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Jan 06, 2019

The first word is the most important

The first word is the most important

Passage: Matthew 5:1-3

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: The Highest Good

Some of the most celebrated and debated words Jesus ever spoke are found in His Sermon on the Mount. How we read them has everything to do with how we understand what He’s done for us and what He calls from us. That’s why so much rides on grasping these first words of the Sermon.

Artwork by Stacey Chacon

Order of Worship

Call to Worship: Psalm 1
New Testament Reading: Matthew 2:1-12
Sermon Title:. The first word is the most important
Central Text: Matthew 5:1-3

01.06.19 Sermon Notes

Related Scriptures

  • Psalm 1
  • Isaiah 2:3; 40:9; 61
  • Matthew 11:28-29; 21:5
  • Luke 12:32
  • Luke 18:9-14
  • Hebrews 1:1-3a

Discussion Questions & Applications:

  1. When’s the last time you’ve felt really powerless? Why did/do you feel that way?
  2. Why might Matthew want to include the details of both where Jesus spoke these words from (on the mount) and in what posture (sitting)?
  3. Jesus is known as Lord, as Savior, as a teacher. Read the whole sermon (Matthew 5-7) How do we see those roles at work in the meaning of this sermon?
  4. Are the “beatitudes” promises of blessing or descriptions of a life that is blessed? Explain your answer.
  5. How might these beatitudes tell a story when taken as a whole?
  6. Why might this “sermon” begin with an affirmation of those who sense their own spiritual poverty? Why might all else He says depend on our grasping the idea He begins with?

Quotes

  • All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. - Flannery O’Connor
  • In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. - C.S. Lewis
  • For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, the demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. - Kurt Vonnegut
  • We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex / It didn't amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects./ When you bite off more than you can chew you pay the penalty, / Somebody's got to tell the tale, I guess it must be up to me. Bob Dylan, "Up To Me”
  • Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace. - Philip Yancey
  • God cannot fill what is full. He can fill only emptiness – deep poverty – and your “yes” [to Jesus] is the beginning of being or becoming empty. It is not how much we really “have” to give – but how empty we are – so that we can receive fully in our life and let him live his life in us. In you today, he wants to relive his complete submission to his father – allow him to do so. Take away your eyes from yourself and rejoice that you have nothing. - Mother Theresa
  • When Jesus talks of seeking God’s kingdom, he isn’t telling us that the kingdom is some hidden reality which we have to struggle to lay bare. God’s kingdom doesn’t lie at the end of some great quest, and seeking it isn’t to be an occasion for spiritual athleticism. To seek God’s kingdom is simply to acknowledge that it is already among us, supremely potent and effective in the ministry of the man Jesus. To seek God’s kingdom thus means in public and in private, politically and domestically, to order our affections in such a way that God in Christ is the supreme reality. It means to govern our thinking and acting by the sheer truth that Jesus Christ is the one in whom God renews the face of the earth; it means to acknowledge that all other ways of thinking and acting fail, because they don’t read the world as it truly is: the place of God’s kingly rule. To “seek” that rule is, we might say, to strive after and hasten toward God’s rule as the most real reality and truest truth that may be found. - John Webster
  • The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?”The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And,finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God? - Henri Nouwen
  • Weaknesses are with me for the whole journey. Paul was particularly thinking of persecutions, but how much more does this passage apply to human frailty, brokenness and hurt? How essential is it for us to be broken, if Christ is going to be our strength? When I am weak I am strong. Not, “When I am cured,” or “When I am successful,” or “When I am a good Christian,” but when I am weak. Weakness–the human experience of weakness–is God’s blueprint for exalting and magnifying his Son. When broken people, miserably failing people, continue to belong to, believe in and worship Jesus, God is happy. - Michael Spencer

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