Christ's Teaching for Today | Matthew 5:1-2; 28:18-20
Brian Hedges | October 12, 2025
I want to invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to Matthew 5. You might also put a finger in Matthew 28. We’re going to look at several passages of Scripture this morning.
While you’re turning there, I want to begin with these famous words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great twentieth-century German theologian, from his classic book The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer warned the church against what he called cheap grace with these words. He said,
“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church disciplines, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ living and incarnate.”
I think the church today is infected with cheap grace, and we see that across the spectrum in the Western church, where many profess the name of Jesus Christ and yet give no attention to his teachings.
Last week we began a new series on the Sermon on the Mount, and I opened with that quotation from Dallas Willard, where he talked about the “great omission” in the church, that we have omitted to teach people to obey what Christ taught in his word. We began this new series in Matthew 5-7, where we’re looking at one of the main portions of Christ’s teaching found anywhere in Scripture; in fact, it is the longest sermon of Jesus found in the gospels; it’s the longest complete sermon or discourse found anywhere in the New Testament. We began this last week by showing us that we have to understand these words coming to us from Jesus the king, Jesus the sage or wise teacher, and Jesus the Savior.
Really, last week was something of an introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, to help us just get our footing and get oriented to the teaching. I confess that I feel the need to do something similar again today. Once again I want to give more of a general introduction to the Sermon on the Mount before digging into the specific teachings in the beginning of Matthew 5.
I feel the need to do that for two reasons. One reason is for my sake. I don’t actually just have all of these things learned and tucked away, ready to preach; there’s a great deal of research that goes into a series like this. So I still find myself grappling with understanding the Beatitudes. I feel like I need one more week to be prepared to start in that part of the teaching.
But also, as I have dialogued with others, especially in our staff meeting review, I felt that further clarification would be helpful for you as the church, for us to understand how to read and interpret the Sermon on the Mount, because there have been many different ways people have approached this body of teaching, many different approaches to interpreting this sermon, and many objections to actually taking the Sermon on the Mount as applicable for Christians today.
So today I want to address some of those questions and objections and concerns, and I’m going to break it down by just asking three questions this morning. My three questions are:
1. Why Is This Sermon for Today?
2. Why Is This Sermon for Every Believer?
3. What Does This Sermon Teach and How Is It Consistent with the Gospel of Grace?
As I ask those questions, I’ll raise some of the objections or some of the other perspectives that people have had on the Sermon on the Mount. I hope this will be clarifying to you and that by the end of this message you will be convinced both that this message, this teaching of Jesus, is for us today as believers, and that it’s actually very encouraging and is good news for us.
1. Why Is This Sermon for Today?
So, question number one: Why is this sermon for today? The objections go something like this: Some would say this sermon belongs to the old covenant, not to the new covenant. Jesus was preaching the sermon before his death and his resurrection; he was preaching the sermon to old covenant Jews. He was essentially giving a rearticulation of the law of Moses. “This is all old covenant teaching and it really doesn’t apply to new covenant Christians.”
Or another variety of this objection would be that the sermon belongs to the future kingdom, not to the present church. The older dispensationalists would have said something like this: Jesus preached this to the Jews with the expectation that he would set up his kingdom on earth, but the Jews rejected that kingdom. Jesus ended up being crucified, raised from the dead, and the kingdom of God got delayed to a future millennium. Now we’re in a different dispensation; we’re in the dispensation of the church age, and this teaching of Jesus really doesn’t apply to this age, it only applies to that future millennium.
Now, most dispensational scholars today would not take that view, but that was kind of the older view in the early twentieth century and it still may be current in some of the study Bibles that people have.
So these are the objections—essentially, this sermon was either for the Old Testament people of God or it’s for the future millennial kingdom, but it’s not for us, it’s not for the church age, it’s not for Christians today.
I would respond in a couple of ways.
(1) Number one: the sermon comprises the main body of Christ’s teaching on discipleship, which he commissioned the church to teach to others. Let me remind you now of Matthew 28:18-20. This is a very familiar passage of Scripture to anyone who’s been in church for any length of time. This is the Great Commission. These are the words that conclude the gospel according to Matthew, and note this: these are the words of Jesus to his apostles after his resurrection. Here’s what we read.
