It is good to be back with you
again after two weeks absence.
I'm sorry I have not been able to
be present when some of you have been
passing through times of sickness and sorrow, but
we have been remembering you and are assured
that the grace promised by our Lord Jesus
Christ will have been sufficient even in some
very dark moments in the lives of some
of our of our members.
We rejoice that some of you are out
of hospital.
You were in hospital when I succumbed to
the weakness of the body, and it's good
to see some of you here this morning.
We trust that the hand of the Lord
is very really upon you.
Now, I have felt constrained for some time
to attempt to expound the Sermon on the
Mount.
I have for some reason or other been
inhibited, perhaps really, because some years ago I
did take a series on the Beatitudes.
And you know we preachers are a very
proud lot of people, and there are folk
in this congregation that seem to forget from,
who seem to remember things that were said
10 years ago, and they they tell you
about it.
Well, I don't know whether it was that
or not, but at any rate I felt
somewhat constricted.
A number of things have happened recently which
have brought me to the point where I
feel we simply must do this.
I mentioned one thing only.
Quite a number of younger people and new
Christians have asked some such question as this.
Is there no, is there nothing that we
have in Scripture that kind of summarizes the
Christian faith?
Of course we know the whole of the
Word of God, the whole of the Bible
is necessary.
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God
and is profitable, so we need the whole
of Scripture, but is there no summary form?
Is there nothing that gives us the quintessence
of the Christian faith in a simpler form?
And it just dawned on me that that
is precisely what we have in the Sermon
on the Mount.
We have the Christian faith boiled down by
our Lord to its essential quintessence.
Every word is meaningful, every statement could be
actually a chapter, or if you like a
book or a sermon.
And more, it is possible for a young
Christian who is really concerned to grow in
grace and in the knowledge of our Lord,
it is possible to memorize these chapters in
Matthew's Gospel.
There are only three chapters you know, five,
six and seven, and there is no reason
on earth why every member of Knox Church
shouldn't be able to memorize this great Sermon
on the Mount.
And if we do, I can assure you,
we shall find as we go out into
the world and face the problems and moral,
ethical issues and other issues that face us
out there, this will be to us a
kind of well within whence we are supplied
with ammunition.
Now that's a mixture of metaphors, but whence
we are supplied, may be supplied, by the
necessary means to deal with the questions that
are sometimes very challenging.
Now for that reason, therefore, I'm going to
begin a new series this morning on this
great Sermon on the Hillside, or the Sermon
on the Mountainside, or the Sermon on the
Mount, I don't care how you choose to
refer to it, the one translation is as
good as the other.
This morning I'm going to confine myself to
an introduction, but I trust it will not
be without a word of God.
But very often it is necessary for us
to see the whole and to have some
bird's eye view of the whole before we
can appreciate the part.
And I think that may very well be
true of this remarkable piece of inspired literature,
the Sermon on the Mount.
Now unfortunately, of course, not everyone has this
high and elevated view of the Sermon on
the Mount, and there are some who have
used it for ends that I certainly do
not have in view.
You will remember, for example, following the first,
well, you will have read, some of you
will not remember, but you will have read
how following the First World War, there were
many who made the Sermon on the Mount
the basis of what used to be called
the social gospel.
To them the entire Christian message was summed
up in these terms.
The gospel was a social gospel.
It had very little to do, very little
to say about our relationship with God.
What really mattered was, how do you behave
towards society?
And they looked to the Sermon on the
Mount as if it were the last word
on that, and they saw nothing else in
the Sermon.
They very strangely, myopically, glossed over the Beatitudes
which come at the beginning of the Sermon,
and they chose out such passages as tell
us that we should turn the other cheek
and love our enemies and one thing and
another, and they chose these particular excerpts and
built their case upon that.
Well, now the Sermon on the Mount is
infinitely more than that.
Then there have been others who have only
seen in the Sermon on the Mount something
that in the New Testament matches the giving
of the law in the Old Testament through
Moses.
When Moses had brought out the children of
Israel from Egypt, by the grace and power
of God, and they'd come through the Red
Sea and come into the wilderness, you remember
on Mount Sinai, God gave his law to
his redeemed people.
And there are those who think of the
Sermon on the Mount in purely such terms.
