Jesus: King, Sage, and Savior | Matthew 4:17-5:3; 7:24-29
Brian Hedges | October 5, 2025
It’s great to be with you for worship this morning. Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew 5. Actually, I’m going to read a few verses from chapter 4.
While you’re turning there, I want to read a quotation to you from Dallas Willard, from his book The Great Omission. Willard says,
“There is an obvious Great Disparity between, on the one hand, the hope for life expressed in Jesus, found real in the Bible, and in many shining examples from among his followers; and on the other hand the actual day-to-day behavior, inner life, and social presence of most of those who now profess adherence to him. The governing assumption today among professing Christians is that we can be Christians forever and never become disciples. This—with its various consequences—is the Great Omission from the Great Commission, in which the Great Disparity is firmly rooted.”
I wonder if you have witnessed this great disparity in the lives of others, or maybe you’ve even experienced this in some measure in your own life, where you are, at least in word, a professing believer in Jesus Christ, maybe baptized, maybe a regular church attender, but not really following Jesus in your inner life, in the way you think, the way you behave, the way you live in the world. Especially when you look at the ethical teaching of Jesus, the moral teaching of Jesus, the commands of Jesus, you would see a great gap between what Jesus calls us to and where you currently live. You might even think, “Well, I believe in Jesus, but discipleship is really for advanced Christians. That’s for those who are really radical and kind of fanatical in their commitment to Jesus, and I’m not there yet.”
This is what Willard says is the great disparity and the great omission. We have to remember that Jesus, when he gave the Great Commission to the church, one of the things he said we were to do as we teach disciples is to teach them to obey “all that I have commanded you.” Jesus expected his teaching to be obeyed, and it is one of the great omissions in the church today that we sometimes neglect his teaching.
I don’t know where that finds you this morning. Maybe it doesn’t quite land with where you are, or maybe it does. But in either case, today we’re beginning a new series. We’re calling this “Matthew: Heirs of the Kingdom,” and we’re actually going to be looking at a segment of Matthew’s Gospel over the next several months, the segment that’s called the Sermon on the Mount. It is the longest sermon found in the New Testament, either by Jesus or by anyone else, and it is that sermon (found in Matthew 5-7) where we have some of the most familiar and famous words of Jesus. Almost all of us are going to be familiar with things that Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. This is where we get those images of the salt of the earth and the light of the world and a city that is set on a hill. This is where Jesus tells us to love your enemies and turn the other cheek and go the extra mile. It’s where we have a version of the Lord’s Prayer that sometimes we pray together, and many, perhaps, pray on a daily basis. This is where Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” It’s also where Jesus says, “Judge not, that you be not judged,” “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” and, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In other words, some of the quintessential teaching of Jesus is all found here, in these three chapters, the Sermon on the Mount.
St. Augustine was probably the first person to call this the Sermon on the Mount, and Augustine said, “It is the perfect standard of the Christian life.” The Sermon on the Mount has been admired by many, not only Christians but also non-Christians. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy famously attempted to practice the Sermon on the Mount—and failed. Mahatma Gandhi admired the Sermon on the Mount, thought it was a wonderful expression of ethical conduct. But as John Stott says, “It is the best-known, least-understood, and least-obeyed part of the teaching of Jesus.”
So it’s important for us, I think, to dig into these chapters together, and this morning I really just want to give us some orientation to help us find our footing in how to read, interpret, and apply the Sermon on the Mount, before we even begin to dig into the details of the sermon.
I want to just say at the outset that I think there are two extremes for us to avoid in our interpretation of this sermon. One extreme is what we might call isolation, where we isolate this passage of Scripture, the Sermon on the Mount, from the rest of the teaching of Jesus, we isolate it from the Gospel of Matthew in which it’s found, and we isolate it from the rest of the New Testament. On the other end of the spectrum would be domestication. This is where we essentially treat the sermon as if it’s irrelevant for Christians today.
There actually are approaches to the Sermon on the Mount that fall on both of these extremes. On the isolationist side, you might think of the famous social gospel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where modernistic, theologically liberal Christians denied the supernatural elements of Christianity altogether. They denied the virgin birth, they denied the miracles of the New Testament, they denied that Jesus Christ had literally risen from the dead. So really, they were Christian in name only. They were denying the very essence of the gospel. But they tried to put in practice the Sermon on the Mount and even make it a part of their social policy.
