01.20.2025
Explore God’s boundless love and transformative light, guiding us from darkness to eternal life. ✨
Sermon Series:
Summary:
The sermon discusses Dallas Willard's profound impact on the church through his teachings on spiritual formation and discipleship. The speaker focuses on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, as the "seminal teaching of Jesus" that reveals how to live according to the way of Jesus.
The key themes explored are:
Transcript:
A name that you need to know. Dallas Willard. You've probably heard us quote him before. In my opinion, this might seem like an overstatement or overselling, but I think that it's true. Dallas Willard was a philosopher professor at the University of Southern California for many years, renowned in his philosophical contributions to the field of philosophy, but most known for his contributions to the church in the area of spiritual formation or maybe as we might know, a better term, discipleship being formed into the image of Jesus for the sake of the world. In my mind, Dallas Willard with his contributions to discipleship and spiritual formation puts him in line with Albert Einstein and his contributions to physics, Plato and Aristotle and their contributions to philosophy. He is that important of a voice for when it comes to us as people learning what does it mean to follow Jesus and how the Holy Spirit works in our lives to bring about the character of Jesus. A brilliant man, anything that you could get your hands on that he wrote is worth reading. At one point in time, he was asked to explain Jesus in one word, just for a moment. Allow yourself to think of what that one word would be if you were asked that question. He thought about it and the word that he uttered surprised me when I read about this, but has profoundly influenced me in many, many ways since hearing what he offered in response to offer a definition of Jesus or describe Jesus in one word, what would it be? His word was, can I get a drum roll?
Relaxed, relaxed? I would've offered probably love, maybe God, his word was relaxed.
I want to just encourage us to sort of sit with that and even beyond this morning, sit with that and understand the profound nature of Dallas Willard was describing about Jesus and being simply relaxed as we move through the Sermon on the Mount in our series, the Narrow Way, that's ultimately what we are working towards is being people who are able to live relaxed. Now, I'm not talking about sitting by and watching the world pass by, I'm not talking about any sort of laziness or any of those words that might come to our mind when we think about relaxed, I mean trusting, having a trust that abounds so much that the general state of existence that we have is being relaxed. That is the profound nature that Jesus lived by and I think in many ways what he is calling us to in the Sermon on the Mount, this is the seminal teaching of Jesus, the foundational teaching of Jesus that helps us understand the scale on which the fruit of our lives is measured.
This is the most comprehensive set of teachings that we have on if you want to practically know, what does it mean to live according to the way of Jesus, that this is the way in which you should follow it is the measurement that we should seek to live up to as we think about the Holy Spirit working in our lives. The Sermon on the Mount is the tool by which we gauge how well the Spirit is able to work in our lives. The Sermon on the Mount is not addressing who will go to heaven and who won't. That's not what Jesus is talking about. It is about who will live their lives today rooted in the kingdom of God here in this moment where we reside and here is why that is important because the Kingdom of Heaven is permeated into our lives by the kneading work of the Holy Spirit.
One of my family's favorite traditions is making grilled pizza. We do not have a pizza oven. I would love to have a pizza oven, but we do not. So we do the next best thing. We grill our pizza on our kettle grill, our charcoal kettle, and it poses a problem for us because as you can imagine, if you have a dough that is too moist, if you go to put that on your grill, it's just going to seep down in between the grates of your grill and create a mess that you're not going to be able to get off in a way that you would be able to enjoy the pizza. So I have ventured into the art of making pizza dough to try and come up with the dough that has the perfect consistency that will remain light and fluffy, yet sturdy enough to hold the ingredients of the pizza and also not slip through the grill grates as it sits on my grill.
I am not a baker. I do not know anything really about yeast. I do not know anything about dough. Everything that I have learned, I have sort of haphazardly found and my work is still inconsistent. One day I hope to be able to mature in my bread making skills, but where I am, it works probably about 80% of the time. But when you have yeast and you are working it into a dough, the only way for the yeast to do its thing properly to make the crust that is light and fluffy, but also sturdy enough to hold the ingredients of the pizza, is to incorporate the yeast into the entirety of the dough. So you have to knead it, you have to work it throughout the dough. Now is that illustration for us of how the Holy Spirit works in our lives. It is not enough to just agree with the beliefs of the church.