They think of it as a legal document.
They see no gospel in it.
There is no good news in it at
all.
It's just a legal document.
Indeed, some of them go much further, and
they see analogies which may or may not
be meant.
In the baptism of the Lord Jesus, they
see a picture of Israel crossing through.
In the baptism of Jesus in Jordan, they
see a reference back to the crossing of
the Red Sea by Israel.
In Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, they see
something that corresponds to the children of Israel
in the desert.
And then Jesus goes up to the mountain,
the New Testament mountain, and he does exactly
what Moses did.
So they say.
Well now, I believe there is much more
than that in the Sermon on the Mount.
It does declare what God's will is concerning
various aspects of Christian behavior.
And it does so with equal authority to
that which underlies the Decalogue, the commandments, the
Ten Commandments, and the other commandments of the
Old Testament.
But it is infinitely more than that.
There is grace in the Sermon on the
Mount.
The way of salvation is declared in the
Sermon on the Mount.
And I challenge any man or woman in
all honesty to come with us and look
eyeball to eyeball at the teacher teaching us
these beatitudes, and not thereby sense the dragnet
of the Gospel winning you, wooing you, carrying
you in the way of eternal life.
But then there are others.
I must refer to these two.
There have been certain good Christian people.
We refer to them as dispensationalists.
Now I know there may be one or
two of them here.
There are dispensationalists and dispensationalists.
They're not all to be tarred with the
same brush.
Those who read Scofield's reference Bible and not
all of them do.
Now the dispensationalists don't believe that the Sermon
on the Mount has got anything to say
to the Church.
The pure dispensationalist, or should I say the
extreme dispensationalist.
They believe, you see, that when Jesus came
into this world he came to set up
a kingdom.
And in that they're right.
But he was disappointed.
And God's will was so completely frustrated he
could not set up his kingdom.
So then, as it were, as a second
thought, God is with his back against the
wall.
He's cornered.
He can't do what he wants to do.
Jesus is disappointed.
What will he do?
Well, he found a church.
And the church is an ecclesia, a calling
out of people from among the multitudes who
reject him.
And so they build the church.
And the church comes into existence.
Now, say our strong dispensationalists, the Sermon on
the Mount only speaks to those who are
in the kingdom.
And not until the kingdom has come in
its glory will the Sermon on the Mount
have anything to do with people.
You can put it all on one side.
It's got nothing to say to you until
the kingdom has come on earth as it
is in heaven.
Now, respectfully and humbly, I trust, I violently
disagree with that.
I want to give you two reasons.
And I believe that the two are adequate.
I hope you will.
The first reason is this, that there are
so many things said in the Sermon on
the Mount that cannot apply when God's kingdom
has come on earth in all its consummated
glory.
For example, Jesus tells us in the Sermon
on the Mount to love our enemies.
There will be no enemies in the millennium.
Satan will be bound and sin will be
banished.
There will be no enemies.
Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the
Mount, if somebody takes away your outer cloak,
give to him the outer one also.
There will be no such need when the
kingdom has come in all its glory.
These and a number of other things in
the Sermon on the Mount cannot apply to
the day, to the time, to the era,
when the kingdom of God is consummated on
the new earth in which righteousness, as Peter
says, makes its home.
The other thing is this, and this to
me clinches it.
If there were need for a clincher after
our first point, all the teaching of the
Sermon on the Mount, maybe you can find
one little point.
But let me say, the vast body of
the teaching found in the Sermon on the
Mount is also found in the epistles.
And in the epistles it is unequivocally addressed
to the church, not to a kingdom that
is yet to be, but to the church
that existed then and was going to continue
to exist throughout this church age until Jesus
Christ comes again.
Now, if the same truths in the codified
or brought together in the Sermon on the
Mount, they do not apply to the church,
but only to the kingdom.
I'm sorry, I don't often have to deal
with negatives, or I don't often deal with
negatives like that, but I think it is
necessary.
But I want to add this in order
to be fair.
In the new version of the Schofield Bible,
which has come out, in the foreword there
is a change of stance.
And what was denied in the older version
is now somewhat conceded in the new.
In the old it said, the Sermon on
the Mount in its primary application is neither
the privilege nor the duty of the church.
