Preached · June 1, 2018
A Re-Recording
Well, good morning, or good afternoon, or good day to you, whatever time it is you're listening to this. Back on June 3rd, I preached a sermon that introduced our Sermon on the Mount series, called "Life on the Rocks." And as it turns out, the soundboard corrupted the file, so the sermon didn't get saved. So I wanted to take some time and actually rerecord what we talked about, so it's in there for posterity, and if you wanted to catch up on the last sermon, then it's accessible to you. So, sorry, this is not in front of a live studio audience. This is just me in my office with a microphone and my notes and Bible in front of me.
But we started a new sermon series called Life on the Rocks, taking a look at the Sermon on the Mount—Matthew 5 and 6 and 7. And we're spending the whole summer, June and July and August, on these three chapters, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, because we think they are so crucial, so important. It's where Jesus gives his vision of what life in the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the heavens, looks like. It's a collection of the key teachings of Jesus—of our Savior, our Lord, Jesus Christ, who saved the world with his death and resurrection. So when he speaks, we want to listen, and we want to take a look at what these verses, these chapters, talk about.
The Sermon on the Mount is, quite honestly, one of the most important and greatest pieces of literature ever composed and put to paper. The influence it's had on culture and society around the world really can't be overstated. Just listen to this list of things that come out of the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill. Let your yes be yes. Turn the other cheek. Go the extra mile. Love your enemies. Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. The prayer, "Our Father, who art in heaven." Store up your treasures in heaven. No one can serve two masters. Let tomorrow worry about itself. The speck in your brother's eye. Don't throw your pearls before swine. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you. Do to others what you would have them do to you—the golden rule. The phrase "wolves in sheep's clothing." All of these phrases come from just three chapters in the Gospel of Matthew, from this single sermon of Jesus.
What Do We Do With It?
So we recognize it's an important piece of literature, an important piece of Scripture, an important piece of Jesus' teaching. But what we want to talk about today is: what on earth are we supposed to do with it? Because when you look through the Sermon on the Mount, you begin to recognize that there are some really hard teachings in it. When you start reading it and paying attention to what it says, you recognize that some of it seems idealistic. Some of it doesn't seem possible. Some of it seems like maybe it's meant for life in heaven and not possibly life on earth. And so we need to ask: what are we supposed to do with it? When Jesus taught this, did he mean for us to live it today? Did he mean it for when we reach perfection?
About a year and a half ago, we surveyed the Good News congregation. We did the Reveal survey. It asked them a whole bunch of questions. One of the questions had to do with the Bible. It asked people to respond to the statement, "I believe the Bible has decisive authority over what I say and do." And about 70% of people said that they agreed or strongly agreed. And 70% is pretty good. But that means there's about 30%, one-third of our congregation, who, when they look at the Bible, they're not so sure. Maybe, benefit of the doubt, they look at Scripture and they want it to have decisive authority over what they say and do, but they recognize it just doesn't. Or they look at Scripture and they don't want it to have decisive authority over what they say and do—they want to ignore it. They look at the stories of the Old Testament and they think God is capricious and angry and mean. They look at the teachings of Jesus and think they're unrealistic and not meant for today.
So we want to spend some time today on why we should make the Bible have decisive authority over what we say and do. That's what Christians have historically believed—that Scripture is our rule of life and faith, our standard of practice of what we're supposed to believe. And if you're in the camp where you're not sure, I want today's sermon to be, in part, help to convince you of why the Bible is worth living for.
So that brings us to our three points for this sermon. Number one, the Bible is worth living for. Number two, Jesus is worth dying for. And number three, the Sermon on the Mount is best served on the rocks. The Sermon on the Mount is like a fine whiskey—it's best served on the rocks.