“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”
That’s pretty straightforward, pretty clear. Jesus is giving this teaching to his apostles. He is, I think, by extension giving this teaching to the church. And the teaching is to make disciples of all the nations, so it’s clearly not just for Jewish people, it’s for the Gentiles. They are to make disciples of all the Gentiles, panta ta ethne. It’s all the ethnic groups of the world. This is where we get our Great Commission.
Making disciples involves both baptizing them in the threefold name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit; and it involves teaching them to observe all that Jesus commanded. It makes pretty good sense to say that what Jesus commanded is the teaching that is recorded in the gospel according to Matthew. In fact, Matthew’s Gospel contains more of the teaching of Jesus than perhaps any of the other Gospels. Certainly it is arranged around these blocks of teaching, with five distinct sermons or discourses or bodies of teaching built into Matthew’s Gospel. So it seems reasonable to say that this teaching that we are to observe is the teaching that’s commanded in this Gospel.
Notice that this commission is valid for the entire age in which we now live, because Jesus says, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” We are in the final age, to be sure, we are in the age of the Spirit, and Jesus himself is with us through the Spirit. So it makes pretty good sense, I believe, that the Sermon on the Mount includes this teaching, which we are to include in our discipleship of others.
(2) Number two—this is my second response. The teaching of the sermon is repeated in the New Testament letters and was universally embraced by the early church. I mentioned this last week, but now I just want to show you briefly and just give you some examples of how the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is either alluded to or at times almost quoted word for word. It’s not quite word for word, but it’s almost word for word. There are very clear allusions in the New Testament letters to the teaching of Jesus.
I’ll give you some examples from both Paul and John and James. I could also give you Peter, but I’m just going to give you four examples really quickly. So, the Sermon on the Mount repeated in the New Testament letters.
Take Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5 where he equates being angry without a cause with murder in the heart.
“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”
That simple equation of being angry with a brother or hating a brother being equivalent to the sin of murder is something that the apostle John also teaches. Look at 1 John 3:15, where he says,
“Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.”
There’s no doubt that John got that teaching from his Lord, got that from Jesus. To hate someone else is to commit murder in the heart. To be angry without a cause is to commit murder in the heart. That’s the teaching of Jesus, it’s the teaching of the apostles.
Here’s another example. Jesus in Matthew 5:20 says,
“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Now those are kinds of scary words. Righteousness is necessary to enter into the kingdom. Some people read that and they think, “Oh, that sounds like works salvation. You have to be a righteous person to enter into the kingdom of heaven,” and all kinds of hermeneutical gymnastics are done to try to get around what Jesus says in that verse. But listen to the apostle Paul, who says something very similar but just puts it in the negative. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 he says, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” Unrighteousness disqualifies you from the kingdom! And Paul says essentially the same thing in Galatians 5:21 and Ephesians 5:5.
Here’s Paul; he is the apostle of grace. He’s the one who teaches that God justifies the ungodly. He’s the one that teaches that we are justified by faith alone! Yet the apostle Paul also says that if you’re unrighteous you will not inherit the kingdom of God. There’s more to the gospel, then, than being justified by faith alone. There’s more to salvation than that. I think that’s implicit both in the teaching of Jesus and in the teaching of Paul.
Here’s another example. Take Jesus’ teaching on loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you, turning the other cheek—all of this. I mean, this is radical. This is Jesus’ teaching about nonviolence, nonretaliation. It’s pretty radical teaching.
Paul taught the same thing. Look at Romans 12. Paul said,
“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all….To the contrary, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink…’”
Now, to be sure, Paul here is quoting from Proverbs, but he’s also right in sync with the teaching of Jesus. You bless your enemies, you pray for those who persecute you, you love those who are opposed to you. This is the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.
One more example. Jesus ends the Sermon on the Mount with these words.
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”
Then follows the contrast with the foolish man who builds his house on the sand. So get this: Jesus says you need to hear and you need to do. It’s not just hearing, it’s also doing. Doesn’t that remind you of what the apostle James says in James 1, when he says, “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves”?
Now, we could multiply this with example after example after example. When you look at the moral, ethical, practical teaching of the New Testament letters, again and again and again they are repeating the substance of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. There’s nothing in the Sermon on the Mount that is not taught across the whole of the New Testament, even if the language is slightly different.