It's got nothing to do with the church.
I have not the statement before me that
we find in the new version of the
Schofield Bible, but it withdraws that, at least
in measure.
Now someone will ask us, or would ask
me, all right, you're coming to the Sermon
on the Mount, which version are you going
to take?
Because we find such a difference between the
version that we have in Matthew and the
version that we have in Luke, for example.
We find that the Lord Jesus is alleged
to have said something in Matthew, and he
says something quite different in Luke.
Here's an illustration.
In Matthew, our Lord Jesus Christ says, blessed
are the poor in spirit.
In Luke, says the cunning critic, Jesus said,
blessed are you poor, not poor in spirit,
poor, you poor.
I'm not going to deal with that this
morning.
We'll come to that again.
But I believe that the answer is very,
very clear, and we don't have to go
far for it to find the explanation of
it.
But there are those who suggest that there
are differences here.
Now, I come to the Sermon on the
Mount as it is recorded by for this
reason.
I believe that our Lord Jesus repeated many,
many things at different times and in different
places.
What preacher did you ever hear of who
only preached once on a given theme?
What prophet in the Old Testament do you
know of who only delivered his message once,
in one place, in one way?
As a matter of fact, of all peoples,
the Hebrews, the Jews, believed in the importance
of repetition.
And those of you who have studied Hebrew
poetry will know that they have a, they
have a genre there, they have a classification,
a kind of poetry which is referred to
as parallelism.
And there are many kinds of parallelism, but
the point of it is this.
Parallelism, simplest, the simplest form of parallelism, is
nothing but repetition.
It is saying something in one way and
in the next line saying the same thing
in different words.
For example, just this is purely illustrative, maybe
not the best one.
I have before me Psalm 38 and verse
1, O Lord do not rebuke me in
your anger.
And the next line says, O discipline me
in your sole displeasure.
Now that's, that's, we would say, tautology, that's
repetition.
But you see, this was the genius of
the Jewish method.
There were no printing presses, there were no
books, everything had to be written by hand,
and so the Jews were taught to memorize.
In order to memorize, things were repeated.
And you find that coming into the New
Testament, both Paul and Peter stress this.
I find a number of places where both
Paul and Peter stress the importance of repetition.
Paul, for example, in Philippians chapter 3 and
verse 1, he says, it's no trouble for
me to write the same things to you
again.
And what's more, he says, and it is
a safeguard for you.
Peter goes further.
In 2 Peter 1, beginning with verse 12,
he says, so I will remind you of
these things, even though you know them and
are firmly established in the truth you now
have.
I think it is right to refresh your
memory as long as I live in the
tent of this body, because I know that
I will soon put it aside, as our
Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me,
and I will make every effort to see
that after my departure, that is after my
death, you will always be able to remember
these things.
Have you got it?
The principle of repetition is in written into
the scriptures, and our Lord Jesus is no
exception.
Sometimes he said something in a given context,
he said it again in another context, and
there were times when he said it here,
addressing a certain people in a certain context,
and he said it in a slightly different
way to another people in an entirely different
context.
The glory of the Sermon on the Mount,
according to Matthew, is this.
It seems that by the inspiration of the
Spirit, Matthew has brought together the whole sermon
as it was once delivered in one sitting.
Remember the teacher sat as he taught in
New Testament times as in the Old Testament,
and this sermon was given in one sitting,
and it starts, and you can see how
it works out according to plan, you can
see the thinking of our Lord.
It is a most remarkable document, even as
a piece of literature, and because I believe
it has this quality of wholeness about it,
I commend it to every Christian man and
woman here this morning, and very especially to
those of you who are new in the
faith.
Now, a few words further of introduction.
Two things I want to say, two main
things.
One, I want to say a word about
the context in which the sermon is placed
in Matthew.
Now, this is important, because there are two
things in the context that we really need
to grasp if we are to get the
most out of this sermon.
The first is this.
The credentials of the teacher have been made
very clear in the context.
You see, I want us to see behind
the teaching the teacher.
I want us to see that the one
who is teaching here is none other than
the incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of
God.
And if there is one thing that has
taken place in the context here in Matthew,
it is this.
The personality and the authority of the teacher
has been made clear.
