Sermon on the Mount, Part 1 // The Good News of the Kingdom of Heaven

Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast.

Church of the Lookout is in Boulder, Colorado, and our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with all-inspiring love.

Visit us online at the lookout.church.

Alright, let's take a seat.

Let's take a seat.

Are you guys ready to jump into the word this morning?

I'm gonna need a rousing, yes.

Okay, alright.

You guys alive this morning?

Alright.

We're doing this together.

I'm not preaching at you, I'm preaching with you, I guess.

I don't even know what that means, but yes, we're all doing this together.

We're together, alright?

And you guys are alive, you know, and I know that you're alive because I see that smile on your face, beautiful smile, and I know that you have the Spirit of God inside of you.

So we're gonna jump into the Word.

Feel free to shout back at me if you like it, alright?

And if you don't like it, you can shout back too.

I don't care.

I'll take anything.

All right.

Open up to Matthew.

We're gonna start in Matthew 28, and today I'm gonna set up a longer um theme, uh teaching series that we're entering into as a church for the next couple months, all right?

And uh, but before I talk to you about that, I want to set it up through talking about Jesus' final commandment to his disciples.

Matthew 28.

If you don't have your Bible, we're gonna have it on the screen.

Now read with me.

It says this.

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them, and when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.

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 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.

Now, who are the disciples in this room this morning?

So that's hopefully, hopefully you're raising your hand.

If you're not a disciple, we invite you to join us in following Jesus today.

But one of the things that Jesus mentioned to his disciples before he ascended into heaven is he put out an expectation, it was an invitation, that part of what it means to follow me is to not only yourself, not only you follow me with your life, but I want you to do the same for others.

I want you to have followers in your life, and I want you to teach them to observe everything that I've commanded you.

Teach them to observe everything I command you, teach them how to live in and walk in everything that I have commanded you.

Now, this this is a particularly challenging passage, even if we just take this at face value, because in the modern Western context, a lot of Christians, we we think Jesus said, teach them to be inspired by what I uh but what I said to you, or teach them to think about what I said to you.

But but teaching them to observe everything I commanded you, that means that we have a responsibility.

Jesus had an expectation of those who are following him, that number one, we would know what he commanded us, and number two, we would know how to live that out and invite others to join us in that.

You guys hearing me?

And so one of the interesting things though is when you talk to a lot of Christians, a lot of followers of Christ, if I were to ask you the question, what did Jesus command you?

What are Jesus commands?

How what would you what would actually come to mind?

You know, let's let's go love your enemies or you know, love God, love others.

We're gonna say that.

All right, so that's a good catch-all.

But what what did he command?

And how do we know what he commanded?

And are how are we, are we diligently living out what Jesus actually commanded us?

You guys with me?

And so that's a it's a very important place to start because that was his expectation.

Now, if we are to look at where do we actually explore what Jesus commanded us, what he instructed us, how he invited us to take on his teaching, take on his yoke, and to follow him as our rabbi teacher, where can we look?

The core body of Jesus' teaching is all over the gospels, but for the next few months, we're gonna be focusing specifically on Matthew 5 through 7, and it's a collection of teachings we know as the Sermon on the Mount.

Okay, it's called the Sermon on the Mount.

Now, if if you're a uh if you've been following Jesus, reading the Bible for a long time, you're probably very familiar with this section of teaching.

If you're newer to following Christ, this is a great place to start, and we're gonna be walking through this line by line.

But what is the Sermon on the Mount?

We're gonna talk a little bit about that today.

And here's how it starts in Matthew 5, verse 1.

Matthew 5:1

It says, seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and taught them.

Okay?

So he was on a mountain, he went up to a mountain, and he called his disciples to him, and they came and they sat around him, and he saw the crowds, and they kind of started gathering up.

So, because what we're reading is in the couple chapters right before then, he's healing the sick, he's casting out demons, he's starting to draw a crowd.

So he said, Come follow me up the mountain.

And so he had his disciples around him, he's eye to eye with the people he's spending all his time with, and the crowds are kind of pressing in on every side.

And so this is Jesus' chance to speak to them everything that he believed was going to be important for them to know and to live and to be invited into.

And what he was doing, he's casting a vision for a new kind of life.

