Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Well, good morning everybody. It's great to be together. I'm Evan, I'm one of the senior pastors. But I'm excited about this as we kick off today, talking about Jesus Sermon on the Mount. It's three chapters in the book of Matthew, chapters five, six and seven, where Jesus tells us some of his most famous statements. And even if you are not familiar with church or you're just checking this out, you've probably heard some of the words and the sayings that he includes in the Sermon on the Mount. Things like love your neighbor as yourself.
[00:00:38] Or how about this one? The Golden Rule, do unto others what you would have them do to you. Or this one? Just a small town girl living in a lonely. Nope, that's not it. It's different but no less famous, right, than what Jesus said. But no, for real though, these are so well known.
[00:00:58] And if you think about how Western civilization has been shaped over centuries, you might think that some of what we consider virtues are universal and just kind of instinctual as humanity. But if you look at pre Christian empires and societies and civilizations, what you'll find is that many of the things we just take for granted as virtues today are not rooted in some kind of basic human understanding, but they're actually rooted in the Sermon on the Mount.
[00:01:30] Things like kindness towards your enemies. This doesn't exist, except Jesus opened his mouth and spoke these words one day on the side of a mountain. And here we are today, thousands of years later, looking into these things with great interest.
[00:01:49] And it is the genius of Jesus that words that he spoke that would have been understood amongst the peasant class out in the wilderness as he taught, are still things that for centuries the brightest minds and ethics professors and brilliant men and women over centuries have studied and looked into these things and have found richness and depth. It is the genius of Jesus to teach in such a way that everybody can access this.
[00:02:22] And this is our invitation as we spend some time in. What Jesus taught in his most famous teachings is that we don't just hear and we don't just listen and hear some things we're already familiar with, but that we lean in and maybe with some fresh hearing, some fresh ears, we hear what God would speak to us today.
[00:02:43] And as a friend of mine once said is when we read the words of Jesus, we don't just read them, but we want to live in them. We want to put ourselves next to Jesus on the side of that mountain as he begins to teach.
[00:02:56] And so we're going to get into this. And if you're new to Westside, we're really big on Jesus here, which should be a given.
[00:03:05] But we are. We want to talk about Jesus. We want to spend a lot of time in the story of Jesus.
[00:03:11] We want this to be the heart of really all that we teach and all that we create as a community has to be centered around Jesus. And I say that, and you're like, yeah, you're a Christian church, we get it. But here's the thing. There's a lot of stuff that's important, and we could spend a lot of time on a lot of things that really do matter.
[00:03:28] But I want, at the end of my time as a pastor, and I'm sure Ben feels the same way, that maybe one day we stand before Jesus and that he would say, you ignored a lot of important things because you were so focused on me. I would rather it be that way than the other way.
[00:03:45] That we were so consumed with all the important things that we didn't look to Jesus. We didn't listen to Jesus teachings. We didn't look to what he had to say. We didn't assume that what his teachings were then actually applied to us. Now I want to dive into what he teaches with this hope and assumption that what he spoke then actually applies in the real world.
[00:04:08] Because sometimes we can allow the teachings of Jesus to kind of live up in our heads or exist in these churchy spaces and assume that they actually don't apply out there.
[00:04:19] And I only want the kind of faith that works in the real world.
[00:04:23] And so we're going to dive into this.
[00:04:26] Something about Jesus is so compelling in the Gospel, something about Jesus is so magnetic that people literally tear off roofs to get to him. People cross lakes and seas to get to where he's at. They press in in far off wilderness places to hear him teach. There is something compelling about Jesus.
[00:04:51] And whenever I look at my faith, my religion, my following of Jesus, if it feels stale or uninspired or something less than life to the full, I have a choice.
[00:05:08] I can say, well, I guess Jesus isn't all that he cracked up to be. He isn't all that he promised he was. Or I can say, lord, I want to leave behind lesser versions of faith and Christianity and return again to the source of life.
[00:05:21] And in you that I might find a reinvigoration of my faith and my life.
