Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

September 23, 2007

The Gift of Demand

Matthew 5:17-20

Often I encounter people who feel a sense of inadequacy in their knowledge of the Bible. Sometimes they are people we have attempted to recruit to teach Bible study on Sunday morning or another time. Sometimes it is a parent of a child who is involved in our children’s ministry which does such a good job of teaching scripture and sometimes the children come home and the family member will think, “My child knows more about the Bible than I do.” So people often express this sense, “I wish I knew the Bible better.”

Oftentimes when this happens, people will then make a commitment to start reading. “I’m going to start reading the Bible. A lot of times with that great enthusiasm, they will start with the Book of Genesis and begin to work their way through and often become very frustrated by the time they reach the Book of Leviticus which is not too far into it, if you don’t know.

I would offer a suggestion that if you ever want to do that, if you ever want to start reading to try to learn scripture better, consider starting with the Sermon on the Mount which would be chapters 5, 6, and 7 in the Gospel of Matthew. It is where the text came from that we read just a few moments ago. In these hundred or so verses, there are many familiar passages. If you were to start reading in Matthew 5 and read that and two more chapters, you would probably be astounded how many verses sounded familiar to you. You would say, “Oh, so that’s where that is.” It is where the Beatitudes are. “Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . Blessed are those who mourn . . . Blessed are the peacemakers . . . .” Most of us know those verses, at least when we hear them. It’s where The Lord’s Prayer is. In Matthew’s version, it is where Jesus says, “Don’t think you have to heap up a lot of empty phrases. Just say, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’”

It is also where one of the favorite verses for any of us who have ever been caught doing something wrong, that great verse where Jesus says, “Judge not lest you be judged.” We are all very familiar and very glad Jesus said that.

So the Sermon on the Mount is a good place to start reading or to come across a variety of very familiar good, beautiful passages of scripture. But I also need to give you a warning. It also contains a number of very disturbing verses. At the end of the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are you when you are persecuted and when people curse you unjustly.” I don’t like to be persecuted justly, let alone unjustly. “Blessed are you when this happens on my account.” Oh, wait a minute. If that’s where that “blessed are they” is going, I don’t know that I really want a part of that.

Near the end he says, “Enter by the narrow gate for the way is broad and the path is easy that leads to destruction.” Narrow gate? Boy, it seems hard enough sometimes when the way is wide.

The passage of scripture which we read just a while ago about how none of this is going to pass away and boy you are going to have to keep it all. Don’t think that you can get away with breaking any of this stuff. And those verses, “You have heard it said.” There are several where Jesus says, “You have heard it said ‘Don’t commit adultery.’ I tell you if you look at someone with lust it’s the same thing.”

“Don’t kill.” I’m fortunate. I have never killed anybody, but then Jesus goes on to say, “But don’t ridicule anybody either because if you ridicule them, then the same damage is done to your heart as if you had killed them.” I can’t weasel out from underneath that one. All of a sudden, these things that Jesus teaches become very disturbing.

It has been said that in the 2,000 years since Jesus first uttered these words on that Palestinian hillside, there has been no higher standard of morality than the Sermon on the Mount. It doesn’t get any tougher to live up to something than this. Non-Christians have had a great debate over it. Gandhi loved it. Nietzsche, the German philosopher, cursed it. And Christians have spent lifetimes, written volumes, debating about, and “Is this literally true? Did Jesus really mean ‘turn the other cheek’ or was he just being symbolic? If somebody insults you, you are not supposed to insult them back.” It has often been described as just too hard. It’s just too hard to live up to this. One person even said that Jesus taught this and made it so difficult so that when we read it, we would throw ourselves on the mercy of God and thank God for his grace because we would realize that none of us could do it, that none of us could live up to this.

The Sermon on the Mount has so many beautiful, familiar passages of scripture but it’s one of those passages that ought to be marked with “Danger” on the side. Don’t pick this up. It might explode right in your hands. You might read something that condemns you right out of your own heart or something that makes you realize that you have fallen so far short of what God wants us to do. What are we supposed to do with the Sermon on the Mount?

I think sometimes that we imagine Jesus sitting on that hillside, teaching some cosmic classroom where all the philosophers of the world, all the great teachers, have gathered together, and they are all debating, “Well now, Jesus, how would you say this? What do you think about this?” We make it harder than it is, and it’s not like that at all.

When Jesus sat down to teach this, there is a place in Palestine right off the Sea of Galilee where the mountain slopes up very beautifully. There is kind of a hollow in the side of the hill that people believe that is where the people sat in what was a natural amphi-theater. The sound of the person’s voice was actually contained by the hollow of the hill, and Jesus sat there and taught the people the first time when he uttered the Sermon on the Mount. If this is true, I have to tell you that even today with all the tourism that takes place in Palestine, there isn’t much around where Jesus taught. There was certainly even less 2,000 years ago.