This was also pretty much the universal response of the early church. When you go beyond the writings of the apostles—and many examples could be given of this, but let me just give you one example. This is from a document called the Didache. The Didichae was a late first-century or an early second-century Christian document. You can read this now if you buy The Early Christian Writings or The Apostolic Fathers. Let me just read you from the opening paragraph of the Didache. The Didache says in chapter one,
“There are two ways: a way of life and a way of death. The difference between these two ways is great. The way of life is this: thou shalt love first the Lord thy creator, and secondly thy neighbor as thyself; and thou shalt do nothing to any man that thou wouldst not wish to be done to thyself. What you may learn from these words is to bless them that curse you, to pray for your enemies, and to fast for your persecutors. For what merit is there in loving only those who return your love?”
Now, if you know the Sermon on the Mount, much of what the Didache says right there is just paraphrasing the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and the Didache was largely giving us that ethical teaching. This was, again, one of the earliest documents following the New Testament that we have.
I think it’s pretty clear, then, that this teaching was understood by the early Christians to apply to them, and it’s a good argument that the teaching applies for us today.
Here’s my application for this first point, this first question: Receive the Lord’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount as teaching for the church today. If you have any misgivings about that, I would encourage you to read carefully through the New Testament and mark every place where there is some correspondence between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of the apostles, and I think you will find that there is complete harmony between what Jesus taught his disciples in Matthew 5-7 and what the apostles taught the church in their letters.
2. Why Is This Sermon for Every Believer?
Question number two: Why is this sermon for every believer? Some of you are thinking, “Didn’t you just answer that question?” Well, not quite, because there’s a variation on the objection here. Some would say something like this: Even if the Sermon on the Mount applies throughout all ages, the sermon isn’t intended for ordinary, everyday Christians. It is for advanced disciples. This is not kindergarten ABCs for every Christian; this is like the PhD for the super spiritual elite. This is for priests or monks if you’re Roman Catholic; it’s for preachers and missionaries if you’re Protestant. “It’s for the really, really devoted, committed person, but certainly not for everyday Christians.”
There are several variations of this. Some of you may know that in the Roman Catholic church there are what are called the three evangelical councils, and those are the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Those vows are largely taken from the Sermon on the Mount. So the whole monastic system, where people would go away into a monastery and would become a monk and take these vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, they were kind of going above and beyond what the ordinary believer would do.
This is where we get the division, which I think is a very unhelpful and unbiblical division, between the clergy and the laity; as if those who are “professionals” somehow in the church are held to a standard different from the standard of everyday Christians.
There’s also a Protestant version of this. We really get it in different ways of teaching on sanctification and the Christian life. There are some Protestants who say something like this: You come to Jesus in stages. First of all, you receive Jesus as your Savior, and that’s just when you believe. You pray the sinner’s prayer, your sins are all forgiven; your life may not change at all, but you come to Jesus as your Savior. Only later, maybe, will you receive Jesus as your Lord, where you start to get serious about the Christian life. But you’re saved if you took Jesus as Savior, and you may never receive Jesus as Lord.
Another way of putting that is to say it’s possible for someone to be justified—that is, all of their sins forgiven, completely pardoned, on their way to heaven; they’re not going to hell—and yet their lives are never changed, they’re never sanctified, they never become a holy person.
Or, at its most simple, it’s the idea that you can be a believer without being a disciple. You can be a Christian without being a disciple; discipleship is something additional, it’s something extra. It’s for the really devoted Christians, the really dedicated Christians. I would suggest to you that this teaching is nowhere to be found in the New Testament.
Now, I’ll give the response here in just a minute, but here’s another variety to the objection. It would be something like this: To expect ordinary Christians to obey this sermon is to teach works instead of grace. Okay, there’s the real fear. I mean, people struggle with the Sermon on the Mount! Maybe you’ve struggled with this; if not, news flash: there are a lot of people in the world, a lot of people even within the confessing church, who struggle with the Sermon on the Mount. It makes them uncomfortable, because it looks to them like works salvation.
I think this is based on a very superficial understanding of grace. So here’s my response.