[00:05:28] So as we begin, let's pray that God would be close to us. As we read his word this morning. Lord, we thank you that today we are gathered here opening again what people have been looking at and reading and hearing for centuries, these teachings of Jesus. And I pray that you would give us fresh ears to hear it, fresh eyes to see it, and that we would be changed not only in our intellect or our religion, but in our real world, in our real lives, that we would be transformed by your spirit and your word. In Jesus name, amen.
[00:06:03] Matthew, chapter four, starting in verse 23, this is the beginning, as we are about to get to the beginning of his teachings. In chapter five, it says, from there he went all over Galilee. He used synagogues for meeting places and taught people the truth of God. God's kingdom was his theme. That beginning right now, they were under God's government, a good government.
[00:06:28] This is the theme, the main topic, the main point of everything that Jesus teaches all through the Gospels. He touches on a lot of concepts and themes, but he again returns to the kingdom of God over and over and over in his parables and his Sermon on the Mount. And when he's teaching his disciples again and again, he's talking about the. The kingdom of God, or as Matthew would call it, the kingdom of the heavens.
[00:06:56] And he was declaring and inaugurating this kingdom as something that was not far off any longer, but that God's kingdom, where God gets what God wants, was happening right then, here and now, right among them.
[00:07:10] And for all those sitting around Jesus out in this rural space as they're listening to him teaching, they would have heard those words that God's kingdom was here and said, I beg to differ because I still see Roman flags everywhere. I still see things that don't look like God getting his way. But again and again, Jesus is going to announce the surprise announcement that beginning right now, they were under the good government of God. The kingdom had come.
[00:07:46] And one of the main books that we are drawing from as we study through the Sermon on the Mount is Dallas Willard's the Divine Conspiracy. And this is what Willard says about the kingdom of Heaven. He says, the kingdom of heaven is where what God wants done is done.
[00:08:00] This is where God's will is done.
[00:08:03] And we're going to find that at the center of the Sermon on the Mount is the Lord's Prayer.
[00:08:10] It's really beautiful how Matthew lays it out, because the sermon of Jesus teachings, this compilation of everything that he was teaching, is in three parts. And in the middle of the third part, there are three parts in the middle and in the middle of that the very center of the Sermon on the Mount is the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
[00:08:34] And it's almost as if Matthew and Jesus, by teaching it this way, is saying everything revolves around us, opening our lives and speaking to the Father.
[00:08:45] Everything that we will gain in life and understanding God and understanding ourselves is going to be derived when we come to that place of prayer and opening ourselves up to God. I've been watching this week, as I'm sure many of you have. Artemis 2, the spaceship that we sent around the moon, isn't this phenomenal, what we're watching in real time? So, like many of you, just judging by the visual, I wasn't alive during the Apollo missions. Okay, how many were alive during the Apollo missions? Okay, sign up for encore. It's our seniors gathering. It's happening this week.
[00:09:23] Ouch.
[00:09:25] It's just math. I'm not trying to be mean. Anyway, I was not alive during the Apollo missions. So this is really amazing. As we're watching for the first time in how many years since Apollo 8, we're sending this crew around the backside of the moon. And so I've been watching as the pictures have been coming back this week. I know they just touched down, I think yesterday was it.
[00:09:49] And as we're watching these images, I'm just struck by this is the far side of the Moon and for all of human history, been staring up at the night sky and staring at the side of the moon that always faces the Earth as it's locked in this orbit around us.
[00:10:09] And in our generations in this space age, we've now sent people who with their eyes have looked on the backside of the moon, which has been invisible to us for millennia. Look at that Earthrise over the backside of the moon. I mean, Pink Floyd only wished it could be this good, right? Like, it's really beautiful.
[00:10:32] And I know in our day and age it's something where we see this and we're not easily impressed anymore, right? I saw someone online be like, I think that looks like AI. I'm like, stop it.
[00:10:44] We should be so impressed by the beauty and the wonder that humans are in these spaces and places so far from our home planet. And I want to use this as a metaphor for what Jesus has done as he sits and he begins to teach with an authority that the people had never seen.
