The Law of God can not save you. That is not it’s purpose. The law is a school master to teach you about sin.
The law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.
The law shows us our need for a savior and the gospel shows us the savior we need.
LAW
Harry S. Truman – A person who is fundamentally honest doesn’t need a code of ethics. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are all the ethical code anybody needs.
GOSPEL
Oswald Chambers – The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of principles to be obeyed apart from identification with Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting his way with us.
Philip Yancey – Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.
Stanley Hauerwas – The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works, but rather who God is.
Jeopardy Fail – Three recent contestants on JEOPARDY were asked to fill in one missing word from the beginning of the prayer. The question read “Our Father which art in heaven’ [ ____________ ] ‘be thy name.” This verse comes from Matthew 6:9, part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Galatians 3:19
Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary.
Galatians 3:21
Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law.
Galatians 3:24
So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.
Romans 7:7
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”
Matthew 5:17
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Romans 6:14
For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
James 2:10
For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.
James 2:12
So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.
Mt 5:1
Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.
5:2-12 – Beatitudes
5:13-16 – Salt and Light
5:17-20 – Christ Fulfills the Law
5:21-26 – Anger
5:27-30 – Lust
5:31-32 – Divorce
5:33-37 – Oaths
5:38-42 – Retaliation
5:43-48 – Love Your Enemies
6:1-4 – Giving to the Needy
6:5-15 – Prayer
6:16-18 – Fasting
6:19-24 – Treasure in Heaven
6:25-34 – Anxiety
7:1-6 – How to Judge Others
7:7-11 – Ask, Seek, Knock Prayer
7:12-14 – Golden Rule
7:15-20 – Tree & Fruit Spirituality
7:21-23 – “I Never Knew You” – Jesus
7:4-28 – Foundation That Lasts.
You are the light of the world. If you build a city on hill is it going to be able to hide?
In the same way, let your light shine.
A light is meant to be seen.
What is the light he wants to shine in us? Love. God’s love. It’s a powerful thing.
Sermon on the mount is troubling. Unless your righteousness exceeds the pharisees and scribes you won’t even enter the kingdom of heaven. — Where do you go from there?
Read these chapters – the correct response is feeling a tremendous burden!
We have to do something with this without softening the blow or dulling the edge.
What we have in these texts (read them today) Jesus giving us a picture of the kingdom of God. He’s not not presenting himself as a moral philosopher by giving us maxims to live up to.
Luther writes about our tendency to pick up the laws that Jesus proclaims here and to try and make them a pattern for living. “Presumption follows when a man sets himself to fulfill the law with works and diligently sees to it that he does what the letter of the law asks him to do.”
You can take the beatitudes and try it, albeit poorly. Take the rest of the sermon.
Luther, so shrewd in these manners. We are prone to strenuously attempt to live these out outwardly while utterly failing inwardly. [white washed tombs, dead on the inside clean on the outside]
Look inward.
The sermon on the mount is a picture of the kind of world, the kind of person, God envisions. It’s great as a picture. It’s a statement of grace. We see ourselves in the light of this disclosure of the kind of people, the type of community God wants and we realize, it’s not the kind of people we are.
The sermon on the mount is a straight stick of which we don’t measure up. This is not about trying to be the best Christian you can be. This is not what the gospel we proclaim has to do with. All these things in the sermon on the mount reveal our need.
What is critical are not the words themselves. What matters is who is saying them! Laying out the picture of God’s kingdom. By virtue of their beauty and graciousness calling us to grace in Christ.
John 5:39-40 – You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
Otherwise your righteousness much exceed the most righteous people you know. And this condemns us, and if being more righteous than the religious leaders doesn’t condemn us, try on “be therefore perfect as your father in heaven is perfect!” Reach that by effort? I think not.
the word; is the one who speaks them is the one who brings the very kingdom he commands, they finally point us, not to the demands of that law, but to the one who speaks graciously on behalf of that law.
The law shows us our need for a savior and the gospel shows us the savior we need.
At the end of Matthew we hear the great commission. All
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
The authoritative word of God, finally, is not the law that kills us, but the gospel that frees us. It’s not just go and teach my principles. Teaching and obeying is linked with baptism; flows from baptism. Our baptism into Christ is the living picture of Jesus giving to us what we cannot acquire for ourselves. We can not obey unless we are made new. We have no hope if our identity is not found in God. [identify]
The sermon of the mount is an unfolding of the kingdom of heaven. We read it, we see what it commands, and if we’re honest we say, “Lord this isn’t who I am!” The sin of world is all around us. In his righteousness he gives us what he commands of us and sets us free.
Free to live a life of love, a life of faith, a life wrapped up in a joyful relationship of God’s love for you.
The moral demand is stripped away and now in Christ we may live that way. As you live this kind of freeing faith you begin to find yourself doing things that surprise yourself. Not because you must, or you ought, or you should, or you better. But because in that spirit of Christ’s freedom which has taken hold of you; you find that you cannot but do otherwise. That’s the freedom.
Additional Scripture
Mt 6:33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
John 1:17
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Galatians 2:16
Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
Galatians 5:14
For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Romans 13:10
Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