The Bible Is Worth Living For
Now, the Bible is an interesting thing. We often call it a book. But it's not just a book. It's a library of books—a library of 66 books, written across centuries and millennia by a whole bunch of authors from a lot of different geographical locations, all talking basically about the same thing: their experience with God. And we come to the Bible with questions. Is the Bible worth building our lives upon? Is it worth doing what it says? Is it worth actually changing everything about how we live, shaping and forming our lives based around what it says? Does the Bible tell the truth? Is it historically accurate? Does it tell the truth about miracles, about Jesus' resurrection, about the nature of reality in the universe and the nature of God? And does it help me answer the question that every single human person asks: What is the good life? What is the life that's worth living? And does the Bible help me get there?
So to help us get around those questions, I want to talk specifically about the New Testament. We could talk about the whole Bible, but it would take a lot of time. So I want to talk about just the New Testament—the last third of the Bible in terms of bulk. What the New Testament is, is a library of 27 books. It's got four biographies of Jesus—people who wrote a history of Jesus' life. It's got one history book, the book of Acts. And then it's got 21 letters—people like Paul or James or John writing letters to churches. And then one apocalypse, what we might call today post-apocalyptic literature or dystopian literature. So: four biographies—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; one history, the book of Acts; 21 letters; and one apocalypse, the book of Revelation.
It was composed by nine to ten different authors, all within one generation of the life and death of Jesus. So we've got eyewitness testimony and account. And it's interesting, because there were lots of things being written about Jesus in that first generation. But we see from very early on in church history that there are similar lists of what to read, coming from three different geographical locations. To the north, you've got Antioch and Rome and Greece. In the middle, you've got Jerusalem and Palestine. And to the south, you've got Alexandria and Egypt. So you've got different Christian communities all living there, but they all have similar lists—they're making similar what's called canon lists of what Christians need to be reading to understand Jesus, to understand Jesus' twelve apostles and their teachings, and to understand the early church and what they believed. Even though they're spread apart by hundreds of miles in the ancient world, and there are dozens of different documents being written about Jesus in the early church, they all have similar lists of "these are the things you should read."
You might have heard it said, maybe in a poorly written History Channel documentary, or maybe you read The Da Vinci Code, that the New Testament was written or compiled hundreds of years later, in like 400 or 500 A.D., that Constantine made it up, that there was no agreed-upon canon list. And quite frankly, that's just a lie. There's no respectable historian, both Christian and non-Christian, who would actually posit that. The New Testament canon—that agreed-upon list of books we should read—came about really early on in the church. By about 110 A.D., we see three very similar lists.
That's all great, but how do we know what it actually says? Because the New Testament was written 1,900, 2,000 years ago. How do we know that what we have from the New Testament is reliable? And was it like a massive game of telephone, where it got corrupted over time as people made copies? They didn't have Xerox machines. They didn't have a save button in Microsoft Word. How do we know what the New Testament says?
Well, we know, because we actually have 5,700 Greek manuscripts which represent the entirety of the New Testament. So again, three different geographical locations—Antioch, Jerusalem, or Alexandria—and you start pulling together all of these old Greek papyri, ancient paper, and you start seeing that there are massive similarities between what was being compiled in those three different locations. As a matter of fact, you can reconstruct 99% of the original text beyond a reasonable doubt. And that means the documents and papyri and manuscripts found in Antioch match the ones found in Jerusalem, and the ones in Jerusalem match the ones found in Alexandria, as well as ones spread out across the ancient world—Rome and Corinth and other places. And the 1% where there is some disagreement—maybe a piece of papyrus has a slightly different ending to a word than a piece of papyrus in Alexandria—even where there is some disagreement, there is no New Testament or Christian doctrine that relies on that 1%. It's not like there's a papyrus that says Jesus took a nap and another one that says Jesus died on the cross. All the major Christian doctrines—there's agreement on these 5,700 Greek manuscripts.