[00:11:03] It's as if Jesus is looking at the human condition.
[00:11:07] And for all time, people have had A certain understanding of themselves and God and what causes behaviors and what causes life to either go well or to not go well, what success looks like, what it means to have a good and blessed life, what it means to have a cursed life.
[00:11:23] All these things is in the water and is understood in one way. And then Jesus shows up and it's like for the first time in human history, he speaks as one with authority. And he begins to unveil and reveal what's really going on, that behind what we see, behind what we assume about the human condition, there is more going on. And he reveals it to us in such a way that, that the people can't help but be drawn to his words and his teaching.
[00:11:57] And for all of us who have heard these sayings and take them for granted, for those hearing it for the first time, this was nothing short of revolutionary, awe inspiring.
[00:12:10] He goes on Matthew, in the next verse, it says he being Jesus, also healed people their diseases and of the bad effects of their bad lives.
[00:12:20] Word got around the entire Roman province of Syria. People brought anybody with a sickness, whether mental, emotional or physical, Jesus healed them one and all.
[00:12:30] More and more people came, the momentum gathering. Besides those from Galilee, crowds came from the 10 towns across the lake, others from Jerusalem and Judea, still others from across the Jordan. And when Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside.
[00:12:46] Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. And arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. And this is what he said.
[00:12:58] Let's find ourselves in the company of Jesus today.
[00:13:01] Let's find ourselves maybe being drawn to him because he spoke of the forgiveness of sins or the healing of our minds or our bodies.
[00:13:11] But then as we walk with Him, I hope we'll stick with him long enough to hear what he has to say.
[00:13:18] And like I shared some of those most famous sayings of Jesus, those are the pleasant ones, things like the Golden Rule. But then he gets more challenging as he begins to teach. And we're going to obviously dive into this in the next few weeks, but he keeps going and he starts to say things that really ran counter to what is pleasant or desirable in your everyday life. Things like if someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek as well.
[00:13:45] If someone takes your coat, give them your cloak. Also if someone forces you to walk a mile, walk another mile, bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you. All these things that we would say, no thanks, I'd rather not, or we say, that works really beautifully on Sunday morning inside the church.
[00:14:10] But business is business.
[00:14:12] My family is crazy, and I'm going to do what I want to do.
[00:14:15] Or fill in the blank about how we put guardrails around the teachings of Jesus to keep them safely away from real life, where the complexity of actual interaction makes them seem impossible.
[00:14:31] And he goes on from there, and he starts talking about how to deal with sin in our lives. And he talks about how if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it in the fire. Whoa, Jesus just went to crazy town, right?
[00:14:45] If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off, throw it in the fire. And everyone's like, whoa, Jesus, can we get back to the hallowed be thy name?
[00:14:54] Can we get back to the do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself. I don't like this cut off your hand and throw the fire stuff.
[00:15:02] And Jesus is using rhetoric. He's not starting a cult of, you know, body, whatever, where we cut off our body. That's not what he's saying. He's using rhetoric to talk about how Jesus, in this new kingdom announcement is. He's not lowering the standard of holiness of the Father. Instead, he is offering a pathway to exist in a world where God gets what he wants, where lust, where greed, where anxiety and worry, where hatred of our enemies, those don't have the final say.
[00:15:39] And the invitation is into what seems impossible, which is this whole new way of living, this whole new life of God, where all the things that we just assume are always going to be the way they are, are different, because we're joined to Jesus, because we followed him and the transformation has taken control of our lives. It doesn't lower the bar of holiness. What Jesus does is we follow him as he transforms us from the inside out.
[00:16:09] And I would hope that we don't write off the sayings of Jesus when they get challenging or difficult as unrealistic in the real world, and we abandon them, but instead we wrestle with them and say, jesus, could it be that you were serious?
[00:16:24] And that for us, in our real, everyday lives, in our ordinary relationships and work and family and friends, could it be that what you taught has a place?
