Living Jesus: Before You Go

This blog is oriented toward living out Christianity in real and simple ways.

"Living Jesus" is all about reading and studying the "sermon on the mount" with the intent of actually living out the teaching of Jesus.

Last week we saw that action is the foundation of the Christian life. Well, Jesus provides the foundation with his teaching. Wisdom or foolishness is proven by how we respond to those teachings. If we put them into action, we are wise. If we ignore them and do not live them out, we are fools.

So here we are, our minds and bodies are ready for action.

Go ahead Jesus, give us something to do.

Jesus Christ, however, does not start the sermon on the mount in this manner. He does not come out swinging with a list of commands. Instead, He opens His talk with BLESSINGS: we generally call them the beatitudes.

Christians can easily slip into two different pockets of error. In some cases (as we discussed last week), we consider the commands of Christ and rationalize our inactivity by determining that those things are just too hard to do. "Certainly God doesn't expect us to be perfect."
The other erroneous route is when we take things that are said about how to be, who to be or as in the case of Matthew 5:1-12, simple blessings to people as they already were and we translate those things into commands. Sometimes we are always looking for things to do to feel righteous or accomplished.

Geoff Surrat writes in Christ Follower (Seacoast Church), "It's easy for us to hear these words and think, Oh, so I need to be poor, I need to mourn... These are not commands to be poor, to be hungry, to be sad, to be persecuted. Actually, Jesus is explaining how life really works in the invisible, eternal kingdom of God."

Geoff also quotes Dallas Willard from The Divine Conspiracy: The beatitudes in particular are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings..."

Jesus looked around as He was about to speak and like any good orator would He "knew His audience." They were the downtrodden and outcast, the meek and the poor. They came to Christ with the mindset of, "we are not the blessed ones." So Christ makes it very clear to them, "Yes, you are. Blessed are... all of you."

So we don't get to DO anything quite yet. But that's OK.

We'll conclude with some words from  the book Living Jesus, "There are a lot of commands in the Sermon on the Mount, and through the rest of this series we'll look at those commands; but I believe that it's impossible to live out the Sermon on the Mount if we don't first understand that we are loved and blessed by God."



***The famous "sermon on the mount" is recorded in Matthew 5-7. Last week we started our study of this sermon with the help of the resource "Living Jesus" by Randy Harris, with Greg Taylor. All of the blog posts that have "Living Jesus" in the title follow the Utica church of Christ's Sunday AM Bible study in the 1st quarter of 2014***