(1) First of all, while believers may vary in maturity, and certainly we would all acknowledge that, all believers are expected to be disciples, or learners, of Christ. All believers are learners of Christ. That’s what a disciple is—mathetes, that’s the Greek word; a learner, a student of Christ. Let me just give you one passage from Paul where this is implicit, where Paul talks about how we have come to learn Christ. Ephesians 4:17-24, but let me just read 17-20.
“Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned [he uses the verbal form of this word] Christ!”
He’s talking to believers, and he’s calling them to live a holy life. That’s what Ephesians 4 is doing from this point on. He’s calling them to holiness. He’s calling them to put off the old, put on the new. But he reminds them, “You learned Christ, and when you learned Christ, you didn’t learn to live in sin, you learned a new way of living.” All believers are understood and expected to be learners or disciples of Christ.
(2) Second response: The New Testament never drives a wedge between salvation by grace and the expectation that believers will live transformed lives characterized by good works. We saw this in the passage I read a few moments ago in our assurance of pardon, Titus 2:11-14. It tells us that God’s grace has appeared, it appeared in the coming of Jesus Christ. This is the great epiphany, the great appearance of Jesus Christ in history. The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation, but that same grace trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live holy lives in the present age. We do that as we wait for the blessed hope, the future appearing of Christ.
Then look at this in verse 14: “...who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.”
This verse is showing us that Christ’s intention in saving us is not just to redeem us from sin but to purify us so that we are a people characterized by good deeds. We’re saved by grace, yes, through faith, yes, but for good works (Ephesians 2:8-10).
That led Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his classic studies on the Sermon on the Mount, to say these words. He said,
“Why should we study it? Why should we try to live it? Because the Lord Jesus Christ died to enable us to live the Sermon on the Mount. There’s nothing so dangerous as to say that the Sermon on the Mount has nothing to do with modern Christians. Indeed, I will put it like this: it is something which is meant for all Christian people. It is a perfect picture of the life of the kingdom of God.”
I did want to give you a lengthy quote from John Wesley, arguing something the same, but it was two slides and I already have a long sermon. I’ve been teaching people that you don’t bring everything into the pulpit; you have to know what to leave out. So I’m leaving it out. But if you want it, I can give it to you.
Here’s the application: Examine yourself in the light of Jesus’ teaching. Every true Christian is a disciple or a learner of Jesus, and to refuse to learn from Jesus is to refuse Jesus himself. The Sermon on the Mount will search your heart; it will. It’s one reason we need it: because some of us, perhaps, have bought into Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace. We’ve tasted the counterfeit, our lives have not been changed, and we have not yet encountered the real thing. The Sermon on the Mount is showing us the kind of transformation there will be in our lives as Christians.
3. What Does This Sermon Teach and How Is It Consistent with the Gospel of Grace?
So, question three, what does the sermon teach, and how is it consistent with the gospel of grace? I have about ten minutes left. What I want to do in these last ten minutes is kind of give you an outline of the sermon, just to show you how the Sermon on the Mount fits together. Next week, I promise, we’ll start working through the actual content of Matthew 5. But I want to show you that and give you a summary of what the Sermon on the Mount is about, what it teaches, and then show you how, in the context of Matthew’s Gospel, this is consistent with the gospel of grace. This is a part of Matthew’s teaching and the teaching of our Lord himself.
(1) Okay, first of all, what does it teach? Let me just show you briefly in a chart here the shape of this sermon. I’m pretty persuaded, as I’ve read different commentaries and scholars, that there is a shape to the sermon. This is not just a random collection of sayings that Matthew put together. I think Jesus actually preached this sermon. And there is an order to it, and you can see it as something of a chiasm in the way it’s arranged.
The sermon begins; the setting in Matthew 5:1-2 is crowds gathering around Jesus; he goes up a mountain and he begins teaching. Then, at the end, Matthew 7:28-8:1, once again you have crowds, you have Jesus descending the mountain, having given this teaching.
The opening of the sermon is comprised of what we call the beatitudes and the similitudes. These are the “blessed are” and the “you are.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and there are nine of these “blessed” statements. Then the “you ares”—“You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.” These are the beatitudes and the similitudes.
They are concerned largely with the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” As we saw last week, the kingdom is a running thread through the Sermon on the Mount.
You have this at the end as well, in Matthew 7, where Jesus talks about two ways, two trees, two builders; and once again he brings up this phrase “the kingdom of heaven.” So the sermon is telling us something about who is in the kingdom. It’s giving us a description of people who are in the kingdom.