[00:16:38] Could it be that you were serious about what you said?
[00:16:43] And this whole Christian life, I think, could be summarized by this phrase, trying to actually do what Jesus said, try to actually do it.
[00:16:53] Not to write it off, not to assume that Jesus, after the Sermon on the Mount, he says all these difficult sayings and he raises the bar for how we ought to live. Then he's walking away and he kind of elbows his disciples. He's like, just kidding, guys. That was crazy. I know.
[00:17:06] Don't worry about it. I know how it really goes. No, Jesus is inviting those disciples to live in a way where their best attempts at morality and their best attempts to follow all the rules are gonna fall short. That so they're going to have to throw themselves in the mercy of something greater.
[00:17:23] And so it is for us that if we live a life that is consumed with rule following and morality to impress God, what we are saying is, I will try this without you, Jesus and God, Aren't you impressed with how good I'm doing? And Jesus says, it's not ever going to be enough. So give up on that way, give up on that gospel and come over here where you follow so close to me that you are transformed and changed by grace.
[00:17:50] And this is. This is difficult, I know, for anybody who grew up maybe in a legalistic religious setting where the rules were everything.
[00:18:01] We have to be deprogrammed. We have to dismantle some of this gospel, this lesser gospel that pulls us away from our reliance and our closeness to the heart of Jesus.
[00:18:13] And if we're looking here at Westside for a version of Christianity on the flip side, that never makes us uncomfortable, that never challenges how we think or how we live, I pray and hope that you don't find it here, because I want Jesus to challenge me and I want Jesus to challenge you. And I want to be transformed tomorrow more than I am today. As someone said, the moment Jesus stops bothering you is probably the moment you've stopped listening.
[00:18:41] And so Jesus, we're listening.
[00:18:44] This challenging, exposing, vulnerable stuff is brought to the surface when we listen and we apply the words of Jesus.
[00:18:55] And if we're going to go into this willingly following Jesus and counting the cost and allowing our lives to be changed, we have to ask, well, what's on the other side of that?
[00:19:07] What would cause people to leave everything to follow him? What was so compelling about Jesus that people would abandon everything they knew to give their lives completely over to him? And I love how Willard paraphrases John 3:16, where he says God's care for humanity was so great that he sent his unique son among us so that those who count on him might not lead a futile and failing existence, but have the undying life of God himself.
[00:19:36] What is on the other side, when we let go of the things that we're holding so tightly in order to follow after Jesus, is the undying love and life of God. Himself.
[00:19:46] And whenever our faith looks like a shallow imitation of the undying love of God, we don't reject our faith. We go back to the source of life, which is Jesus himself, and say, lord, create in me a clean heart, a new heart before you.
[00:20:03] Last week, my son was just relentlessly arguing to get a very specific video game he had been wanting.
[00:20:13] And it reached a fever pitch where he had brought it up multiple times on Thursday or Friday, and it just kept coming up.
[00:20:22] And about the third or fourth time that he was, he was trying to convince me to buy him this video game.
[00:20:28] Almost mid sentence, as he's arguing for me to get him the game, he goes, and by the way, can I get baptized on Sunday?
[00:20:37] I'm like this eight year old, he loves Jesus and he loves video games. And that's enough. You know, it was really sweet. And so we talked with him. Alyssa and I talked with him and asked him, you know, do you understand what baptism means and why people get baptized? And.
[00:20:56] And he said, yeah, so Jesus can wash my sins away.
[00:21:00] And we're like, that's pretty good. They've been doing a good job in Sunday school. I love it. And so we got to baptize him right here last Sunday morning. And such a sweet time as unprompted by us, just decided this on his own to be baptized.
[00:21:15] And such a beautiful thing. And by the way, we did not give him the video game after the baptism.
[00:21:22] I need to make this clear. Everyone was asking after the first service, like, did you give him the video game? No, I didn't give him the video game. We do not bribe our children to get baptized with video games.
[00:21:33] It's terrible. You people, okay?