And the New Testament documents, those 5,700 Greek manuscripts, are larger in number and closer in proximity to the events they talk about than any other ancient record. We've got lots of ancient books—you can make a whole library of really old books, things like Plato's Republic, or Socrates, or Josephus and his histories, or Cicero, or the histories of Rome. But the problem with those books is that we have fewer manuscripts—there's not as many original copies or papyri—and the ones we do have are much, much further away from the original time they were written. The New Testament, however, is unique in that we have a larger amount of manuscripts, and they are closer in proximity to the events they record than any other ancient record. In other words, from a historical standpoint, we are more confident about the life of Jesus than we are about the life of Julius Caesar. We're more confident about the life of Jesus than about Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. We're more confident about the life of Jesus than about the Buddha, or Confucius, or any of the Eastern religions. We're more confident about what happened in the early church—the life of Jesus, or Paul, or James—than about any other historical event, because we have more manuscripts, and they are older than any other manuscripts of other ancient books we have.
So, okay, all well and good. It's a library of books. We're confident that what the New Testament says is actually what was written, when it was written. But what if it was all made up anyway? What if the people who wrote it in the first century made it all up? They wanted to create a religion, get rich and famous, and so they just made a forgery of all these things and thought maybe that would get them on the road to fame.
Well, here's the thing. If it was a forgery, it was a really, really bad attempt at one. Take a look at the resurrection stories as they're presented in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. If you start looking closely, you actually start to see differences in the stories—a difference in the order of events, who's where at what time, do angels show up, is it one or two or three angels, or does Jesus show up, how many women go to the tomb. So you start to notice these differences, and at first you may think, well, that proves that Christianity isn't true, doesn't it? Well, actually, not quite—because what that means is that it smacks of eyewitness testimony. And it also means that if it was a forgery, it was a really bad attempt at one. Because if the core historical event of your faith is the resurrection, and you're trying to invent this religion but you can't get your facts straight, then that's a really badly written forgery. But the fact that there are differences, while the core similarities don't change—the fact that it was a physical, bodily resurrection; that Jesus eats food and drinks with the disciples; that there was a tomb with a stone that gets rolled away; that there are soldiers who get scared away; that there are multiple testimonies; that there are women and men all mixing it up with Jesus—the fact that the core details don't change, but some of the peripheral details do, proves that there is eyewitness testimony. People, in their confusion, wrote down what they remembered. And it kind of shows that it's not a forgery. They didn't make it up—because if they made it up, they wouldn't have four different accounts.
You see the same thing in the details of the birth stories of Jesus—different genealogies, who the angel appears to, even the emphasis on what city Jesus is from; it's different in Matthew than it is in Luke. Again, core, key Christian teaching. If you're trying to invent a religion, you'd think you'd want to have one story and get it straight. So again, it smacks of eyewitness testimony.
Another reason it's a bad attempt at inventing a religion is that you have women presented as eyewitnesses of the resurrection. They are the key testimony to whether or not the resurrection happened. And in a first-century perspective, women weren't seen as trustworthy witnesses, because they were women. And yet Christianity actually rests its claims on the testimony of women. If you're trying to make up a religion, you wouldn't do that.
Same thing with theologies of death. Everyone believed that when you died, you stayed dead. Resurrection wasn't an agreed-upon thing. Jews believed that resurrection was going to happen in the great distant future, to everyone at the same time—not just one guy. Romans and Greeks all believed that when you died, you stayed dead. And yet here comes Christianity claiming that, no, Jesus was resurrected as the firstfruits.
It's a poorly written forgery because the hard sayings of Jesus are included—things we'd rather Jesus not say, things about cutting off your limbs. So again, if you're trying to make up a religion to get rich and famous and have people convert, why are you having Jesus say these bizarre things? And we also see that there are no attempts at harmonization or reverse engineering. We know that in the first-century church there were controversies around Jewish law and rituals. And if you're making up a religion, you could just write in your biography of Jesus a final word about it, saying, "Well, look, in the Gospel of Mark it says this, and therefore that's what we should do." But they didn't do that. We don't have these final words from Jesus on what to do about some of the controversies in the first-century church, which again probably means they didn't make it up. There were actually, in later centuries, attempts at harmonizing the four Gospels, trying to combine them into one book. And the early church decided, no, we don't want to do that, because these four biographies actually give us a more three-dimensional, or four-dimensional, view of the person and work of Jesus.
