Great Words from Philip Yancey - The Sermon on the Mount

In The Jesus I Never Knew Philip Yancey exposes his own puzzlement with the Sermon on the Mount -- especially the Beatitudes.

Here are some of his thoughts regarding how the sermon describes Christ's dual message: absolute Ideals and absolute Grace.



  

     For years I had felt so unworthy before the absolute ideals of the Sermon on the Mount that I had missed any notion of grace.

     Once I understood the dual message, however, I went back and found the message of grace gusts through the entire speech.

     It begins with the Beatitudes--Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek; blessed are the desperate--and it moves toward the Lord's Prayer-- Forgive us our debts...deliver us from the evil one.

     Jesus began this great sermon with gentle words for those in need...and continued on with a prayer that has formed a model for all twelve-step groups. "One day at a time," say the alcoholics in AA; "Give us this day our daily bread," say the Christians. Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of us.


     For years I had thought of the Sermon on the Mount as a blueprint for human behavior that no one could possibly follow. Reading it again, I found that Jesus gave those words, not to cumber us, but to tell us what God is like.

     The character of God is the subject of the Sermon on the Mount.

     Why should we love our enemies? Because our merciful Father causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good. Why be perfect? Because God is perfect. Why store up treasures in heaven? Because the Father lives there and will lavishly reward us

     Why live without fear and worry? Because the same God who clothes the lilies and the grass of the field has promised to take care of us.

     How could I have missed it? Jesus did not proclaim the Sermon on the Mount so that we could furrow our brows in despair over our failure to achieve perfection.

     He gave it to impart to us God's Ideal toward which we should never stop striving, but also to show us that none of us will ever reach that Ideal...it forces us to recognize the great distance between God and us, and any attempt to reduce that distance by somehow moderating or watering-down its claims misses the point altogether.

     ...The Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and covetous. 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.

Discarding the Valuable, Keeping the Worthless

                                                          Holding on to the Worthless

The weight of gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents [about 25 tons], not including the revenues from merchants and traders from all the Arabian kings and governors of the land.

King Solomon made two hundred large shields of hammered gold; six hundred bekas [7 1/2 pounds] went into each shield. He also made three hundred small shields of hammered gold with three minas [3 3/4 pounds] of gold in each shield.

Then the king made a great throne inlaid with ivory and overlaid with gold...all King Solomon's goblets were gold, and all the household articles in the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon were pure gold.

The king had a fleet of trading ships at sea along the coasts of Hiram. Once every three years it returned, carrying gold, silver and ivory, and apes and baboons....

Year after year, everyone who came brought a gift -- articles of silver and gold, robes, weapons, and spices and horses and mules....

King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings.... 
                           1 Kings 10:14-25



Later, after Solomon's death, his son, Rehoboam, ascended to the throne.


Here's what happened:


After Rehoboam's position as king was established and he became strong, he and all Israel with him abandoned the law of the LORD.

Then the prophet Shemaiah came to Rehoboam and to the leaders of Judah who had assembled in Jerusalem...and told them, "This is what the LORD says, 'You have abandoned Me; therefore I now abandon you to Shishak.'"


Because they had been unfaithful to the LORD, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem in the fifth year of King Rehoboam.


With 1200 chariots and sixty thousand horsemen and the innumerable troops of Libyans, Sukkites and Cushites that came with him from Egypt, he captured the fortified cities of Judah and came as far as Jerusalem....

When Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, he carried all the treasures of the temple of the LORD and the treasures of the royal palace.

He took everything, including the gold shields Solomon had made.

So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace.

Whenever the king went to the LORD's temple, the guards went with him, bearing the shields, and afterwards they returned them to the guard room.

    -- 2 Chronicles 12:1-11


Their king had abandoned the law of the LORD (the text says, the king "and all Israel with him") and so lost his country's priceless heritage...all that Rehoboam's grandfather, King David, had set aside for the temple and royal treasuries, and all that his father, King Solomon, had later acquired...all gone...in the fifth year of his reign...what several generations accomplished was squandered in just a few years...

And those solid gold shields....

It's fascinating to imagine -- the guards probably polished the bronze to shining perfection -- but they were still bronze, not gold!

Who were they trying to fool?

So the guards, who had previously carried solid gold shields to escort their King, now carried cheap imitations!




Do we do this? Let what is priceless slip through our fingers and hold on tenaciously to what is without value? Polish it up and try to make it look good?

Not acknowledging that what we are grasping is only a substitute, a counterfeit, not the real thing!

Letting go of the important and holding on to the trivial.

It's time to reverse that - right now!

Mid-way to Christmas!

Six months from today is Christmas  - the happiest, most glorious time of the year!