And so when he opened his mouth, he was looking into the eyes of the people that he loved, maybe some people he didn't know, and he opened his mouth, he started looking into their eyes, and he said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

You are the salt of the world, you are the light of the world.

Do not let it be hidden, right?

He'd say things like this.

He said, If if if somebody asks you to carry their bag for a mile, what I want you to do is to go an extra mile.

That's where we get the whole phrase, an extra mile.

Go an extra mile.

He said, If if you get slapped on the cheek, if somebody slaps you on the right side of the cheek, what I want you to do, instead of retaliate, I want you to turn the other cheek and give them the opportunity to slap the other one.

He said, Judge not lest you be judged.

He said, and and rather than retaliating against your enemies, I want you to pray for your enemies and bless those who persecute you.

So he started going through teaching after teaching of some of the most radical revolutionary sayings that we, that much of our culture, much of our lives are actually still built on as kind of a common ground that we stand on.

And here's the problem for a lot of us that are very familiar with these things.

Our challenges, if you've been a fruit for a Christian for a long time, there's a high likelihood that these passages fall under the category of, I already know that, right?

We all have this bucket of thing when we read the Bible and we kind of read it, and it's easy to default to, I've read that before, I know that, know that, know that, got it, got it, got it.

And we just keep moving on and we forget how radical, how revolutionary Jesus really was, and what that means for us today.

Okay.

Now, there's several people in history that this particular group of passages, the Sermon on the Mount, shifted everything for them.

It completely defined their life and their work and their ministry.

Now, one of them, um you've heard me talk about before, is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He was a famous German pastor, known for his role in plotting the assassination of Hitler during World War II.

So, hey, welcome to church, everybody.

Um, he was famous for he got caught in an assassination plot and was killed because he was part of a group that was trying to stop what was happening in Germany.

And some of that, some of his journey, some of uh where he how he ended up, how his life ended up that way, was shaped in the 1930s.

He actually was a German pastor, but he came to the United States to study in Harlem in New York City for his post doing some postdoctoral work.

And during his time he attended a black church, and it was the very first time that out of his context, he was experiencing faithful Christians who were also the objects of object of racism.

And he was struck by how they how they were able to live into the teachings of Jesus, even as the objects of scorn and hatred in their own communities.

And for him, it was being among them and watching them live into live their lives and index their lives towards the way of Jesus in a deep form of love.

That it really crystallized for him what it meant to live in the opposite spirit of the day.

And it gave him courage to return to Germany and oppose anti-Semitism and much of what the national church was being seduced into in their political day.

And so that's what Dietrich Bonhoeffer did.

There's a there's a new movie coming out later this year that you'll probably all go see.

I hope so.

That's gonna be great.

Here's what he said, though, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He said, I would only achieve true inner clarity and honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously.

Here alone lies the force that can blow all this hocus pocus of Nazism sky high, like fireworks, leaving only a few burnt-out shells behind.

And so for him, it was this body of teaching that just it what it did is it got to him and it gave him a vision for a new kind of life.

And later on, um the this isn't well documented, but I've heard the story of that he started a discipleship school in Germany, and he was training up pastors and leaders to live into a different way.

And and one day they were outside and they saw um they saw an army from the Third Reich, Nazis that were marching by, and he told all of his young apprentices and disciples, he said, Listen, he said, this, what we're doing here, needs to be stronger than that.

This must be stronger than that.

And it's a really good word, I believe, even for today.

If we are if we are not steeped in the way of Jesus, we will be coerced into the seductive power of this world.

Those are strong words, but I mean it.

That what we do here, the power of even what we're doing in praise and worship, the power of living out what we're actually reading about in the life of Jesus, the spirit-empowered life lived out must be stronger than the way of the world in which we live.

That was a fantastic golf clap.

And uh, but it's true, right?

It's true.

I think you guys believe that too.

Gandhi, we know, was also inspired by the the Sermon on the Valent, the whole message of nonviolent resistance as it related to British rule in India.

Now, uh Gandhi, we know, was not a follower of Jesus, at least explicitly.

He was not he was not a Christian, but he read the Sermon on the Mount twice a day for his last 40 years.

Okay?

Who reads the Sermon on the Mount once a day?

Okay, how about twice a year?