Of course, it’s right for us to seriously consider the social implications of Jesus’ teaching, but it’s wrong for us to isolate his message from the whole of his life and from the rest of the teaching of the New Testament. That’s one extreme.
On the other extreme, you might think of certain forms of dispensationalism that essentially say that the Sermon on the Mount was Jesus’ teaching intended for the millennial kingdom…but we’re not in the millennial kingdom yet, we’re in the church age, so there’s really no expectation that this is to be practiced by Christians today. So they domesticate the sermon. They make it irrelevant for Christians today. “This isn’t even for us; this is for other people in another time.”
I think the clear answer to that claim is to just read Romans 12, or 1 Peter 3-4, or the whole book of James. These are the apostles of Jesus Christ who give us the letters in the age of the church, and they clearly echo and teach and repeat the teaching of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount.
We want to avoid both of these extremes. Somewhere in the middle, where we don’t isolate the Sermon on the Mount and make it everything, but we don’t domesticate this sermon and make it irrelevant for our lives—somewhere between those extremes I think we find what this sermon is intended to do in our lives today. That’s going to be our focus this morning, as we try to get our footing in understanding the Sermon on the Mount.
I want to begin by reading several passages of Scripture. These are going to be kind of scattered from Matthew 4-7. I’m going to begin in Matthew 4:17. You can see what the verses are on the screen and follow along on the screen. So essentially I’m going to read what comes right before the sermon, the beginning of the sermon, the ending of the sermon, and then what comes right after the sermon. As we get that framing of the sermon, it’s going to give us our bearings for how to interpret and apply this important teaching of Jesus. So, Matthew 4:17.
“From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”
Drop down to Matthew 4:23.
“And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. So his fame spread…[a]nd great crowds followed him…”
Matthew 5:1.
“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, saying:
“‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’”
It’s the very famous first Beatitude, the first words of the Sermon on the Mount. We’ll come back to that in the weeks to come.
Then, go to the end of the sermon, Matthew 7:24. Jesus says,
“‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.’”
That’s the end of the sermon. Verse 28:
“And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.”
This is God’s word.
I think there are three ways in which Matthew presents Jesus in his Gospel and surrounding the Sermon on the Mount, three ways that he presents Jesus that help us get our bearings, to help us be rightly oriented to who Jesus is, what he’s saying, and the essence of his teaching, and it will help us to understand this sermon. So these are the three things I want us to consider:
1. Jesus the King
2. Jesus the Sage
3. Jesus the Savior
You might even think of a Venn diagram. I love Venn diagrams. Here’s a Venn diagram. If you take these three aspects of Jesus—Jesus the king, Jesus the sage, Jesus the savior—it’s in the overlap of those categories that I think we get a right understanding of how to read and apply the Sermon on the Mount. You really need all three of the categories to understand what’s going on in this sermon and to avoid the errors on either side of the spectrum.
So, let’s work through these three categories.
1. Jesus the King
Did you notice when we read from Matthew 4:17 that Jesus says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”? This is early in Jesus’ ministry. He’s just been baptized by John the Baptist. He spent forty days being tested in the wilderness. And now he begins his ministry, and the substance of his message is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” or “the kingdom of heaven is near,” or “the kingdom of heaven is coming,” or “the kingdom of heaven is here present among you.” It depends on how you interpret that word. But essentially, Jesus here is talking about the imminence of the kingdom of heaven.
Then he goes throughout Galilee teaching in the synagogues, and he’s proclaiming what’s called the gospel of the kingdom. Jesus preaches the gospel, but it’s the gospel of the kingdom. This is good news about the kingdom of God.
The very first thing he says when he begins his Sermon on the Mount is, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” In fact, there are two beatitudes that end in that way. A blessing on certain people because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Then, when you look at the substance of the Sermon on the Mount, the kingdom is a prominent theme throughout the sermon. Let me just remind you of a few of the passages. The beatitudes I’ve already mentioned, verses 3 and 10.
Then in Matthew 5:19-20 Jesus talks about those who would be least or greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and he even talks about entering into the kingdom of heaven. In the Lord’s Prayer, one of the petitions in that prayer is, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In Matthew 6:33 Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Then at the end of the sermon Jesus warns, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
So, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, that this sermon has something to do with the kingdom and has something to do with Jesus as the king, the one who has come on the scene and who is proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom of God. So we just need to ask, what is this? What is the kingdom?