I think I "Need a little Christmas now!"

Yes, right now!

I am putting on my Christmas music and singing loudly - and remembering that old wonderful Christmas carol, "What Child is this?"




Remember that 2nd verse:

 Why lies Him here in such mean estate

Where ox and ass are feeding

Good Christians fear:

For sinners, here, the silent Word is pleading.

I had two thoughts:

(1) the glorious fact of our rescue plan...

designed by God before the creation of the world...

described to mankind at the beginning of history...

reminded to mankind continually throughout history....

revealed to mankind in the incarnation of Jesus Christ the Word....

explained to mankind through the

written record of the New Testament...

and finally, totally, accomplished through the coronation of Jesus Christ as Lord of all.

Then "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord." (Philippians 2)

When Mary laid Him there in that manger, when the shepherds came to worship, when Joseph stood by to protect Him, in that tiny Body God's grace was already being worked out.

(2) God loves to surprise us!

Think of it!  The Creator--God--King arriving in Bethlehem of Judea in a stable! Who would ever make up a story like that!

And then in the last days John sees the throne of God and the elders call, "Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed."

And what does he see: "Then I saw a Lamb, looking as it it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne" (Revelation 5).

Not a fearful mighty Lion, but a wounded Lamb....the Lamb that was slain from the beginning of the world (Revelation 13).

God's amazing rescue plan -- wrapped in a surprise package -- and so we can now begin to glorify God and enjoy Him forever!

May the awe and wonder of Christmas astonish us every day!

Babette Prepares a Feast!

Babette Hersant, in 1871,  flees a terrifying life of violence in a French commune.  She finds herself in a small village in north Denmark.

The villagers, hardened by hypocrisy and self-centeredness,  experience a loveless, cheerless religion.

She takes up residence in the home of two woeful sisters, Martine and Filippa, daughters of the founder of their bleak religious order.

Babette suddenly becomes the winner of a lottery,
(10,000 francs) and keeping her winnings a secret,
decides to offer her community an extravagant French dinner.

The lottery ticket is her only tie to her previous life in Paris -- a gift from a friend who keeps renewing it every year.

She could have used the money to return to her life in Paris, escaping from the joyless existence of her village life. She had been there 14 years and certainly going back to Paris must have had some appeal.

But, instead, she decides to gift the entire community with a fabulous meal, one that they would never have had occasion to experience.

(Babette had been a master chef during her earlier life in Paris).

Using her new wealth, she has all the necessary items shipped in by boat: ice, dishes, fine linen, cheeses and meats, cases of wine, and a very large turtle--destined for the soup pot.

The opulent dinner scene reminds us of the splendor of a wedding banquet, an image also presented for us in the Bible to describe God's fellowship with his people, when we are brought, with great rejoicing, safely into His heavenly kingdom.

The extravagant richness and joy of the meal transforms the guests from gloomy and petty souls into people who have tasted divine mercy.


Their eyes and now open, realize they are the recipients of an experience they could never have imagined.

They are changed, transformed at the magnificent display of Babette's feast.

One guest, General Lowenhielm, says, "The moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude...grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty."

God's grace is seen, by most in the room, for the first time, as God who reveals His love, even partially, in a meal prepared with love and sacrifice.

Babette's Feast was movie produced in 1987, based on a screen play written by Isak Dinesen.

What more joyous words than from the General: Grace is infinite....demands nothing from us but that we await it with confidence and acknowledge it with gratitude....

"So what", we might say, "It was just meal!"

Perhaps.

But it is a reminder of another meal, two thousand years ago, in an  upstairs room, when Jesus had dinner with His disciples....

When it was time, he sat down, all the apostles with him, and said, "You've no idea how much I have looked forward to eating this Passover meal with you before I enter my time of suffering. It's the last one I'll eat until we all eat it together in the kingdom of God."

Taking bread, he blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, given for you. Eat it in my memory."

He did the same with the cup, after supper, saying, "This is the new covenant written in my blood, blood poured out for you."
 (Luke 22)


God's infinite grace...explained at a simple meal, a meal prepared with love and sacrifice.

How Paul Prayed for His Friends

 How Paul prayed for his Friends at Colossae --

    "We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please Him in every way" Colossians 1:9-10).

  He didn't pray they would be obedient -- we can tell from the context that they were already obedient to His Spirit. He just wants them to know His will, through the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives,  and then they would obey and live lives pleasing to God "in every way"!

  We should pray that prayer for each other. God's Spirit supplies the wisdom and understanding, we obey, and then we can live our lives glorifying and pleasing Him!

  Some day we may hear His voice, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the glory of your Lord" (Matthew 25:21).

   Remember the catechism? "What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever." That's how we do it!