Right?

He he was faithful to it.

And his his only hiccup, he's like, I would probably become a Christian if I met other Christians that actually lived more like Jesus.

And and so he was just more, you know, his life and the what he was pressing into, he wanted an integrity and an honesty that he just didn't see.

But he was moved by the vision that Jesus was casting here.

In equal manner, Martin Luther King Jr.

was deeply inspired by by this particular body of work.

And Martin Luther King Jr.

was a young pastor, but he he also led in a volatile day.

He was inspired by the nonviolent resistance that marked the civil, or he inspired the nonviolent resistance that marked the civil rights movement.

Here's what Mart uh Martin Luther King Jr.

said about the Sermon on the Mount.

He said, It was the Sermon on the Mount rather than a doctrine of passive resistance that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action.

It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with creative weapon of love.

And so kind of a few high-level examples, Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., all leaders within very unsettling times where there's political upheaval, injustice.

These are all leaders that needed a new way forward.

And the reason I use those examples, we could use a lot more.

Is I I really believe that one of the things we can do this way to live in our fidelity to the way of Jesus, or fidelity to the kingdom of God, in a time that even in the United States, as it's going to continue to heat up.

It's already, it's already hot.

There's pressures on all sides, there's voices on all sides, there's a lot that we have to live into.

There's a lot of darkness, a lot of shadows, a lot of rhetoric.

But to be at in order to preserve our souls during unrest, polarization, political divisiveness, we must be reacquainted and steeped in the reality of the kingdom of heaven, not just as a good idea, but as the way of life that is our only option.

And I think this is a good place for us to be and to hang out for the next bit of time, to walk together through the Sermon on the Mount.

So I just want to invite you into this journey because this must be stronger than that.

This must be stronger than that.

And we're gonna learn how to live to this journey uh together, passage by passage.

And so one good question to kind of start us off, though, as we're as we're teasing this out, is what is the Sermon on the Mount?

Was it just was it really just one sermon?

Uh who was Jesus speaking to?

What was his hope that would actually happen?

Okay, so I'm gonna hit a few angles of this.

What is the Sermon on the Mount?

Um you should know this that as you look at Matthew chapter 5 through 7.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

If you don't have a Bible, we'll get you a Bible.

Just go to the Connect Hub after the service.

We'll find a Bible.

You can take somebody, you can take somebody's Bible here if you don't have a Bible.

You most of us have like seven at home, right?

Um the first thing to know about the Sermon on the Mount was it likely wasn't just one sermon.

It was actually 14 distinct teachings from Jesus.

Now, scholars believe that this was these collection of sermons that Jesus brought to a lot of different places that he went.

It was like as he toured Galilee, as he toured the area, it's almost like a comedian.

He had bits, right?

He had bits that he worked on, and he worked hard on these sermons, I believe.

He crafted these.

They're so clever, they're so brilliant that he actually worked on these things.

And in this particular passage, Matthew, his disciple, wrote down this collection of teachings.

And uh, and so it could rightly be said that these are Jesus' greatest hits, right?

These are like his, this is like his actual, like if he released an album, this would be it, the Sermon on the Mount, okay?

Um, and it was his reimagination of the law and the prophets.

The rabbis, every rabbi in his day were known to have their own takes, their own spins, or their own um readings of the scriptures and how to live into them.

And so so that's why when Jesus called his disciples to his teaching, that would be called taking on the yoke of your rabbi.

You're taking on their understanding, their interpretation of the scriptures.

And so when when Jesus would say things, you have heard it said, but I say unto you, that was his version as a rabbi of saying, okay, this is what everybody knows, this is what you've read in the scriptures and the Torah, but I'm going to reinterpret this under the new day, this new era, this new wineskin, this paradigm that I am instituting in my life and my work.

And he he brought an entire new way of living into the covenant of God and the heartbeat of God on earth.

And so this was a collection of teachings that he would use to really hit on the high points of the kingdom life.

Okay.

So it's 14 distinct teachings, and it was delivered, it was delivered on a mountain.

Now, why is that important?

Why a mountain?

Why not a beach?

Why not a grassy plain?

Why not a vineyard?

And certainly he likely had sermons on all of those different landscapes.