The little village of Magdala is just a few miles to the west. The villages of Capernaum and Bethsaida are a few miles to the east, but there is nothing there. You try to imagine, “Who came out here to listen to Jesus?” It would have been people from the villages. It would have been other fishermen, like James and John, Peter and Andrew. It would have been people who were craftsmen, like Jesus’ father, Joseph, people who worked with their hands. It would have probably been farmers or shepherds and women who worked in the village keeping their children or weaving or making earthenware or baking. These were people who just came from these rural remote villages and hungered for the word of God, and came out and listened to Jesus.

Jesus did not say to them, “Now write this down because in 15 or 20 centuries, people are going to get this and they are going to be sophisticated enough to start debating it.” What Jesus said to the crowd made sense to them. Jesus was not revered in his earthly ministry because he was always talking over the heads of the people that he talked to. He was revered because they got it. “Oh,” they said, “Nobody teaches like this. He doesn’t teach like the scribes and the Pharisees. He teaches with authority.” That means this sounds right, this rings true with the nature of God and “I get it. I get it! Nobody else teaches like this.”

So Jesus is teaching and the people understand. Now, why don’t we?

Let me use this as a way of trying to direct our thought. If you were to describe the best teacher, the best coach, instructor, whatever might have been in your life, the best mentor, did that person ask little of you or did that person ask a lot? If you remember, if you have been to college and you have already passed that point in your life and you remember how you signed up for classes, typically, you would stand around with other students who were taking the same major or same set of classes, and you would say, “Oh, I’ve got to take that next semester. Who should I have?”

“Oh, don’t take her. She’s hard. Don’t take her. She’ll make you work. You will have to write five papers in that class.”

And you would say, “OK. I’m not going to take her,” and you would sign up for somebody else. Then you would get your schedule back and you had her, and you would think, “Oh, what am I going to do? I have to have this to graduate. I will have to go ahead and take it.” And you take it, and yes it was hard; it was demanding and the professor that you didn’t want because you knew you were really going to have to work wound up being one of your favorite professors. Because in the demand, in the requirement that was so high, you learned more than you did anywhere else.

Some people will attest to the fact that they took another class with the same professor. They changed majors because somebody asked more of them.

Coaches, instructors, if you have taken music lessons, has your best teacher been the one who said, “Don’t worry about practicing this week?” Or is it the one who said, “What were you doing all week? I expected you to practice.”

Coaching. Was the coach that was your best coach the one who said, “Do y’all want to run sprints today? OK. Ya’ll just go on in.” Or was it the one who made you work, and work, and work, and work. We never drift higher in our aspirations, we never get better at the things that really mean a lot to us by being casual about it.

Tiger Woods is a very natural athlete but he is not the phenomenal golfer that he is simply because he is casual about his gift. The people who are really good work, and they work hard, and people who make them better are the ones who ask the most.

So on that Palestinian hillside, when Jesus sees the crowd gathering, he sees on their faces the same thing that he sees on our faces. And that is a desire, in the midst of all the things that we are involved in, and the things that we are busy about, and the things that distract us, he still sees it. There is this desire to be closer to God.

So on that Palestinian hillside, Jesus gives the people a great gift, and it is the gift of demand. It is the demand of the Gospel that calls people to live more righteously, to live more attuned to the heart of God. What they find and what we find is that if I move past just not killing people to not ridiculing people, to having a heart for people that won’t allow me to treat people that way, if I move past just not committing adultery to the place where I don’t think about people as objects or people in terms of my own use, but who they really are for a person, I find that every time I do that, I am somehow living closer to the heart of God. Every time I read in the Sermon what Jesus would have me do, every time I am successful, every time I am effective in living that way, I find that I am walking a path that draws me closer to the heart of the one who sent Christ for us. It is a great demand. You cannot read the Sermon on the Mount, or any of the Gospels really, without recognizing where the demand is, but the demand is our gift. Jesus knows what we really want, what we really need, more than anything else—to walk closer to God than I walked yesterday, to live nearer to the heart of Christ than I am right now, to feel the peace of Christ in a way that I have not known before.

So he says, “Come live this way. When you pray, don’t heap up empty phrases. Just say, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven . . .’ and come live this way. Don’t kill. Don’t retaliate. Turn the other cheek. Come live this way, no matter how hard it is.” You will find that in the fulfillment in your own life that you will find the fulfillment of what you always wanted, that the peace of Christ is real, that the spirit directs every day, and the love of God is closer now than it was before.

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

Back to top

2007© First Baptist Church of Rome Georgia