What Would Jesus Say? - Part 3

Concluding Thoughts: Listening to Jesus

            The importance of listening to the one who gave this sermon cannot be stressed enough. Just as Jesus spoke to a variety of people while presenting this message, a variety of people need to hear Jesus’ message today. Followers of Jesus need to hear what Jesus says because there are many proposed systems of thought in our culture that are a distorted or diluted version of Christianity. Whether it be the “health and prosperity gospel,” a post-modern remix on church, or reducing the Christian religion to a means of self-help methodology,  believers in Christ are in desperate need of going back to the original teachings of the one they claim to follow.

            Over five decades ago, the minister D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones bewailed, “I do not think it is a harsh judgment to say that the most obvious feature of the life of the Christian Church today is, alas, its superficiality” (Lloyd-Jones, 5), and superficiality continues  to abound among professing Christians today. With this reality in mind, no wonder many are critical of Christianity. But the primary solution for recovering a credible witness is for us to be confronted with the life-transforming truths taught by the Lord Jesus Himself. Modern reinventions of Christianity need to be discarded and replaced with the pure message of Jesus, the “author and finisher of our faith” (cf. Heb. 12:2).

            But non-Christians would do well to listen to Jesus as well, for just as He elucidated the cultural fallacies and short-comings among the multitudes of His day, multitudes in our society need to see our culture through the lens of this history-changing figure, who taught as no one ever taught before or since that time. There is a reason that for over two thousand years this message has continued to evoke study, meditation, and literature addressing its content. It is a message that transcends common wisdom and sheds supernatural light on our understanding of the world in which we live.

            So both Christians and non-Christians need to listen to Jesus’ message. But this sermon is not only meant to be heard, it is meant to be lived. Because of the high ideals and lofty standards espoused in Jesus’ teaching, some have considered it impossible to follow, but the great teacher John Stott offers wisdom on this point, saying that “the standards of the Sermon are neither readily attainable by every man, nor totally unattainable by any man. To put them beyond anybody’s reach is to ignore the purpose of Christ’s Sermon; to put them within everybody’s is to ignore the reality of man’s sin. They are attainable all right, but only by those who have experienced the new birth which Jesus told Nicodemus was the indispensable condition of seeing and entering God’s kingdom” (Stott, 29). Living according to Christ’s standard is attainable, but only through the power made available by God Himself.

            The crux of Matthew’s Gospel is that Jesus ultimately gave His life on a cross, a Roman instrument of torture and execution. The Scriptures explain that in dying, Jesus “gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14). Jesus died that we might be able to live in a new way through a new life that He grants. It is a life of being “zealous for good works,” of living according to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.

            The world needs to see real Christianity, and the only way it will is if people will truly listen to and live out the message of Jesus. May that be the result in our lives as we look at what Jesus teaches is this amazing sermon.

Works Cited: 

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1959–60).

John R. W. Stott, Christian Counter-Culture: The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1978).

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version.  Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.