But what's interesting about the Sermon on the Mount is where else do you read about somebody else going to a mountain to receive the word of the Lord in the scripture?

Moses.

And so it was an unmistakable reference as he would kind of go up to the mountain, he would gather people to him, and he would begin to expound upon this new reality.

It was he was making a connection that just like Moses, the first prophet, did that, and he he received the Ten Commandments, instructions to the Lord, Jesus was restarting.

Um, you know, he was restarting, he's kickstarting the prophetic in a new day.

And his message was the same: it was a message of deliverance.

So Moses came and and uh Moses, as he received the instructions from God on Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments, it was a redefining of the people.

It was a deliverance out of one way of life and an invitation into a new way of life.

And Jesus is doing the same thing.

He said, Listen, I want to invite you out of a spiritual reality, out of one way of living.

I want to invite you into an entirely new way of living.

Author Glenn Stassen says Jesus' message was coming to deliver us from our vicious cycles of anger and violence, unfaithfulness and adultery, manipulation and deceit, materialism and greed, and our double-mindedness from our separation with God.

In other words, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is saying, you don't have to stay stuck in your vicious cycles anymore.

There is a new way forward.

And it's in the power of the Holy Spirit.

And it's entrusting me in my way.

It's about abiding in me.

It's about being staying in connection with your Father who is in heaven.

And out of the overflow of this life, there is a new kind of life that is available.

So Jesus, he goes to the mountain because he's making a clear point.

There is a new thing that is happening in this time.

And like I said before, the third thing to know about the Sermon on the Mount is he who he was speaking to, he was speaking to crowds and his disciples, but we just need to be reminded this is not a group of suburban Coloradans that all have a couple cars, you know, and a mortgage payment, and their lives are generally put together, right?

This is the crowds that he's speaking to are poor.

They are mourning, they are longing for justice, they are oppressed by the Romans, they are held down, they're on their last thread, they're lacking hope.

They don't know who else to go to.

Their lives are not put together, their lives are broken.

And I think if we're all honest with ourselves, we're all actually there too.

Because without Jesus, the thing is, all of us in our lives, there's things that we're lamenting, there's things that we're grieving, there's things that we wish were more put together than they are.

There's places where we feel like we have a poverty of spirit, there's places where we're longing for something new in our lives or in our world.

And so, in a lot of ways, though our circumstances on the surface level look a lot different than the first century audience, let's let's just all be clear, we are all still broken as people without God.

And so we find as as we as we hear him speaking to his disciples who were fishermen and tradesmen, they had nowhere else to go.

As he speaks to these crowds and their and these mothers and these fathers and these children, and and as they're coming to him, they're coming as people hungering for a new way forward and wondering if there is good news for them as well.

And I think in this room here today, I think we're all asking the same questions.

God, what is the good news that you have for us here today?

It's something individually that we live into, and it's something as a community that we live into.

Are you guys with me this morning?

So he's speaking to crowds and his disciples, individual and large.

But another really interesting thing that as we go through the study together, I want to invite you to pay attention to is the teaching of Jesus is uh incredibly steeped in the prophet Isaiah.

He quotes Isaiah very frequently more than any other parts of the scripture.

Likely he had the entire book of Isaiah memorized just just because that's how that's how he trained and that's how he grew up.

They memorized scriptures.

And so when he would start pulling out scriptures, he'd often reference Isaiah.

Um, Jesus quotes from 17 different passages of Isaiah over his teaching.

And it's because Isaiah was the prophet, he was called the good news prophet.

He was the one that hundreds of years beforehand was casting a vision of a new day that was coming, a new kind of kingdom, a new kind of reality.

And so as Jesus would start quoting Isaiah, he both he both was saying, Israel's new design.

Is here and I'm the one that's going to do it.

It's going to be fulfilled through my life and my work.

I am the fulfillment of what Isaiah is doing.

And so it's really important that as we're going through Sermon on the Mount, that you can you can contrast that even with the prophet Isaiah.

And you might just kind of go back and forth because it's it's striking.

It was important to Jesus, and uh and it's how we enter into these teachings uh um with with more depth and more significance, okay?

Last thing here, last thing here is this in the Sermon on the Mount, if if it had one title, if you could give one title rather than Sermon on the Mount, all right.