It's not enough just to agree that Jesus is God's son. The spirit has to incorporate deep down into the most hidden parts of our lives, the yeast of the kingdom of God, which then allows us to live according to the fruits of the kingdom of God, and that is what Jesus is speaking about here in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus ends this sermon by calling people who will live according to these ways which we are going to be studying from now until November. He says, this is a narrow road. Now, it's not narrow in the sense that it is in the negative sense of that word. It's not being narrow-minded or being close-minded or being holier than thou. It's not any of those types of things. It is narrow because there are few people who are willing to walk down this road, and here is the reason why, because this road is not always easy.
In fact, a lot of what Jesus is doing in this Sermon on the Mount is imploring us to count the costs that we will experience along the way. If you study spiritual growth and read through the wisdom of people like Dallas Willard or Eugene Peterson to be sort of modern examples or going back further all the way back to the beginnings of riding for the church with the Desert Fathers, there are essentially three things that almost every generation of followers of Jesus have agreed upon, promote spiritual growth. Those three things that are kind of passed along in the tradition of what does it mean to be formed and to the image of God for the sake of others. Those three things are prayer, not just putting out praying over your list of things that are concerning to you, but silent and contemplative prayer where we allow God to form and shape us in the innermost parts of our lives Community not just knowing people but opening yourself up, committing yourself to be known by others.
And the third one is suffering. Suffering that we experience in life. These are three things that result in or open up the opportunity for spiritual growth. Now, these three things are difficult. Prayer is difficult to commit yourself to observing silence and praying and allowing God to reveal himself through prayer is a difficult journey. It is not easy. It requires patience. It requires perseverance. It requires resilience, community, having people that you know and is important and not always that difficult, but committing to people and opening yourself up to again, not only know them but to be known. Many of us sort of have a level that we are comfortable in going to, but in order for us, for the spirit to work in our lives and bring about spiritual growth, oftentimes we have to move past whatever that level is and to be fully known by God, by ourselves, and then by one another.
And then suffering sort of self-explanatory, right? No one wants to endure suffering, but it creates opportunity for us to grow. This is why the road is narrow, because it is easy for us to settle ourselves into a life of perceived comfort instead of journeying in these difficult ways forward. But the result often of us pursuing comfort is that we then, in order to not be uncomfortable, end up either insulating ourselves or isolating ourselves from prayer community and suffering. And in that the opposites of the spirit began to display themselves in our lives and by the opposites of the spirit, we know that the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Did I get 'em all? Ms. Mary? We know that those are the fruits of the spirit so that we know in contrast, the fruit of brokenness are things like anxiety and bitterness and judgment and fear and so on.
So those things begin to permeate out of our lives when we live isolated and insulated from prayer, community and suffering. When we seek above all to live comfortable lives, therefore we are unable to find ourselves in a position to be able to relax in the truth of the kingdom of God. If our understanding of the narrow way is expanding love and deepening peace and unending joy and contentment in our lives, we will never be able to have those things realized in our lives if we are seeking comfort above all else. So Jesus stated what Colby read earlier, he referenced a proclamation made by the prophet Isaiah many days before Jesus came into the world. And the reason why I thought it was very appropriate for us to read this is because there are a lot of similarities here in what Jesus is saying and Luke and also here in Matthew, and we began to pick up on this theme that Jesus is suggesting that the entry into his kingdom is a reordering of what we know and believe and think about as true.
It's not about pity. Sometimes when we think about these types of people that Jesus is talking about as we'll read here, when he offers these blessed statements or in this passage when he's proclaiming the good news to the poor and freedom for the prisoner and recovery of sight for the blind, this is not about having pity for people who are in these situations. It's about leaning into this total reordering from what we know to be true with our eyes and to understand and experience what is true in contrast in the kingdom of heaven or in the way of Jesus. Discipleship is at its core, a reordering for us. One of the main ways in which this reordering unfolds in our lives is in the area of the stories that we tell, stories that we tell ourselves and stories that we tell others, stories that we believe about the situations that others find themselves in.
The stories that we tell need to be reordered. I don't like to get into partisan ideas on Sunday mornings and try to act like that. We're all going to agree on those things because we are not. But if there is anything that is true about our time and place and country is that we need some new stories to be told. We are caught up in the same old stories on repeat, and we need new stories. And this is a profound way in which the church can lead the way in our culture, in our wildest imaginations. The best that we can come up with oftentimes is that we would accomplish enough and earn enough and achieve enough and be liked enough and be absent from problems enough that that would result in some sort of good life. But Jesus challenges these common stories that we tell ourselves.
