A Great Moral Teacher

One thing that virtually everyone agrees on is that Jesus is a great moral teacher.

And His magnum opus is the Sermon on the Mount.

From MLK to Ghandi to Leo Tolstoy, this famous discourse has made an impact upon Christians and non-Christians alike.

The sermon (a shortened summary of it at least) spans three chapters and is found in Matthew 5-7. It is Jesus’ longest, most detailed teaching in all the gospels and continues to be one of the most influential ethical teachings in the world. And while it plumbs the depths of ethics, philosophy, and theology, it is also extremely practical, dealing with everyday topics such as lust and sexuality, worry and anxiety, money, anger, and spiritual habits.

But Is It Attainable?

The Sermon is about what life in the Kingdom of God looks like—how we are to live as Jesus’ new community. And to be honest, Jesus sets the bar pretty high. Upon reading it, you might ask yourself, is he really expecting me to live up to all of this?

Interestingly, in pushing back against the claims of some that “Jesus is just a great moral teacher”, many Christians have swung the pendulum the complete opposite direction and they don’t really take His teachings as realistic guidelines to live by. Martyn Lloyd-Jones elaborates on this:

Is it not true to say of many of us that in actual practice our view of the doctrine of grace is such that we scarcely ever take the plain teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ seriously? We have so emphasized the teaching that all is of grace and that we ought not to try to imitate His example in order to make ourselves Christians, that we are virtually in the position of ignoring His teaching altogether and of saying that it has nothing to do with us because we are under grace. 

But in the Sermon itself, Jesus emphasizes repeatedly that these teachings are to be lived out by his disciples. And he ends the sermon like this: “everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on a rock” (Matt 7:24).

Of course, the only one who could completely abide by the Sermon on the Mount was the one giving it.

But just because we don’t perform it perfectly isn’t an excuse for making it irrelevant to our lives. (After all, the sermon shows us how we can receive mercy and be forgiven, because Jesus knew we’d need that, too.)

At the end of the day, we are to live out The Sermon on the Mount because it will lead us into a life of true flourishing.

The Path To Flourishing

That’s what we’re all after—the good life, a life of happiness and joy from the inside out.

And the sermon is presented as the path to exactly that—a narrow and difficult one at that (Matt 7:13-14). It’s extremely counter-cultural at times, and maybe even counter-intuitive to the way we’ve been wired to think the world works. But in it, Jesus shows us how to deal with our anger, battle against anxiety, rule over our desires, steward our money, and much, much more.

So journey with us over the next 10 weeks as we unpack why following this path is the best way to live. And we’ll see that while Jesus is way more than just a moral teacher—he is certainly not less than that.