So: the New Testament is a library of books. We have more proof of it than any other historical document. If it was a forgery, it was a really poor attempt at one. And probably the number one thing that makes me want to pay attention to the New Testament is that within one, two, and three generations of Jesus, innumerable hundreds and thousands of Christians were killed because they believed its claims. Here you have people who are eyewitnesses to the life and death of Jesus. And if we really believe they made it up to get rich and famous, and then they start getting killed by the hundreds or thousands, and their family members start getting excommunicated from good society—they can't trade in the marketplace, they can't get good jobs, they can't even live in the city anymore because they believe in the claims of Jesus—to me, that probably says they really thought it was true. And I would say it really was true. What the New Testament records is probably actually true, because people are dying for it. If they were doing this for any other reason, they would say, "Nope, I made it up, never mind, please don't kill me." But they didn't. They died for the claims of the New Testament.
Jesus Is Worth Dying For
So that's all great, but why should we live like it says we should live? Why should we pay attention to its teachings? That brings us to our second point: Jesus. The main character of the New Testament—probably of all of Scripture—is Jesus, the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.
I'm going to read something that gets passed around during Christmastime, this kind of poem. It comes from a sermon in 1925 by James Allen Francis, and it's called "One Solitary Life." It's a good summary of Jesus and his impact. This is what it says:
He was a man who was born in an obscure village, as the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another obscure village. He worked in a carpenter's shop until he was 30, and then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never owned a home. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put his foot inside a big city. He never traveled 200 miles from the place where he was born. He never did any of the great things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He had nothing to do with this world except the naked power of his divine humanity. While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him, and another betrayed him. He was turned over to his enemies. He went through a mockery of a trial, and he was nailed upon the cross between two brigands. His executioners gambled for the only piece of property he had on earth while he was dying, and that was his coat. When he was dead, he was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend. Nineteen wide centuries have come and gone, and today he is the center of the human race and the leader of the column of progress. I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that have ever marched, and all the navies that were ever built, and all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon the earth as powerfully as has this one solitary life.
Now, there are lots of people who changed the world—even people like Buddha or Confucius, or those who set down the tenets of Hinduism or Mormonism or any of the religions of the world. There are lots of people who are influential. But here's the thing about Jesus. You look at the life of Jesus, and he did what Matthew 5 and 6 and 7 says. He lived out that life, and it ended up getting him killed. It ended up with him on a cross and then buried in a tomb. But what Christians believe, because of what the New Testament says, is that he came back. He didn't stay dead. Jesus was resurrected. And that's a historical claim that no other faith tradition makes. We base our faith on the historical claim that Jesus not only lived, not only died, but he came back.
And again, I believe the New Testament is reliable. I believe that those who lived closest to the time of Jesus wouldn't have given up their lives for something so absurd unless they really thought it was true. Which means that when someone like Jesus says something, and the most reliable ancient text we have bothers to write it down, I should probably pay attention.
Best Served on the Rocks
So that brings us to our third point: rocks. The Sermon on the Mount is best lived on the rocks. And this comes from Matthew 7, the way Jesus concludes his sermon: whoever hears what he says and puts it into practice, actually does it, is like the wise builder who builds their house on a foundation of rock. The storms will come, and the house will not be blown over—compared to the person who hears the words of Jesus and doesn't do them, and when the storm comes, the house is going to fall down because it's on a foundation of sand. It's not deeply embedded into the rocks.
So what is the Sermon on the Mount? Well, it's what the world looks like when Jesus is king. The Sermon on the Mount is all about God's kingdom, the kingdom of the heavens. We see this in Matthew chapter 4—this is the primary message of Jesus, the kingdom of the heavens. And the Sermon on the Mount explains what the world looks like when Jesus is king. It's about God's kingdom and how we put it into practice.