[00:21:38] But his understanding of following after Jesus that starts with forgiveness is so important because all of us, we learn as we read scripture, we're far from God in our sin.
[00:21:53] And so we need desperately a Savior to come and cleanse us of sin and unrighteousness and bring us into this right standing with God.
[00:22:03] And yet, if that's where our understanding of what the Gospel offers stops, what we will do is we'll come to faith, say, lord, forgive me of my sins, and then assume our next step is to die and then go to heaven. And so it's like, lord, thank you for forgiving my sins. I'll see you in 40 years. You know? You know, meet you at the pearly gates.
[00:22:25] When what Jesus came to offer was forgiveness of sins. Yes, but not as the finish line, as the starting point of a life lived in abundance, as we Walk with Jesus that between that moment where we receive Christ's forgiveness for our sins and the moment that we breathe our final breath, there is a life lived in his presence. And because he is near and because the kingdom is at hand and it's not far from any of us, he and where God is, things are going to go his way. That we find that we are living into the blessed life, the abundant life, the life that is full to overflowing, and in every circumstance, good and bad, that we experience his sustaining grace in our lives.
[00:23:09] If Jesus came only to give us a loophole to get out of the consequences of our sin, that's a pretty shallow gospel.
[00:23:18] Instead, he invites us into an abundant life.
[00:23:23] And for all of us who maybe grew up in a space where everything focused primarily on the management of sin, right?
[00:23:34] Those spaces where my individual sin, as long as I got that, dealt with everything else, whatever, that's all we're going to focus on.
[00:23:43] I want to just invite us to have a broader understanding of the gospel.
[00:23:47] And I know that some of you have come from church backgrounds. If you grew up in church where individual, personal relationship with Christ was maybe de emphasized, personal sin was deemphasized and it was more about seeing God confront sin and injustice out there in the world.
[00:24:07] And for you, I would say we need both.
[00:24:11] We need injustice to be confronted by the kingdom of God, and we need sin to be confronted by his forgiveness and his mercy. But if we only stop at this management of sin in our lives and in the world, we will never ask the question, how then should we live?
[00:24:28] How should this play out in our relationships? How should this play out in our everyday lives? And this is the gospel is forgiveness and the confrontation of sin. But then a life lived to the full.
[00:24:42] As Jesus said in John 10:10, I've come that they might have life and life to the full.
[00:24:49] And so we reject this gospel of sin management. And here's what. If we believe that the primary focus of God's work in our lives is to manage our sin, here's what will happen.
[00:25:00] Faith will only be concerned with the afterlife.
[00:25:03] Salvation is then a transaction. And Christianity is compliance.
[00:25:08] How compliant can you be? Well, that's how approved you are by God. I was talking with a friend and I hadn't seen him in a while, so we're catching up, talking about our kids and what they're involved in. And he was saying how multiple of his kids are in travel, sports, which travel sport families. God bless you. Pastor Ben is in Arizona yesterday with travel, sports and I don't know how people do it. I don't know. You guys are, you guys are doing great work, Great work. And he was talking to me about all the pressures and time commitment to get all these kids to all these different events. And I saw the wheels turning in his head. And I have this effect on people by virtue that I'm a pastor where I make people feel guilty.
[00:25:53] This is like a.
[00:25:54] It's just, it's a side effect of the vocation, I guess.
[00:25:58] But because people know that I'm a pastor, they assume I'm judgy, I guess I'm so not judgy. I'm not judgy at all. But as he's talking, I'm seeing the wheels turning. He's like, oh, I just kind of admitted that I don't go to church very often during these seasons because I'm with my kids at sports. And so he said something effective. And I bet God's gonna smite me next time I'm at church. God's gonna smite me. And I'm like, whoa, bro, what do you think? I think about God like he's out there with a hammer. Just like, I'm watching your church attendance, right?
[00:26:31] And also, like, I think God likes it when we're showing up for our kids. You know, I think that's a good thing.