I’ll just give you my definition of it. I could give you definitions from other people, but here’s my definition, my understanding, as I’ve tried to study the Gospels over the years, of what the kingdom of God is. The kingdom is God’s future, saving reign already revealed in Jesus; and to belong to the kingdom is to live under Jesus’ reign, with all the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. That’s my understanding of the kingdom of God. It is God’s saving reign. It is the reign of God over the hearts and lives of people.
To be sure, there’s a future aspect to this. We’re waiting for the day when Jesus reigns over all things visibly and in a way that brings peace and justice and shalom back to the world. We’re waiting for that. That comes when Jesus returns. But it’s really clear in the New Testament that we already are, in some sense, in the kingdom of God; that we are citizens of the kingdom of God. And Jesus says this. He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It’s not a future thing; this is an already thing. You already are members, participants, citizens of the kingdom of heaven. You are heirs of the kingdom.
I think you might consider a constitution for a nation. As American citizens, most of us are familiar, at least to some degree, with the Constitution of the United States, and we know that a constitution outlines something like rights or privileges of citizenship and certain responsibilities of citizenship. That’s what a constitution does.
We might think of the Sermon on the Mount as the constitution of Jesus for the kingdom of God. Sinclair Ferguson calls it “the manifesto of Jesus, his public declaration of his policy in the kingdom of God.” Frederick Bruner says, “It is Jesus’ state of the union address, his messianic inaugural.”
Here is Jesus the king; he’s on the scene, he’s beginning his ministry, and right at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus lays out a manifesto for what life will be like for citizens of the kings of God.
We have to grasp this, that when we read these words, we’re not reading mere suggestions, we’re reading about the commands, we’re reading about the precepts, as well as the blessings and the privileges that come to us from Jesus the king. This is your king speaking! This is Jesus’ teaching for we who seek to follow and obey him.
So here’s the application this morning: Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is spoken with the authority of a king and teaches us how to live as citizens of his kingdom. I just want to ask this question to begin pressing in on our hearts the words of Jesus. Do you live under the reign of Jesus, or does something else hold more power in your life?
What are some of those other things that might hold power in our lives? It may be certain desires. It may be sexual desires. It may be desires for vindication or even for vengeance. It may be desires for money and wealth and financial security. Did you know that all of those are things that Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount? Jesus gives us a way of thinking about money and sex and power. He teaches us about forgiveness and the way to handle possessions in the world. He shows us that when you live under his reign, there’s a way for us to live. It’s a way of obedience and submission to Jesus, who is the king. There’s a set of priorities that should be in our lives if we are citizens of the kingdom of God.
To whatever degree our lives are being ruled by these other things, to that degree we have not fully brought ourselves into submission to Jesus as the king. So ask, are you living under the reign of Jesus, or is there something—it’s probably in your mind right now—“Yes, that thing actually does have too much power in my life, too much control in my life?” If so, take heart, because Jesus the king came to liberate. He came to bring freedom. He came to bring wisdom. We’re going to see that he brings this freedom and life and wisdom—he brings that as the king as he also occupies these other roles, the roles of sage and Savior.
2. Jesus the Sage
So we’ve considered Jesus the king; now let’s think for a minute about Jesus the sage. Now, this isn’t a word we usually apply to Jesus. Most of the time, if you think of a sage you think of the wise mentor; you think about these guys on the screen. You know, you think of Gandalf—by the way, if you know who all three of those characters are, you and I should be friends. When you think of a sage, you think of the wise mentor who’s kind of guiding the young person on the hero’s journey. You think of Gandalf or Obi Wan or Dumbledore. That’s fine. This is kind of the sage archetype in the Western tradition and in our literature and movies and so on.
But there’s a very real sense in which Jesus is our sage, that he is a wise mentor, because we need to remember that Jesus was a teacher. He was a teacher. He was a rabbi, and he gathered disciples around him. The disciples were learners; they were pupils, they were students. So they sat at his feet in order to listen to him teach. In many ways, Jesus’ teaching fits within the wisdom tradition of Israel. So we know in the Old Testament we have this whole genre of literature that we call wisdom literature. Think of the book of Proverbs or the book of Ecclesiastes. You think of certain of the psalms that really speak about wisdom. There are certain words, there are certain formulas, there are certain ways of thinking, certain concepts that belong to wisdom literature.
Actually, what we find in the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus echoes that wisdom literature in the way in which he speaks. Jesus here is the wise man who is speaking to his students, and he’s teaching them about the way to live.