What if you had to title it, scholars would say the best title for the Sermon on the Mount is the good news of the kingdom of heaven.

The good news of the kingdom of heaven.

And it's very important as we get into this that we know that Jesus' central message was not personal happiness and fulfillment, though living into God's kingdom often leads to those.

It's not the sermon is not about having the moral high ground and doing more good things than bad things in your life, though that's not that's not a bad thing to do.

Like, yeah, we should all be doing more good things than bad things, right?

That wasn't the central message of the kingdom of God.

And even though he was producing morality, the kingdom produces morality and virtue.

We're not doing it for this hierarchical, better than self-righteous ordering of the people.

Because here's the deal: we don't fit the kingdom of God into our lives.

We enter our lives into the kingdom of God.

We come into it.

It doesn't fit into ours.

And so just before the Sermon on the Mount, we see this.

We see that as Jesus is starting his ministry, he's going along the countryside and and and he's bringing good news to those who need it, specifically people who needed healing in their bodies, people who were ravaged, people who were demon-possessed.

And we see him proclaiming and demonstrating good news along the countryside by healing the sick, by delivering people, by meeting them in the everyday stuff of their life.

And he knew what they were going through.

And so good news for him had to be demonstrated in very real ways.

And so this is a continuation of that.

Matthew 4, this is about a chapter before he gets into the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 4, 17 says that from the time Jesus began to preach, or from that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

So Jesus, if he had one thing that he was trying to do with both his his deeds and his words, it was helping people to repent, to wake up to the reality that there is a new kingdom on the scene.

If you would like to, if you'd like to enter into it, there's a new kingdom available to you.

Now, repent, what does that mean?

Many of you guys know repent is it's kind of an intense word.

Um and it brings to mind a lot of people like on street corners, right, with bullhorns that are yelling at people.

Uh repent for you know before the end of the world, that whole thing.

The actual word repent really means more like change or turn around.

And in essence, Jesus was he his main message was turn around for the kingdom of the skies is here.

The kingdom of the skies.

Turn around, turn your lives around, turn towards God, for the kingdom of skies, the skies is here.

The kingdom of heaven and kingdom of God are two phrases that you'll see a lot in the gospels, and they virtually mean the same thing: kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God.

It's just it meant something Matthew was writing to a Jewish audience, and the others weren't as much.

So when Matthew says kingdom of heaven, it means the same as the kingdom of God.

And so this sermon was this longer invitation to a new reality, an alternate kingdom, a parallel universe, a completely different storyline than the one they had been living, all right?

And this is so important that we get.

And then there's other times that he would say, the kingdom of God is now, but not yet.

Well, which is it?

Is it here or is it not yet?

And sometimes he'd say the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.

And other times you'd say that you know, the kingdom of God is like this and like that.

And he was trying to use as much language as he could to explain what the kingdom of God was.

And even his disciples didn't quite get it because one of their last questions to him was, Hey Jesus, is this the time you're gonna restore the kingdom to Israel?

And Jesus said to them, He said, No, it's like it, it's actually it's uh no one knows the day or the time that's fixed by the Father who is in heaven.

Right?

And so even Jesus says, like, listen, it's not as much about timing as it as it much as much as it is about entering into it here and now with the details of your life, with your everyday life before God.

The kingdom of God is something is not something that we build, just and this is important because we use this language.

Sometimes we talk about building the kingdom of God or expanding the kingdom of God.

We don't actually build it, we wake up to it.

So we don't, we're not, we're not like colonialists, we're not building the kingdom of God in different places.

I'm gonna go do this and build the kingdom of God.

It's not that the kingdom of God doesn't expand, it's that the way the kingdom of God works is that as we enter into life and the kingdom, it expands inside of us, and then it's something that we can participate in and invite others to participate in with us.

But but make no mistake that we don't have power to build the kingdom of God any more than we have power to build the church.

That's all stuff that Jesus is doing.

Our job is to wake up to it, to become aware of it, and to every day take a step in, say, God, I am coming in to your reality today.

Would you get my attention?

Would you wake me up from the inside to live in your reality and not just my reality today?

And this is why it's so exciting because this is available to all of us.

It's available to you and to you, it's available to you.

And there's always more of the kingdom.

And this is why it was such good news, because it was completely free.