He challenges the wisdom of our cultures and challenges, our pursuits in life to be reordered by his kingdom. And so Jesus, again, leading up to this sermon on the Mount, offers these statements where he says, blessed are and then leads us to whom he views as blessed. That word blessed that he uses in the Greek is macario. It's translated in these three ways, both in this form and its Hebrews form Hebrew form. Blessed, happy or fortunate. Blessed, I think is a loaded word that we've oftentimes struggle to understand. Happy is a word that we, I think usually depends on circumstances. Fortunate though, I think is really what Jesus is trying to help us see and think about how that changes as we read through this, think about how that reorders, what we would say leads to people who are fortunate. This is a complete and utter reordering of what we see to be true with our eyes and with our culture.
And Jesus is leading us in this moment to try and help us understand that in the kingdom of God, we talked about this last week, we don't work for blessing. We don't work to achieve blessing. We work from blessing. For some of us, this can be a huge hurdle to climb. We are confident in our abilities, in our accomplishments. We like to consider ourselves as people who can get things done, but in the kingdom of God, that is irrelevant because you cannot earn the blessings of the kingdom of God. They are free to all who will receive them. No matter how much or hard you work, you cannot earn something that is free to all. You cannot earn blessing, and this is probably the most important part. You can't earn it, and your possessions or experiences in life are not indicators of blessing. You can't earn blessing and your experience or possessions are not indicators of being blessed.
So here is how Jesus defines being blessed. It compels us to measure our blessedness by our need for God, our blessedness, for our need for God. God rejects our cultural versions of success and flips them upside down, encouraging us, leading us to see the reality of the kingdom of heaven, which is completely different from the stories that we tell ourselves in our brokenness. This one, we're going to look at four of these blessed statements and we've kind of grouped them together based on how they relate to each other. So if you will allow me, I dunno if we need to take a vote for this, but if you'll allow me, we're going to read verses 3, 4, 5. We're going to save verse six four next week, and then we're going to skip to verse seven. Is that okay? Can we do that? Do we need to take a vote? So we'll read this here together. So Jesus sat down and here is what he taught. Matthew chapter five, verse three. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. What Jesus is leading us to and this grouping of blessed statements is this weakness and the kingdom of God is greater than strength. Weakness is greater than strength. Now, these are definitely unfamiliar power dynamics in the patterns of brokenness because weakness and brokenness does not lead towards strength. We have theories that guide the patterns of brokenness that make us live as if those that are weak will not survive. So we are taught fake it till you make it. If you are not strong, act like you are strong and at least exude self-sufficiency. But in the kingdom of heaven, it is not that that gets us through. In contrast, it is tenderness and grace.
So let's work through these real quick. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Now, I apologize for having to move quick, but we're trying to get through these so we can have enough time for prayers today. But pour in spirit in Matthew, Jesus teaches these words. It's very similar to what we read about in Luke chapter four. Also last week we read Luke chapter six, which is known as the Sermon on the plane. We can get into a debate on whether the sermon on the Mount and the sermon on the plane are two different instances of Jesus teaching or if they're the same and just sort of different points of emphasis being written by the writers. My opinion is that Jesus probably taught on these things often more than what is recorded because as we said, these are the seminal teachings of the kingdom of heaven, the seminal teachings of Jesus. If that is true, then more than likely he spoke about them in depth many times. And Matthew, Jesus uses the phrase poor in spirit. And Luke Jesus uses the phrase just simply poor Matthew, poor in spirit. Luke probably emphasizing more of a material poverty.
We don't get to choose which one we are focused on. And the reason why is because of this. If you step back into the tradition of the Psalms, which is sort of the prayer book of the Bible, the cries out for God to intervene in the world and in the lives of people. When they talked about being poor, they talked about both being poor in spirit and also being materially poor. Both were putting them in places where they were in need of God. For instance, king David Israel's sort of George Washington figure definitely did not experience material poverty yet in Psalm 51, he cried out God, what you require is being poor in spirit, being broken and contrite. So there's a poverty of spirit, and then there's a material poverty. Either one. Jesus is saying, this creates the opportunity for blessing.
