sermon on the Mount, rather than saying, I really love that, you find yourself crying out, Lord, help me.

I don't have the resources to live like that. I don't have it in me to respond to this sermon. Of course, it's a very normal thing as people are able to hear the Word of Jesus, but their first reaction to it is, I'm going to try and do better. I wonder if you've ever experienced that. You've explained something about the Christian gospel to people and you think you're really, you know, they're following you through and you think that they're being helped.

And then they thank you for what you've said and say to you, I'm really going to try much harder to be better. Thank you so much for speaking to me about the Christian gospel. It's our natural instinct that when we see this new life about which Jesus speaks, we think, I must try better to get up higher. And the truth of the matter is, as Jesus makes plain, that this new life is not something we can work up.

It is something that must come down. Remember how Nicodemus discovered this? Jesus spoke to him about the kingdom, didn't He? And said to him, Nicodemus, you can't see or enter the kingdom unless you are born from above, unless by God's grace the Spirit comes down into your life and gives you a new heart. And I find it fascinating that Nicodemus' response to that, this very learned man was, but Jesus, you're telling me that unless I'm born from above, I can't see the kingdom of God.

But Jesus, I can't see that. Even in saying He can't see it, He doesn't seem to see that it's not in Him to see it, that God needs to work supernaturally in Him. And so, this is a sermon that underscores for us that we need a supernatural work of God's grace in our hearts before we can see and understand and enter the kingdom about which Jesus is speaking. The second thing to notice by way of application is that this sermon of Jesus speaks about a transformation, a difference that goes to the very roots of my life. And in the course of our study of it, I think we'll discover how Jesus gets down into the nooks and crannies of our lives. And this is how the Christian life is lived. He is always going down deeper, going further.

He's always getting up into the attic and down into the basement. And we are constantly discovering, as Jesus teaches us here, we're constantly discovering that we thought we had reached a certain level in our Christian lives. And then He uncovers the hidden things, and He teaches us that He wants to go down deeper, right down to the very heart of our lives and make us really different.

You know, something has happened in the evangelical church I think probably over the last 60 years, something that has never before happened in the evangelical church, that evangelical Christians have begun to say, we've got to show the world that we're not really so different. You know, they can like us because essentially what Jesus does, and this is the subtext, is Jesus tops up our inadequate lives. He makes us happy. He may even give us health, wealth, and happiness, as some people have said. And this is a word of the gospel that tells us that is not Jesus' business. Jesus' business is not to top up our lives. Jesus' business is actually to deconstruct our lives and then put those lives together by the power of the gospel in such a way that we would be different enough in our likeness to Him that we might get a taste of the opposition that He Himself experienced.

So not only do we need the supernatural work of God, but the transformation that work effects in us goes down very, very deeply. There's a third thing that we can learn from this sermon, and that is that this difference that Jesus makes, this transformation Jesus works, or if I can put it this way, what He means when He says, repent is something that is lifelong. Most of you know the story of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

The first of those theses was this. When our Lord Jesus said, repent, He meant that the whole of the Christian life should be repentance. You ever heard somebody say, well, I repented, you know, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, ten years ago.

It's done and dusted. No, it's not done and dusted for Jesus. It is the whole of the Christian life. And then there is a fourth little application, and it's this, that this transformation, this newness, this difference that is the Christian life takes place only when we find ourselves bowing down to the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. I remember many years ago hearing a minister say, if Christ is not Lord of all, then Christ is not Lord at all. And that's really the message, the transformation of the whole of our lives so that we know what it is to live the kingdom life in a fallen world, and by His grace we can. The message of the Sermon on the Mount, really the message of the Gospel, is transformation. We are pleased to air portions of Dr. Sinclair Ferguson's series, The Sermon on the Mount, this week here on Redoing Your Mind. I'm glad you could be with us.

I'm Lee Webb. In Twelve Messages Dr. Ferguson shows us how Jesus equips us to live a godly life in this fallen world. Let me commend this series to you. I think you'll find the format is perfect for a small group Bible study or even for a Sunday school class. We hope the series finds its way into your church library as well. So call us to request this 12-part 2-DVD set when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, or you can make your request and give your gift securely online at renewingyourmind.org. You know, Ligonier Ministries relies on the support of a special community of people who pray regularly for the ministry and who also give a monthly gift of $25 or more. If you are a ministry partner listening today, thank you from all of us here at Ligonier. If you're not a ministry partner but would consider becoming one, please mention it while you're on the phone, and we'll add you to this very special group of people. Thank you. Now, as we heard today, the Sermon on the Mount is a rich treasure of instruction from Jesus Himself. Tomorrow Dr. Ferguson will walk us through a series of blessings known as the Beatitudes, and I hope you'll join us for that Tuesday here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.