Now, let me expound this as simply as
I can and as quickly.
If you have your New Testaments with you,
I want you to notice, I want to
take you back to the genealogy in chapter
one.
And I want to point two things from
that genealogy.
Most of you skipped this, I'm sure.
Well, now there are lots of things to
be learned from the genealogy.
The first thing that is stressed there concerning
Jesus is that according to the flesh he
was of the seed of Abraham.
Of the seed of Abraham.
The first point of the genealogical table begins
with Abraham.
Verse two.
And the table ends with Jesus who is
called Christ in verse 16.
The point to note is that Jesus is
racially designated as the seed of Abraham.
Second thing.
He who by implication, if not in so
many words, presents himself as king in this
sermon.
He presents himself as king announcing the manifesto
of his reign or of his kingdom.
He is also the seed of David.
According to the genealogy.
Now that too is important.
Because you see, Jesus is coming as king.
Abraham was not a king.
How can Jesus claim kingship?
Well, he claims kingship on one basis.
In that he was the seed of David.
His kingship is based on other factors also.
But he is in the royal line.
Racially he was from the seed of Abraham.
Royally he was the seed of David.
But the context here goes well beyond that.
Racially a seed of Abraham.
Royally that of David.
Jesus' pedigree as it is outlined here goes
beyond that.
Now look at verse 20 in chapter one.
Here we read that he was conceived of
the Holy Spirit.
Now you say, that's something.
That's something bigger.
That's something infinite.
Yes, it is indeed something infinite.
It is something exceptional.
It is something extraordinary.
It is something supernatural.
Here we've moved into a new territory altogether.
The teacher was not only a seed of
Abraham, he was that.
He was not only a seed of David,
he was that.
But he was the seed of God.
There's something about this person who teaches this
sermon that you cannot say about anybody else.
He was conceived in the virgin's womb by
none other than the third person of the
Trinity.
He was unique in his conception.
But you know it doesn't even stop there.
Because he was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
verse 20 in chapter one, then we read
he shall be called Emmanuel.
Well why called Emmanuel?
Well just read on.
Verses 22 and 23.
He shall be called Emmanuel because Emmanuel means
God with us.
Who then is the teacher of this sermon?
Well he's the seed of Abraham.
He's the seed of David.
But he's more than that.
He's the seed of God.
He's God incarnate.
He's the great Emmanuel that was to come
according to Isaiah 7 14.
Born of a virgin in the fullness of
the time.
You know that is not the end.
Go down to verse 6 of chapter 2
and you will read in quoting from Micah's
prophet, we have these words.
You Bethlehem in the land of Judah are
by no means least among the rulers of
Judah.
For out of you will come, now notice,
a ruler who will be the shepherd of
my people Israel.
Who have we here?
The seed of Abraham, the seed of David,
Emmanuel, God with us.
The promised ruler of his people Israel.
Neither is that everything.
In chapter 3 and verse 3, John the
Baptist tells us that he had been sent
to prepare the way of the Lord.
And in another place somebody asks John the
Baptist, are you the one that was to
come or look we for another?
Who are you and who is this person?
Oh says John, I am only the voice
of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the
way of the Lord.
That's my task.
But you notice the implication of it.
John was preparing the way for who?
For the Lord Jehovah.
Now this is something which is very significant
and very important for us if we are
coming in the right spirit to this sermon
on the mount.
You're not coming to listen to me.
If you do, God will judge you for
it or any other preacher.
You and I need to see beyond every
man in every pulpit here.
We need to see none other than the
Christ, the seed of Abraham, the seed of
David, the great Emmanuel come down among men,
the shepherd and ruler of Israel, the Lord.
And therefore as we listen we shall worship.
So as far as the context is concerned
then, the credentials of the teacher have been
made clear.
The next thing is this, the subject of
his teaching in the context has also been
unequivocally declared.
You might have gathered from what has been
said, but you know it already I'm sure
from the context.
Jesus began his preaching when John the Baptist
had been put in prison.
What was the subject of Jesus' preaching as
he began?
Exactly the same as that of John the
Baptist.
Well what was John the Baptist's subject?
The kingdom of heaven has come near.
What's the kingdom of heaven?