Now, when we look at the words of Scripture, when we hear sermons, we have a couple of options of what to do with them. To show an example of this—and I did this live when the sermon was actually in front of a congregation—we can talk about music theory and music. Music theory is the background science, or explanation, of what's happening in a piece of music. And I've got a piece of music here in front of me: the song "10,000 Reasons" by Matt Redman, this kind of amazing modern hymn that's gone viral worldwide. I've got a bunch of notes here. In measure 4, we see a transition from a 5 chord to a 4 chord. There's a perfect fourth interval between the words "bless" and "Lord," and therefore "Lord" gets the highest note. We see the repeated perfect fourth interval; this time "soul" gets the low note. And then we see another transition from a major 5 chord to a minor 7 chord; "soul" again gets the low note. There's a second line that's parallel with the first, in mere psalmic Hebraic parallelism. The song then goes to major when speaking of worship and minor when speaking of self.
Now, hopefully you're bored by this. There were a few music educators in the room when I preached this the first time, and they thought it was kind of interesting. But music theory, for the most part, goes over most people's heads. We don't love music because of music theory. But then something happens when we actually take the music theory and we start playing the music, and we start singing the song: "Bless the Lord, O my soul, O my soul, worship his holy name."
And so that Sunday, I went behind the keyboard, and I started playing the song, and something amazing happened. People looked pretty bored when I talked about the music theory. But when we started singing, people started standing up, raising their hands. We had a bunch of summer vacationers at our church. And so we had this group of hundreds of either friends, acquaintances, or strangers, and yet they all feel comfortable enough to lift their voices as one in group karaoke. Why? Because music comes alive when we actually sing it. What we didn't see happening in that room, when we all start singing together, is our heartbeats actually start lining up with the tempo of the music, and our hearts start beating as one. If we were to take a massive MRI of everybody in the room at the same time, we would see the same centers and sections of the brain light up as other sections start to go dark, because we're all getting engaged with what's happening in the song as we participate in the music.
If all I ever do with the words of Scripture is look at the theory and talk about the words and never do anything else, I am dead where I stand. If all I do with the words of the Sermon on the Mount is hear them and then let them fall out the back of my head, I am dead where I stand. If all I ever do is talk about the theory and the Greek and the grammar—and don't get me wrong, I know more Greek grammar and theory than the average person, and I can nerd out about a piece of Scripture more than most of you—if that's all I ever do, I am dead where I stand. Scripture comes alive in the living of it. Scripture comes alive when we actually put it into practice. Scripture comes alive not just when we talk about it and tear it apart like a piece of musical theory; Scripture comes alive like when we sing a song and we start living it out.
And that's what Jesus expects and wants from his listeners, from his people, from the people who are calling Jesus King. He actually says in the text of the Sermon on the Mount that us, his listeners—you and me—we are the light of the world. And on that Sunday, I had us practice saying this, and maybe you could do this at home, looking in a mirror: say, "I am the light of the world." And this isn't Oprah theology. This isn't New Age wisdom or thinking. This is Jesus' words to you. He says, you are the light of the world. You, whoever you are, wherever you are listening to this, if you do what Jesus says, you become the light of the world. And when we put it into practice, when we start singing the song of Jesus' instructions, of Jesus' sermon, we become the light of the world. We start showing the world what it looks like when Jesus is King.
Wisdom or Foolishness
So did Jesus seriously expect us to do what he taught? Well, option one is we can say no—it's not possible, it's not practical, it's not necessary. And Jesus says that that's like building your house on sand. In other words, it's foolishness. New Testament scholar Klyne Snodgrass—God bless him for making it through elementary school with that name—Klyne Snodgrass says this: "Anyone who hears the words of Jesus and does not do them is a fool." It's harsh, but it's not my words; those are the words of Jesus. If we ignore what Jesus says, it's foolishness.