Jesus sees us in our poverty, whether it be poor in spirit or materially, and leads us to recognizing our need for God. Then Jesus says, blessed are those who mourn. Now, according to our culture, we might say blessed are those who don't have any problems. Blessed are those who move past adversity quickly. And if we are not careful, we can equate the lack of diversity to faithfulness to God. But that is not reality. Jesus elevates those who mourn. Why? Because God is near to the broken hearted, and mourning is the gateway for us to encounter healing. In the Old Testament, there's a book called Lamentations. The book of Lamentations is all about a spiritual discipline known as lament and lament essentially is airing your grievances to God. Now, this is not God. I went to my favorite restaurant and I received poor service. It's not that level of grievance.
It is something so much deeper, something at the core of who we are that says, this is not right. This should not be inviting God and in some places, which makes me personally uncomfortable, even demanding God to intervene in a situation that is the process of lament. I was a youth pastor for many years, and as a youth pastor, you have a lot of things to complain about. Parents with teenagers know that to be true, teenagers are great, but you have to have a particular set of skills in order to work specifically with teenagers. One of the most difficult moments of my life, I received a phone call at a time when everyone should be sleeping. And I'm an early riser. Maybe you are an early riser. This phone call occurred even before early risers Get up. And the reason for this call was that one of the teenagers in my youth group had tragically passed away in a car accident.
And I remember throwing on some clothes and going to the family's house and sitting with the parents as they tried to make any sort of sense of this fresh and raw tragedy and trying to be present with them and pray for them. And I had to go from there to the church to begin to prepare for this funeral of this person who died way too young on my way from the house to the church building. It was a time of lament. You know it's lament because you don't have to be taught to lament. It just comes out of you. God, why in the world did this happen? What is going on? What is good about this? How is there any sort of sense to be made of this tragic situation that is lament? And what we find is that as difficult and horrible as situations that lead us to mourning might be they open up a gateway for us to encounter God like nothing else. God does not cause bad things to happen, but God is with us through it and leads us in ways that otherwise we could not experience. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. This is a very one that is often misunderstood. Meekness is not weakness. Those two things don't go together. Jesus was meek,
Meaning that he would not allow his circumstances and situations what he faced to control his actions and behavior and the way in which he interacted with his neighbor. He at all times loved his neighbor and elevated them above himself. Jesus says that the meek will inherit the earth. Meekness is not people who are going to be kicked out and put to the bottom and constantly overlooked. They are not victims. They are victors. They will one day inherit the earth In our day and age, the loud, the brash, the aggressive. They're the ones who tend to rule the day. But in the kingdom of God, bravado is seen truthfully as masking weakness and gentleness is what is offered to heal that witch is broken. Last but not least, for the day, blessed are the merciful. Our world says. What goes around comes around. You get the energy you put out into the world.
God is instead an endless foun of mercy, mercy upon mercy upon mercy. You can never get to the depth of God's mercy because it just continues to go deeper and deeper and deeper. And that is good news for all of us. So when we understand the depths of God's mercy, we can begin to see this unending foun as a way for us to receive the blessings of the kingdom of heaven. Trust God's mercy for yourself, for your neighbors, for the world in which we live. If you're going to trust anything, trust in God's unending foun of mercy. So let's sort of bring this to a conclusion for today. Remember we said weakness is greater than strength. Weakness is greater than strength.
Oftentimes, the things that we are pursuing in our lives, if we are not careful, instead of leading us to a place where we allow our weakness to be our strength, it will put us in a place where we are isolated and insulated, isolated from God, isolated from ourselves, even isolated from our neighbors. But Jesus is compelling us to a reordering a different way. And the question for us is what if instead of that a community of people sought to be vulnerable with God, with themselves, with one another and collectively risked God's mercy in extravagant ways?
This quote is what I want to end on from theologian Ronald Rohe. He writes this, we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow freely. The mercy of God is as acceptable, accessible, sorry, as the nearest water tap. And we like Isaiah, must proclaim a mercy that has no price tag come without money and without virtue, come everyone and drink freely of God's mercy. The decision we make is if we have received this blessedness, do we hold onto it and try to keep it for ourselves? Which by the way is a pretty good sign. You're not on the narrow way of Jesus. Or do we risk the mercy that we have received for the sake of our neighbors for us today? If blessedness is measured in the kingdom of God by our need for God, then this moment of prayer is perfectly appropriate for us.
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