It'll cost you everything, but it's completely free.

It'll cost you your very life because you have to surrender to it.

But once you come in, the reality of the kingdom of God is available to every single one of us.

And what does that mean?

It means for the poor, for the marginalized, for the outcast, for the broken, for those who are mourning, for those who feel like they're oppressed, for those who feel stuck in a vicious cycle and they feel like they can't get out of it.

The kingdom of God is the promise of his presence, the light of his presence.

The kingdom of God is deliverance.

It's the message that salvation is here and now.

It's it's righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

It's healing both internally and even externally.

It's return from exile for any of us who don't feel like we're not home and we don't even know what home is.

It's a it's a homecoming to the heart of God.

It's it's a way to live in right relationship with God, right relationship with man.

It's it's the answer.

The kingdom of God is how we recycle the anger and the violence and the hatred that is all around us, and we don't retaliate and respond and react to it, but we allow the kingdom of God to recycle it back into blessing and goodness and joy and life and peace.

And that's why it's so revolutionary for those of us who are willing to step in every single day.

Through the kingdom of God, through or through Jesus, the kingdom of God has broken in.

And it's the message of God's grace and favor that has arrived in His Holy Spirit.

And the good news is this we get to be a part of what God is doing here and now.

And I want to be clear on this point, too, though, to not be misled by the word kingdom.

That's a harder one for us to get because we don't know what it means to live in a kingdom.

We hate kingdoms in America.

We revolted against a kingdom, right?

But in the kingdom of God, it's not a kingdom of dominance and coercive control.

It is, but it is a kingdom of God's reign, his presence, his coming.

That he is the king of his kingdom.

And the invitation is to let him be our master, our guide, our Lord, right?

It didn't mean that he was inviting all those who would be a part of his kingdom to rule over other nations.

It means that as we participate in with him, that we would rule with him through sacrificial love and service, and that his kingdom would not be marked by domination, but by servanthood.

So, a few questions though, we need to ask as we make this journey together, okay?

What does the kingdom of God actually look like?

What does it mean to live into the kingdom of God?

How do we know it when we see it?

How do our lives fit into it?

And here's the question, here's the big question for today.

Do we believe that the kingdom of God is still good news?

Do we believe that?

Do we believe that the kingdom of God is still powerful?

Okay?

This is the question.

Because we're living in a time where even a lot of Christians, followers of Jesus, are not so sure that the kingdom of God is, quote, getting it done.

Okay.

And so sometimes people read the Sermon on the Mount and they say, This is a great ideal, like pie in the sky, but it feels unrealistic.

It feels like if I were to live into this, actually forgive my enemies?

Actually pray for those persecuting, actually turn the other cheek.

If I actually lived into this, it'd be like letting my enemy off the hook.

They'd be getting away with stuff.

Is this actually realistic or is this just to warm our hearts?

Right?

Is this supposed to be an inspirational pick-me-up or is this an actual vision?

Did Jesus actually expect this of his followers?

And again, some of us, we have to be very honest as we go through this.

Some of us are like, man, I like the Sermon on the Mount, but it feels too weak for me.

In fact, there's a the son of a famous politician said this at the Sermon on the Mount when referring to the opposite political party.

He said this.

He said, We've been playing T-ball for half a century while they're playing hardball and cheating, right?

We've turned the other cheek, and I understand that sort of the biblical reference.

I understand the mentality, but it's gotten us nothing.

You guys hear me?

So people can read the Sermon on the Mount and say, okay, that's cute, but that's not powerful enough.

And I want to what I want to invite us here today, as we are considering the kingdom of God, as we're considering where we land with the power of the cross.

The scripture says the power of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God.

There's something about the power of living into self-sacrificial love, a love that prefers others more than ourselves, a love that actually extends, a love that forgives enemies, a love that doesn't retaliate violence for violence, but somehow extends blessing.

There's something about the power of the cross that I believe we have an invitation to be reacquainted with.

Do we actually believe that the way of the cross is the power of God?

And in a time that we're living in, in 2024, guys, I'm just saying in 2024, we have to grapple with this, we have to pray into it, we have to steep ourselves in this because we can get influenced by so many other ways and kingdoms of thought.