You can see this in a couple of places. You can see it in Matthew 7:13-14, where Jesus says,
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
That’s a pretty familiar word picture; those are familiar words of Jesus—the straight and narrow gate, the straight and narrow way. But that language of a way, a path, a road to walk on, that’s wisdom language. You find this in the Psalms, you find this in Proverbs, where the Old Testament wisdom teachers are talking about the way of the righteous versus the way of the wicked, the way of the wise versus the way of the foolish. “Here’s a way to live that leads to life.” This is the way human life is meant to work. “And here’s a way that if you follow will lead to destruction; it’s going to destroy your life.” Jesus is very clearly echoing that wisdom tradition.
You see it again in Matthew 7:24-27. We’ve already read these. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man—” There it is. He’ll be like a wise man
“who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.”
In contrast to that is the foolish man who builds his house on the sand. There’s this contrast between wisdom and foolishness, and Jesus is coming to us as the quintessential wise person, the wise teacher who is giving us a way to live in the world.
Now, it’s not only that. Here’s the interesting thing that I’ve been learning as I’ve been preparing for this series. I’ve been reading this book by a New Testament scholar named Jonathan Pennington. The book is called The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. This is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the Sermon on the Mount. Pennington makes the argument that Jesus is not only echoing the Hebrew wisdom tradition but that Jesus is speaking into a cultural context that was very familiar with the Greco-Roman wisdom tradition and the virtue ethics of Plato and Aristotle, the Epicureans and the Stoics, the various philosophers who were trying to hold out before people the good life. “This is what the good life is, and this is the way you’re to live.”
Jesus is speaking into that cultural context as well, and it’s really the intersection of the Hebrew wisdom literature and the Greco-Roman wisdom literature that gives you the cultural context into which Jesus speaks.
So what Jesus is doing is he’s holding out a vision for us of the good life. Here’s a key quote from Pennington. He says,
“The sermon is offering Jesus’ answer to the great question of human flourishing, the topic at the core of both Jewish wisdom literature and that of the Greco-Roman virtue perspective, while presenting Jesus as the true philosopher-king.”
Are you interested in philosophy? Some of you young men are reading Jordan Peterson. Are you rediscovering the Stoics? Do you line your bookshelves with self-help books, trying to figure out how to be a flourishing human being? Listen, that is a noble quest. We want to live the best life we possibly can! And Jesus tells you how. Jesus gives you a portrait of the good life. He gives an understanding of how human beings are meant to function in the world. In many ways, it’s paradoxical. You read some of the things that Jesus says and it turns our assumptions upside-down. This is the genius and the wisdom of Jesus, because he’s inviting us as the sage, the wise man, he’s inviting us to live and to participate in the kingdom that God is bringing.
So ask yourself this morning, what is your vision of the good life? When you think about the good life, the ideal that you’re striving for, “If I could do these things, if I could be this way, if I could be this kind of person, life would really work”? Does that vision agree with the teaching of Jesus Christ?
I’m reminded of words that I read years ago from C.S. Lewis, words I read at a time in my life when things were just kind of being turned upside-down and then rightside-up again. As I was this young man in pursuit of a deep joy and satisfaction in my heart and life, these words were life-changing for me. Lewis said,
“We are told to deny ourselves and take up our crosses in order to follow Christ, and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea, we are far too easily pleased.”
If you want to know the infinite joy that can be found as a human being living in harmony with the kingdom of God, you’ll find it in the teaching of Jesus, not least of all in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is the king, Jesus is the sage, and Jesus is the Savior.
3. Jesus the Savior
So now we look at Jesus the Savior. The Gospel of Matthew clearly presents Jesus as a Savior. You have it right at the beginning, when Joseph, the betrothed husband of the virgin Mary, receives this message from an angel about a son that is going to be born to Mary, and the name that is to be given to this son. You see it in Matthew 1:21-23. The angel says,
“‘She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ [That’s what the word Jesus means; it means ‘Yahweh saves.] All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet [Isaiah]:
‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel’
(which means, God with us).”
So, right at the beginning, Matthew’s Gospel presents Jesus as the Savior. We need to ask what this means. What is salvation? We use that word all the time in Christian circles, but what is salvation? Some of us when we think about salvation we just think about the moment when we first believed, and that’s part of it, but that doesn’t exhaust the meaning of salvation. Some people when they think of salvation think, “Well, it just means I go to heaven when I die,” but that doesn’t exhaust the meaning of salvation. Salvation is deliverance! To be saved means to be delivered from something. If you save a person who’s drowning, you’re delivering them, you’re rescuing them from the water.