Now this is over simplification and you may
very well challenge me on the adequacy of
what I'm going to say, but you can't
say everything in one sermon.
Now what is the kingdom of heaven?
It is this, first of all it puts
the emphasis upon the fact that God is
King.
That's why we chose that first hymn this
morning.
Rejoice the Lord is King, the kingship of
God.
Now this is a truth in the Old
Testament as much as in the New.
The whole of the Bible thunders at us,
God is King.
Psalm 103 clinches it and I don't go
beyond that this morning, I have no time.
Psalm 103 says the Lord has established his
throne in the heaven.
Notice this, his kingdom rules over all and
the implication is over all other kingdoms.
Where is your kingdom?
What is your kingdom?
A Canadian kingdom?
An American kingdom?
A Russian kingdom?
A Persian kingdom?
What are they?
Where are they?
My friend, over all the kingdoms of the
earth God rules, God reigns from beginning to
end.
And men needed to be reminded of this
because God had allowed sin and Satan to
intrude into his universe.
And men asked the question, has God lost
the reins from his hands?
Has something taken him unawares?
Has he made a mistake?
Has he met his Waterloo?
No, no.
The whole of the Old Testament thunders at
us, the Lord is King.
Nevertheless there are many things under God's rule
permitted by him which are contrary to his
ultimate purposes, including sin, at large in society,
in your heart and mine.
Second thing is this, there is a day
coming when God will so rule that he
will get rid from the universe and from
every human life, every vestige of sin and
impurity and unrighteousness and whatever displeases his rule.
This is the kingdom of God that we
await in the future, this is its consummation.
When God will rid this entire universe of
every conceivable thing that offends him, every man,
every woman, every kingdom, every ruler, every subject,
and in your heart and mine, my friend,
if God is your King and as sure
as he is, he will get rid out
of your heart every sin, every evil, every
perversity, every twist, every evil thought and desire.
And he's pledged to do that.
You've got to bargain with that if you're
going God's way, because he's pledged to get
rid of sin out of the universe.
And when at last we come to the
new heavens and the new earth, naught will
enter the defiles.
Imagine that.
Not a thing that defiles.
There are some people and they they're just
so smutty, they can't speak without bringing some
smut into somebody else's mind and thought and
imagination.
Naught that defiles ever enters into the new
Jerusalem.
The wolf will lie down with a lamb.
The leopard will lie down with a goat.
The calf and the lion and the yearling
together, and a little child will lead them.
And that passage ends in Isaiah chapter 11
by saying this, they will neither harm nor
destroy on all my holy mountain, for the
earth will be full of the knowledge of
the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
But now, this is the point here in
this context.
When John preached, the kingdom of heaven is
near, and lost his head because of it.
And when Jesus took up the same theme
and began to preach, the kingdom of heaven
is arrived and has come near to you.
They were both saying this, that God has
already taken the first step towards ridding the
universe of those things that are inconsistent with
his nature and his purpose and his character.
God has come into time to get rid
of these things.
Now he may take a long time.
Not that he needs take a long time,
but he may do it.
But he's moved in.
And this is what the ministry of our
Lord Jesus Christ was proving.
In this particular context, we read, and Lowe
read it for us this morning, we read
Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in their synagogues,
preaching the good news of the kingdom, and
healing every disease and sickness among the people.
He has come in, you see, to show
that he has power to deal with the
effects of sin, with the symptoms of sin,
with the consequences of sin in human life.
But he has come to do infinitely more
than that.
On the way to Calvary, he dealed with
the symptoms of sin and disease and various
other ways.
But on the cross, and it was to
the cross that he was going, he was
going to deal not with the symptoms, but
with sin itself, as a damning thing that
takes men to hell and separates them from
God forever.
Our Lord says the kingdom of heaven, the
power of God, the rule of God has
broken into time.
We've started to deal with things.
And John in his gospel tells us that
every miracle he wrought was a sign of
that.
Bear with me and I'm through.
You must have a little patience with me
this morning.
I've been silent for two weeks, but I'm
not going to be long.
But there's something else to say, and I
would like you to take this with you
for an understanding and an appreciation of this
sermon.
The content of the sermon in embryo.
It can be divided into four points, I
believe, or four sections.