But Jesus is saying, listen, are you going to be allegiant to these other kingdoms or are you allegiant to my kingdom, the kingdom of God?

And we pray for our nation, we pray, we we vote, we have participation in every level of our society, and we should.

We should be salt and light.

We'll talk about that.

We are ingrained and embedded in our society.

But make no mistake, we are first citizens of the kingdom of God that has its own king.

And that's who we're gonna be together as a church, and that's what we're living into, and that's what we're gonna continue to call each other up into because his kingdom has no end.

The government is on his shoulders and his kingdom has no end.

He is a good king, he's loving, and he is after your freedom, he's after your healing, and he's after the flourishing of the entire world.

The question I believe for us today is do we still believe the kingdom of God is the power of God to live before him for the flourishing of our whole world?

All right.

So today, maybe you feel I just want to leave a couple things here.

Maybe you struggle in real and very real circumstances in your life.

Maybe you've tried to pray for your enemies, but it's backfired on you.

Maybe you tried to forgive somebody who's hurt you, but you feel like again, it it just let them off the hook.

They just kept doing what they were doing and they didn't learn a lesson.

And you're like, how is that powerful?

Maybe you've tried to conduct a business in a way that wasn't focused on greed and profit.

It was as you try to conduct your business in a way that focused on people and not prophets, and somehow it still did not turn out the way that you thought it.

And you're wondering, is that the way I want to continue to go?

Maybe you tried to feel generous and and and at the end of the day you felt like it left you with nothing.

And listen, all of us, we face these questions as we live into the way of Jesus, the way of the kingdom.

But we get to bring those back to him and say, God, would you show me, would you rearrange my heart and show me what you're doing in my life and give me the strength to continue to go?

Because his is the way, his power and his glory is made manifest through his kingdom.

So here's a couple invitations this morning.

First of all, this is all just a setup, all right.

So a little teachy today, I get it.

We're gonna be getting into some more stuff over the next several weeks, all right, and we're gonna get into the weeds.

It's gonna be awesome, it's gonna be so good.

I cannot wait to get into the Sermon on the Mount with you guys.

And I just want to encourage you in your Monday through Friday to the tomorrow morning to open it up.

Read Matthew chapter five through seven.

I want you to read it ten times a day.

No, I'm just joking.

No, it only takes 20 minutes, all right?

Matthew chapter 5 through 7.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

You can read it through one sitting, all right?

And just start to journal where is this challenging to me?

Where do I nod my head?

Yes, I'm supposed to agree with this, but this is really hard for me to get.

Pay attention to those places that the Holy Spirit is surfacing in your life, okay?

That's your only assignment today.

That's your only assignment today.

It's kind of an easy day here, all right?

We're just asking a question.

God, is this still good for us today?

Is your power still in your kingdom?

And would you show me, would you show me what you want me to take away from this journey?

Okay?

Is that fair?

Okay.

Let's stand together.

I want to pray for you.

Just across the room, put your hand on your heart again.

Jesus, I thank you that you did not leave us guessing.

You did not leave us without a vision, God.

That Jesus, your way, you as a person, you showed us what life in the kingdom looks like.

I pray for my friends here today.

As we start this journey, Lord God, that you would preserve our hearts, you preserve our souls before you.

I thank you, Father, for an explosion, just an eruption of uh and revelation of your kingdom in new ways.

I thank you, Holy Spirit, for your empowerment, God, that as we as we go through the scriptures together, this is not about good things to start doing in our own strength.

This is about the spirit-empowered life, the life that you've given to us made possible only through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

So I bless my friends, I bless me, I bless all of us, Lord Jesus, to become the kind of people who look just like you, God.

Would you make us into your image?

And Father, help us to encourage each other, hold each other up, Lord Jesus, as we continue to be shaped into your image and your likeness, God.

We love you today.

We bless your name, Jesus.

We love you.

And it's in Jesus' name we pray.

Everybody said?

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

All right.

So this morning, if you're new with us, we'd love to meet you in the back.

You're going to see a connect with us sign.

And uh, and we'd love to meet you right back there.

Uh, for others, if you have kids, go run and get them from the kids uh kids' ministry, and then you can bring them back up there.

I bless you to go in the peace and the strength of the kingdom of God.

I love you guys.