Part of the argument of this sermon is that those who are in the kingdom will live in such a way that the law and the prophets are fulfilled in their conduct. So you have these two references to the law and the prophets in Matthew 5 as well as in Matthew 7.
By the way, if you want this, I’ll send it to you. You don’t have to write all this down. Just email the church; we’ll send it to you.
Then the real body of the sermon is in these four sections. At the very center you have the Lord’s Prayer, the model prayer. But you have these four sections: the disciples’ righteousness; the disciples’ piety, or his religion—religion is a negative word for us today, but piety; it’s his practice of religious devotion. This is where Jesus talks about giving of alms and prayer and fasting. So you have the disciples’ righteousness, the disciples’ piety, the disciples’ priorities in the second half of Matthew 6, and then the disciples’ relationships in the beginning of Matthew 7.
Now, to summarize all of that, we could say this: the Sermon on the Mount teaches the basics of discipleship. It’s teaching us what life is meant to look like in the kingdom of God. It’s teaching us how a Christian is meant to behave. It’s showing us what the character and the lifestyle and the fruit should be of someone who is saved, of someone who is in the kingdom of God, in the family of God. Friends, there’s nothing more basic than this. This is basic teaching for everyday Christians.
As we saw last week—remember this Venn diagram—Jesus is the king, Jesus is the sage, Jesus is the Savior. We could just put a twist on this now and say the Sermon on the Mount is giving you commands from Jesus your king, wisdom from Jesus your teacher, and promises from Jesus your Savior. That’s what the Sermon on the Mount is.
This wisdom component needs to not be missed. We’ll talk more about that next week as we start to dig into the beatitudes. But the wisdom really has to do with how Jesus understands the best possible way of living a human life. It’s his answer to the great question of, “What is the good life? What is human flourishing?”
So Jonathan Pennington, who I quoted last week (I’ll give you one more quote from him), says,
“The sermon’s answer to the human flourishing question is that true human flourishing is only available through communion with the Father God through his revealed Son, Jesus, as we are empowered by the Holy Spirit. This flourishing is only experienced through faithful, heart-deep, whole-person discipleship [that’s what this sermon is about], following Jesus’ teachings in life, which situate the disciple into God’s community or kingdom. This flourishing will only be experienced fully in the eschaton (that is, in the last day), when God finally establishes his reign upon the earth. As followers of Jesus’ journey through their lives, they will experience suffering in this world, which in God’s providence is in fact a means to true flourishing even now. In short, Jesus provides in the sermon a Christocentric, flourishing-oriented, kingdom-awaiting, eschatological wisdom exhortation.”
Now, that’s a mouthful, but we will be unpacking those concepts for the next several months, as we try to understand what this sermon is about.
(2) Now, again, there’s an objection that people might raise, and this is kind of the final objection I’ll try to answer. Some might say, “Jesus’ intention in the sermon was actually to show the impossibility of keeping the law, in order to drive us to depend on his grace. That’s what the sermon is. This is law, not gospel. Jesus is simply magnifying the law. He’s putting a magnifying glass on the law to show that you can’t keep the law.
Here’s my response. First of all, while the sermon may have that effect, it was not Jesus’ primary intention. His intention was to teach us how to live. To be sure, Jesus magnifies the requirements of God’s law, but he does so with an expectation of this being what we are called to and actually being the best way to live. So, is that consistent with the gospel? Yes it is.
Here’s my second response. The sermon is consistent with the gospel of grace because it is situated in Matthew’s narrative unfolding of the gospel. I wish I had time to dive into this. All I can do is give you the digest. I was really helped by a guy named Charles Quarles, who’s written a wonderful book on the Sermon on the Mount. He shows that Matthew’s Gospel actually contains gospel and does so with these three motifs that kind of run through the Gospel. Those motifs could be called new exodus, new creation, and new covenant.
We talked a little bit about the new exodus last week. I kind of made the case from Matthew 1-2 that Jesus is reliving the story of Moses, the story of the exodus. I don’t need to repeat all of that. But new exodus means that Jesus, through his life, death, and resurrection, is bringing us deliverance, he’s bringing us freedom from sin’s slavery.