The second option is to say, yes, Jesus did mean for us to obey him. And that is what Jesus calls wisdom. It's building our house on the rock. It means that when the storms and the hurricanes and the tornadoes and the big bad wolf come and try to blow down our house and our lives, we will make it. Our lives will stand. We will have an eternal quality to our lives. In other words, if we listen to what Jesus says, that means eternal life is available to us today.
Now, we could also say, yes, Jesus did intend for us to listen to him—and we can just ignore him. We can just not do what he says, even though we recognize that we're supposed to. And that too is foolishness. That too is building our house on the sand. It's what Scripture calls disobedience. And Jesus makes this clear. In the book of John, chapter 15, Jesus says:
Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. And anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching.
There's a very simple way of figuring out who loves Jesus and who doesn't: do they do what Jesus says to do? 1 John chapter 2, one of the followers of Jesus, John, writes this:
We know that we have come to know Jesus if we keep his commands. Whoever says, "I know Jesus," but doesn't do what Jesus commands, is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys Jesus' words, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know that we are in Jesus: whoever claims to live in him must live just like Jesus did.
Now, some of you may have some warning bells going off in your mind. Wait a second—I thought we were saved by grace. I thought we were saved by faith and not by our works. We're not talking about who is saved or who is not saved. We're not talking about who's going to heaven and who's not. Dallas Willard puts it like this: "Grace is not opposed to effort. It's opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude, and effort is an action." If you are trying to earn your salvation by doing what Jesus says to do, well, then you are barking up the wrong tree. We are not saved by what we do. We are only saved by the grace of Jesus. And we'll talk about that on June 10th with the "Blessed are the poor in spirit" passage. But grace is not opposed to effort—to responding to God's grace, to responding to God's love, to responding to God's message of salvation by actually doing something about it.
The Challenge
So I want to offer you a challenge for these three months of the Life on the Rocks series, this Sermon on the Mount series. Here's the challenge, and it comes in three parts. Number one: when Jesus says to do something in the Sermon on the Mount, I will assume he actually wants me to do it. When Jesus says to pray like this, I'm going to assume he wants me to pray like that. When Jesus says, "When you fast, do it like this," I'm going to assume he actually wants me to fast. When Jesus says, "Love your enemies," I'm going to assume he actually means to love my enemies.
Which brings us to point number two of the challenge: when I don't do what Jesus asks, I'm going to call it what it is, and that's disobedience. When Jesus asks me to do something, and I don't do it, that's disobedience. It's hearing what Jesus asks us to do and looking at him and saying no. So when Jesus says to pray, and I don't pray, I'm being disobedient. When Jesus says to fast, and I don't fast, I'm being disobedient. When Jesus says, "Love your enemies," and I buy a gun so I can shoot my enemies, I'm being disobedient. I've got to call it what it is.
And I've got to call it what it is, because that brings us to point three: when I'm honest about my disobedience, I can honestly experience God's grace. If I'm not honest about my disobedience, I can just stay there, so I can just be ashamed about it. But the only way I can experience God's grace is when I'm honest that I don't follow Jesus sometimes—maybe oftentimes. I can fully experience just how good and deep and wide and tall and high and marvelous God's grace is when I recognize how badly I need it.
In preparation for this sermon, I've been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book Discipleship, which is a long meditation on the Sermon on the Mount. When I read just the opening couple of paragraphs, I wanted to throw away my sermon and just read them to you. But I didn't. But I want to conclude with those paragraphs. This is what Bonhoeffer writes:
Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church. Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance, baptism without community, Lord's Supper without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, and grace without the living Christ. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again. Like Paul says, "I die daily." It is costly because it calls to discipleship. It is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. It is costly because it forces people under the yoke of Jesus—but it's grace when Jesus says, "My yoke is easy, my burden is light."
So brothers and sisters, as we go throughout this Sermon on the Mount, we build our life on the rocks—the solid foundation and the belief that when Jesus asks us to do something, by his Spirit empowering us, we will do it.