The Scriptures here are teaching us that Jesus delivers us, he rescues us. What does he rescue us from? He rescues us from sin. So salvation—here’s the definition—is deliverance from sin and its consequences, including both sin’s guilt and sin’s power or reign. This is what Jesus came to do. He came to set us free; he came to rescue us; he came to save us, to deliver us from the guilt and the power of sin.
There are some really interesting ways that Matthew portrays Jesus as the Savior. I think they need to figure into how we read and interpret the Sermon on the Mount. So let me just give you a couple of those quickly, before we draw everything to a close.
Matthew portrays Christ as Savior with themes and categories drawn from the prophet Isaiah and the story of Israel. He’s doing this to show us that Jesus is coming to fulfill the promises of the Old Testament. He is this long-awaited Savior. There are a couple ways he does this. He does this by echoing the stories of the exodus, the events of the exodus.
If you were here a year and a half ago when we were working our way through the first four chapters of Matthew, Matthew 1-4, we pointed this out. There’s almost a retelling of the story of Moses in Matthew 1-4.
Here is this birth of a child. There is slaughter of other children, just like Pharaoh slaughtering the infants when Moses was born. Yet Jesus, like baby Moses, is delivered. There’s actually a journey into Egypt, and then there’s a quotation from the prophet Hosea, when Jesus returns with his family, and it says, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” So Jesus is being seen here as the son, like Israel, that’s coming out of Egypt. Then there’s this journey through water, like Israel passing through the Red Sea, as Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River. Then, very clearly, Jesus is tempted forty days in the wilderness; it mirrors, it corresponds to Israel’s forty years of temptation and trial in the wilderness.
Then you get to Matthew 5, and Jesus comes out on a mountain and begins to talk about the righteousness of the kingdom of God. Jesus is giving us a constitution, very similar to Moses on Mount Sinai, who delivers to the children of Israel the law of God. The constitution for Israel—here’s Jesus, like a new Moses, giving us the constitution of the new covenant and of the kingdom of God. So, Jesus is fulfilling and reliving this exodus story. He’s bringing a new exodus. That’s one way you see this.
Here’s another way. You see Jesus as the servant of the Lord, using the categories from Isaiah. Isaiah talks about the servant of the Lord, and you have this series of servant songs in the second half of Isaiah. Most famous, of course, is Isaiah 53, the song of the suffering. There are at least three times in Matthew’s Gospel where Isaiah connects Jesus to the servant in Isaiah. You see it in Matthew 8:16-17. I’m just going to read these quickly. It says,
“That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.’”
This is really clear. Matthew, writing this gospel, the most Jewish of all gospels, sees Jesus as fulfilling this role of the servant of the Lord.
Then you have it in Matthew 12. You actually have these words quoted from the prophet Isaiah:
“Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,
my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.”
Here’s Jesus, the servant of the Lord.
Then, on Jesus’ own lips…there’s a place when Jesus, near the end of his life, is on the way to Jerusalem, and it’s there in Jerusalem that Jesus will be crucified, that Jesus will die. His disciples on the road are arguing about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus, knowing about this argument, confronts them, and he essentially says to them, “The Gentiles are concerned with who’s the lord, who’s the greatest, who’s the master; but not you. That’s not the way it’s going to be with us. For us in the kingdom of God it’s the person who’s the servant who will be the greatest.” And he says in Matthew 20:28, because “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Again, it’s an echo of Isaiah 53, the servant of the Lord who gave his life, who died as a ransom for the people. So, what you see in the Gospel of Matthew is Jesus fulfilling these two roles, bringing the new exodus as the new Moses, so he’s bringing redemption, he’s bringing deliverance. He is the suffering servant who dies for the people. And in doing that, it’s leading us right up to the cross and resurrection, which are the definitive events in every one of the gospel stories, through which Jesus brings the kingdom of God, and the events (as the apostles and New Testament writers reflect on these events) that is how our sins are forgiven. This is how we receive new life. This is how we get out of the old kingdom—the kingdom of Satan, the kingdom of darkness—and we get into the kingdom of God, the kingdom of light. It all happens through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
So, when you read the Sermon on the Mount in light of that, what you find is that the sermon is actually showing us what life is like if you’re under and in this saving reign of God.