And I want to say them because it
is very important to see the drift, to
see the way our Lord moves.
I think as important as the subject he
deals with is the way he deals with
it.
Now, how does he deal with it?
Well, first of all, we have the character
that goes to the making of the king's
subject.
He starts in the Beatitudes verses three to
ten.
He starts by delineating the kind of character
that will characterize his subjects, the subjects of
his kingdom and of his rule.
And you see, this is starting at the
beginning, of course.
There are some people who've believed.
I was talking about the social gospel a
little earlier on.
They've thought and they believe quite sincerely, but
they believe falsely.
And all you have to do is to
tell people what's right, and people will do
it.
Educate people.
Now, education is a value.
There's no question about that.
And the man in the pulpit today is
not arguing against the need for further education
and enlightenment, not on your life.
But I have learned, my friends, it's not
enough to tell people what's right.
Haven't you?
There is something deep in our nature that
goes against what we know to be right.
And the things I know and I want
to do, sometimes I don't do them.
And the things I know I shouldn't do,
these are the very things I delight in.
Isn't that true of you?
Jesus starts at the beginning and he lays
the foundation of his sermon.
And the foundation is this.
Look at these Beatitudes.
This is the kind of person you've got
to be.
You need these Beatitudes and their characteristics in
your life.
Not one of them, not two of them,
not three of them, but all of them.
And all of them increasingly as you grow
in grace and in the knowledge of your
Lord Jesus Christ.
You need to be poor in spirit.
Now, not a man without spirit or a
woman without any spirit, you know, dead, languid,
not caring for everything.
Not that, but poor in spirit, humbled.
There's no way into the kingdom until you
and I come down from our perch of
self, well, pride, and come down and see
ourselves for what we are in the sight
of God.
We've got to start there.
And we must learn to mourn for our
sins.
And we must learn how to be meek,
and how to hunger and thirst after righteousness,
and how to be merciful toward others, how
to be pure in our heart, how to
be peacemakers, even though we are persecuted in
so doing.
Now, the only point I want to stress
this morning is this.
That's where Jesus starts, and it's got to
stop there.
You can't break into the Sermon on the
Mountain and turn and love your enemies, unless
you come this way.
Unless you've been humbled, and unless you've been
remade by the hand of God himself in
such a manner that you're a man with
a character like this.
It is only insofar as you and I
have this kind of character that we can
turn the other cheek.
The natural thing is to fight back.
But God can make us anew.
He can make us love our enemies, and
pray for those who despitefully use us, and
so forth.
The second thing is this.
The charge that expresses the ministry of the
king's subjects.
Character is important in itself, but it is
to be employed, to be used by God
in a fallen world for a certain purpose.
And he tells his disciples, you are the
salt of the earth.
You who have a character like that which
is delineated in the Beatitudes, you are the
light of the world.
As the salt of society, you have the
capacity to stop the rot of sin from
spreading.
In a home, in an office, in a
school, in a college, anywhere, you have the
capacity to be the salt that stops the
rot.
More than that, you have the capacity, you
have the light to bring into the darkness
that can start a new day in the
darkest place on earth.
Jesus went into Galilee of the nations, the
darkest place of his day, and the light
of the world shone into the gloom, and
men came into the light.
And he tells his people exactly the same.
You are the light of the world in
all its darkness.
Now you see the point?
Character.
And now you have something for us to
do as men and women of this kind
of character.
It doesn't end there.
Now from chapter 5 verse 17 to chapter
7 and verse 14, we have the conduct
that should mark out the king's subjects.
Here we have our great ethical injunctions.
Some of them Godward, some of them manward.
These should be the characteristics of the king's
subjects.
And lastly, the criteria which goes to the
ultimate manifestation of true and false among those
who profess to be subjects of the king.
Matthew 7 verses 15 to 27.
There will be a certain test at the
last, says Jesus, among those who profess to
be my subjects.
There will be prophets who will come to
you, he says, and I want to warn
you beforehand they will be coming like wolves
in sheep's clothing.
They're not what they profess to be.
By their fruits you will know them.
But he says there will be another test,
and he uses another metaphor.
He says, it's just like a man building
a house.