[00:26:38] And what I hate to think is that we have this assumption that God is this vindictive, you know, angry character who's just waiting to smite you for screwing up. When everything we see in Jesus showing up and how he taught and how he healed was this good Father who gives good gifts to those who ask.
[00:27:04] We see this God who, as we'll learn in the Sermon on the Mount, if he clothes the lilies of the field in splendor, how much more does he care about you?
[00:27:15] And it's this invitation not to a life of rigid rule following that somehow makes us excess acceptable to God. It's an invitation because of his compelling love that we stay so close to him that the dust of his sandals gets all over us.
[00:27:32] And before we know it, we realize that not because we've tried to follow a list of rules, but because we have stayed so close to Him.
[00:27:40] Sin and anger and fear and lust and greed have lost their grip on us.
[00:27:48] And we are living into a life that looks like Jesus.
[00:27:52] This is the life that we are invited into as disciples, or as some have called in our modern day apprentices, these who stay so close to the Master that what we do and how we live and act begins to look the same. And I shared this on a recording for this group study. But when you think about the great painting masters of the Renaissance, guys like Da Vinci and Rembrandt and others, once they became famous for their paintings, the demand for their work was so high they brought in apprentices.
[00:28:30] And the apprentices studied long enough under the masters, stroke by stroke, technique by technique, spending absurd amounts of time so close with the master that now today we have scholars and art masters that look at the work and they can't distinguish between Da Vinci and his apprentices.
[00:28:54] And this is, I think, is what Christ invites us into, is a life so close to him that it's indistinguishable the way that we love and the way that we live and the way that we speak and how Jesus lived.
[00:29:06] And if we do that, this is what we get. It's the gospel of the kingdom, where the kingdom is here. Now. Salvation is participation in the life of God, and Christianity is apprenticeship, that by following close to Jesus, we become transformed. And I know that for those who have experienced maybe even decades of a legalistic religious setting, there is work to be done to leave that behind and to embrace not a wishy washy, anything goes approach, but as we'll learn in the Sermon on the Mount, an approach that keeps the bar high, but invites us into a radical kind of grace and following that transforms us.
[00:29:51] And I don't want to leave us here with a sense that now we gotta go out of this place and we've just gotta do better and try harder.
[00:30:04] But instead, the invitation today is that we follow him. There was a rich, young ruin, and I'll close with this, who came to Jesus, and he had it all going for him. He was successful and powerful and influential and wealthy. And he said, lord, I've pretty much done everything right, but I've heard you talk about eternal life. What must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, have you followed all the commandments? He goes, yes, so since I was a child. How about that?
[00:30:32] And then Jesus says, okay. He goes, but what do I lack? Cause, see, he knew. He knew something was lacking. And Jesus said, okay, let go of all the things that you're holding so tightly and come follow me.
[00:30:46] And it says, the young man went away sad because he was so attached to his stuff.
[00:30:51] And I don't know about you, but it can be simpler and easier if Jesus would just give me a list of rules and I'll do my best.
[00:31:00] Instead, what Jesus does, he says, I just want you to stay with me.
[00:31:05] And anything that comes in between you and I, anything that you're holding onto, any of those things that your grip is so tight on, that's what I want you to let go and to follow me into this abundant, overflowing life.
[00:31:22] This is what God offers when his kingdom comes.
[00:31:26] Jesus, we love you today. And we would pray that as we read your words and hear what you have to say, not only to the crowds around you then, but to us today, that this would work itself into our real lives, that we would abandon gospels of morality and performance, and instead we become apprentices to Jesus the master.
[00:31:59] Lord, I pray that we would, with fresh ears and fresh eyes, hear and see what you'd have for us.
[00:32:06] Lord, we love you. And I pray for those that struggle with religious guilt, a feeling of inadequacy, who have experienced this crushing weight of legalism and religious legalism. Lord, I pray that they would be able to, even in this moment, by your grace and by your holy Spirit, to leave that stuff behind and to follow you into the free, wide open spaces of your grace.
[00:32:37] We thank you, Lord, for how you're at work in our lives.
[00:32:41] Do a good work today. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.