In this book, Quarles quoted the old African-American spiritual that I’d kind of forgotten about; I hadn’t heard this in a long time. Some of you will be familiar with this. Do you remember these words?
“When Israel was in Egypt’s land,
Let my people go.
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go.
“Go down, Moses!
Way down in Egypt’s land.
Tell old Pharaoh to
Let my people go.”
Of course, there’s reason in the African-American experience why those words and the story of the exodus had such deep resonance.
But the story of the exodus is not just about the deliverance of slaves. It’s also a type that gets fulfilled in Jesus, who delivers us from the slavery of sin, and who brings us into the freedom of the gospel. So these are Charles Quarles’s words after quoting those lyrics. He says,
“The righteousness described in the Sermon on the Mount is an absolute impossibility for those who remain captive to Satan and are enslaved to sin; yet Jesus’ followers have been liberated from this slavery. The great Redeemer has cried, ‘Let my people go.’”
You see in his death and resurrection that he has defeated sin and he has set the captives free, and the Sermon on the Mount gives us the constitution for the new people of God and the freedom of the gospel. There’s a new exodus; freedom from sin’s slavery.
There’s also a new creation. This is a theme that runs through the Gospels, and it’s really found in the references to the Holy Spirit. You remember in Matthew 3 that John the Baptist is baptizing with water, but he’s saying, “There’s somebody coming who’s going to baptize you with the Spirit and with fire.” Then Jesus is baptized, and you remember what happens when Jesus is baptized? The Holy Spirit descends like a dove upon him.
Virtually all the commentators agree the language that’s used there is reminiscent of Genesis 1, where the Spirit of God hovers like a bird over the face of the waters, the waters of creation, and it’s a signal that Jesus is the one who will bring new creation through the power of the Spirit.
Then there’s a new covenant that gives us transformed hearts. Two more passages of Scripture, and I’m done. At the very end of this Gospel, or near the end of this Gospel, before Jesus is crucified, Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples. Matthew 26; he says,
“Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.’”
Some of the manuscripts insert the word “new,” “This is the blood of the new covenant.” The word is actually there in the parallel account in Luke’s Gospel. It’s pretty clear that Jesus is referring to the new covenant.
What is the new covenant? The new covenant was a promise that God made through the prophets in the Old Testament. The key passage is Jeremiah 31:31.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
Matthew’s whole Gospel is structured to show us that Jesus is the one who brings about the new covenant, and Jesus’ teaching of his disciples, though it precedes his death and resurrection, is teaching that is meant to apply to new covenant believers.
That means—here’s the application—that the only appropriate response to the gospel of grace is heartfelt trust in Christ, which overflows in faithful obedience to his teaching. Listen, friends: this is what it means to be a disciple. This is what it means to be a Christian.
Have you trusted in Christ to free you from sin’s slavery? Have you trusted in Christ to make you new through the gift of his Holy Spirit? Have you trusted in Christ to write his law on your heart, to transform you at such a deep, profound heart level that what you desire is what God desires, that what you want is what God wants? So you want to live the way God teaches you to live? That’s what it means to be born again and to be a Christian.
It’s to those who have experienced that profound grace that the Sermon on the Mount is given, as a blueprint for new life.
If you’ve not trusted in Christ and you’re convicted of your sins and you see your need, I hope you will do so this morning. Let’s pray together.
Father, we thank you this morning for your word. Thank you for the unity and the harmony that’s found in the Scriptures. We thank you for this grace, this powerful, transforming, life-changing grace that is given to us through Christ and through the Spirit. Lord, my prayer this morning is that every one of us would know the experience of that grace and not the cheap counterfeit, that we would know what it is to be set free from sin, to experience new life in Christ, and to have our hearts changed.
To whatever measure any person needs that this morning, Lord, would you grant your Spirit in great measure to bring about that transformation? This is not work that we perform, it is your work in the heart to change us that leads to this new way of living. So, Lord, make it a reality for every one of us we pray.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, may we come to it as a new covenant meal, reminding us of the great cost of this grace that we enjoy, grace that cost the very life of your Son, Jesus Christ. May we receive these elements today in faith, even as we have received Christ as Savior and Lord by faith. Lord, may the overflow of our hearts be gratitude, worship, and obedience to you. We ask you to draw near to us now through your Spirit. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