Some people build a house, and they're foolish
enough, he says, really, to build a house
without any foundation at all.
They start building on the sandy soil, and
they build, but a storm is coming by
and by, and the storm is going to
put that house to the test.
And as the rains will come down, he
says, and the floods will come up, the
house will fall, because it was not founded
upon a rock or upon a foundation.
On the contrary, there will be those who
on that day will find that they have
built upon a foundation.
And when the rains come, and the floods
arise, and the winds blow and beat upon
that house, that house will stand because it
has been built upon the rock.
What's the rock?
Paul says to Jesus, here it is, the
rock is to hear these sayings of mine,
and do them.
You got it?
That's the rock.
Many will come to me in the last
day, and they'll say, Lord, Lord, did we
not prophesy in your name?
Didn't we cast out demons in your name?
Didn't we do this and that and the
other in your name, in your name?
And Jesus will say, I don't know who
you are.
I've had no intimate relations with you.
I don't really recognize you as my own.
I don't recognize you as my subjects at
all.
You haven't got the character of the Beatitudes.
You're not humble.
You don't mourn for sin.
You don't hunger and thirst after righteousness.
Your heart is not pure.
I don't know you.
And they will go away into utter perdition.
My friend, there's a great day coming when
you and I will have to go through
the test.
We shall all have to stand before the
judgment seat of Christ.
Those of us who have heard the words
of this Beatitude will be asked not whether
we enjoyed it, or what we thought of
the preacher, or what criticism we had of
the teaching, but whether we obeyed it.
Why is it so important?
Because Emmanuel, the Lord God Almighty, in His
incarnate state, is the teacher of it in
the power of the Holy Spirit.
And that word has been inscribed into Scripture
and is proclaimed unto you.
I ask you this morning, come to terms
with this before we come to the sermon.
Acknowledge the Lord Jesus to be the person
He is according to the Scriptures, and according
to the testimony of the Spirit to Him,
and of His people to Him, and of
the church to Him.
Trust Him as your Savior.
And when you come to this sermon, come
having already decided what He says you will
do.
And I guarantee you this.
I guarantee you this.
Your life will be transformed, whether you're a
sinner or a saint, whether this morning you're
a believer or an unbeliever.
You will know something.
You will grow as you've never grown before,
as you hear the word of God through
the lips of His incarnate Son.
And now from the word inspired and written
and handed down to us for our profit.
However feeble the preacher, it makes very little
difference here.
The word is so clear.
May the Spirit of God grant us, grant
us to learn at His feet, that we
may know life in all its glory and
the blessedness.
I close with this.
The Old Testament ended.
Read the last words of the Old Testament.
Threatening a curse.
That's how the Old Testament ends.
Jesus comes dancing into the New Testament, and
the first word that proceeds out of His
mouth, and He repeats it eight times over
is, Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed.
I don't want you to be cursed.
I want you to be blessed.
I want you to be saved.
I want you to be redeemed.
I want you to be happy.
I care for you.
It's the same God.
But now in grace He has come radically
to deal with the sin that separates us
from Him in time and threatens to separate
us from Him in eternity.
Receive me, says Jesus.
Receive my teaching.
I want you to be happy.
I want you to be blessed.
I want you to be blessed indeed.
So may it be.
What a wonderful thing.
If in every pew we're knocked over these
coming days there will be those who will
leap into blessedness and come to know what
our Lord Jesus is talking about.
I'm excited.
I believe it'll happen.
Will you pray with me?
That there shall be no man or woman
who will come and just listen, but that
we shall see men and women leaping into
life because of the Word and the Spirit
of God.
Let's pray.
Our Heavenly Father, we ask that You will
graciously undertake for us as we come to
study Your Word.
And may this kind of overview that we've
had this morning be such as to give
us the key to an understanding of what
is to come.
Lead us in Your way.
We do need You, our Heavenly Father.
Some of us have not professed to know
You.
Others of us may have professed to know
You, but in our hearts we doubt whether
it's true.
And others of us are in other conditions
of soul and spirit.
We want to be taught.
We need to be taught.
We come to be taught, and we come
to be saved.
Oh, lead us by the hand.
Oh, gracious God, our Father.
We ask it through Christ our Lord.
Amen.