This is really portrayed in a couple of ways. It’s portrayed as a life of faith, where we trust in the Father. Did you know that Jesus calls God the Father seventeen times in the Sermon on the Mount? I didn’t check, but this may be more than any other place in the teaching of Jesus. Certainly this is dominant. Jesus here is talking to his disciples, and he’s encouraging them to trust in “your heavenly Father.” In other words, there’s an assumption that “if you’re my followers, then you’re in this kingdom, and my Father is your Father, and you can trust in this Father.”
Then, he also portrays this as a life of righteousness, where we imitate the Father. Jesus says, “You are to be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect.” That’s not rhetorical. Jesus is actually calling us up to live a life that is patterned after the heart of God, a life that is patterned after the righteousness that is characteristic of both Jesus and of his Father.
You might think of it this way. You might think of someone who bears the family likeness. When I was younger and I would go home, go back to where I grew up, I remember people would sometimes say things like this—they would see me, they would remember what my dad looked like when he was younger, and they would say, “You are the carbon copy of your father. You look just like Ronnie Hedges!”
Of course, now, my extended family, who don’t see my kids for years at a time sometimes, when they see my kids they’re like, “Oh my goodness, your boys look so much like you!”
You know why? Because we have the same DNA, right? They share the family likeness.
What Jesus says when he talks about being the children of God—“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God”—he’s saying, “When you live this way you are bearing the likeness of your Father, and this is what it’s supposed to be like in the kingdom of God.” If you are living under the saving reign of Jesus Christ, your life is to be a life of trust, it’s to be a life of righteousness.
Alright, so let me summarize and conclude with a couple of takeaways. We’ve seen that Jesus is the king, Jesus is the sage, Jesus is the Savior. This frames the way we approach the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is for us. It’s not for people in a far distant future; this is for us. So, Redeemer Church, we’re going to spend months working through the Sermon on the Mount.
Here’s how you can start—first takeaway. Read the sermon this week, alright? Can I encourage you to do that? It’s three chapters. You can read it in one sitting. Read the sermon this week, meditate on Jesus’ promises, tremble at his warnings, wonder at his wisdom, ponder the paradoxes in his teaching. Take some time to familiarize yourself afresh with the sermon that Jesus preached, the Sermon on the Mount. Remember, when people first heard Jesus preach this, they were astonished at his teaching. There’s no teaching like this anywhere in the world! This is the quintessence of Jesus’ teaching, the constitution of the kingdom. So read it, familiarize yourself with it.
As you do, let the words of Jesus bring you to the feet of Jesus himself, where you submit to Jesus as your king, where you listen to Jesus as the sage, the wise man, the voice of wisdom, who is calling you to the best possible life you could live. The things that your heart most wants in the world you get when you follow Jesus. And let it bring you to the feet of Jesus the Savior, the one who came not to be served but to serve, and that means he came to serve you, and to offer his life as a ransom for your sins, so that through his death and his resurrection you could be brought into the kingdom of God. Let’s pray together.
Gracious, merciful Father in heaven, we thank you this morning for the revelation of your word, the revelation of your will, in your Son, Jesus, and in the teaching that Jesus gave us. We thank you that we have preserved for us this wonderful teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. We pray that you would give us eyes to see it, ears to hear it, hearts to receive it, and a willingness in our lives—not just a willingness, but a deep commitment in our lives to conform our lives, our thoughts, our behaviors, our attitudes, our actions to the teaching of Jesus, our wise king and our loving Savior.
We pray, Lord, that in the weeks to come, as together we work through this great passage of Scripture, that you would use it to change us in all the ways that we need changing. We pray that you would use it to make our church and our community more than ever before an outpost for the kingdom of God, something like a little colony of the kingdom of heaven in the here and now, a place where people who follow Jesus are so different from the world and yet so attractive in the way they live that it would draw others to yourself.
We pray, Lord, that you would give us a deep understanding of your love for us as your Father, as Jesus shows us in the Sermon on the Mount, and that this week we would ponder these words and in doing so would renew our own relationship with you and our walk with you.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, we come remembering that this table represents for us the death of Jesus the Savior, the one who gave his life as our ransom. So Lord, may we come with humility, because we were so sinful that we needed this sacrifice. May we come with repentance, hating and turning away from the sins for which Jesus died. May we come with faith as we trust in the all-sufficient, atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We pray, Lord, that you would draw near to us by your Spirit as we observe the elements together. We pray all of this in the name of our king and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
