Hanging on the words of Jesus
Following Jesus is both hard and exciting.
Last Sunday, we finished our 11th sermon exploring the implications of the Sermon on the Mount for our life of discipleship by looking at Matthew 5:21-22. The heights and depths of Jesus’ teaching is staggering. We will undoubtedly cover more ground than two verses per week in the weeks ahead, but my aim is that we lean hard into these words of Jesus – the most famous sermon ever preached – for the next several months.
Let me encourage you in a couple of directions as we engage the Sermon on the Mount:
1) Rediscover your love affair with Jesus.
Occasionally in the church, one hears about so and so having a crisis of faith or wandering away from regular church attendance. “Suzy” experiences a deep hurt in her life and begins to drift away, “Bob” feels underwhelmed by the church service itself, “Jill” lets dominant cultural narratives erode her confidence in the Word of God, and “Charles” would rather fish or play golf on Sunday mornings. Each individual may have attended church faithfully for a season of life. Now, it’s the last activity – if they are honest – they want to do on a Sunday morning.
Beneath the surface of complaints against the church or complaints against the worship service or complaints against the preacher is often a deeper soul-level reality: often, the person’s love affair with Jesus has cooled. The embers have died down. The soul-level fascination with following Jesus is choked out by the affairs and busyness of this life. Messianic pretenders parade with frequency across the dashboard of our lives: political ideologies, family obligations, and self-indulgent relaxation all seem, at times, to compete with Jesus or even offer better promises of meaning, belonging, and rest than following Jesus.
If you feel yourself barely hanging onto the church, becoming bored (or frustrated) with the church, or often (or occasionally) thinking to yourself “is church really worth it?”, let me counsel you in simple terms:
Rediscover your love affair with Jesus.
Meditate on God’s great love for you in Jesus (John 15:13; Rom 5:8; Eph 2:4-5; 1 John 3:1; 4:19). Be amazed again at Jesus’ unique compassion in the gospels (Luke 7:13; Mt. 8:16-17; 9:36; 14:14; cf. Heb. 4:15). Try applying the meekness of Jesus to your life for even a week (Mt. 5:5; 27:12-14; Phil 2:7; Is. 53:7). Seek to withdraw to a quiet place to be with Jesus (Mark 6:31; Luke 5:16). Stoke the Jesus-centered fire again, pour cold water on the secondary issues that are distracting you (whether inside or outside of the church), and hear Jesus’ words afresh to you:
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Mt 16:24-25)
A love affair with Jesus is a promise to find true life, true rest, true meaning, and true belonging. Following Jesus takes you to the center of your true identity.
I dare say that every child of God faces the dull-drums of being a Christian. Being a Christ-follower is hard; soul-work is hard to eat at the drive-thru (with the quickened pace and busyness that characterize many of our lives). During such times, be careful of blaming secondary issues. The church is an easy target because it’s never a perfect place, it’s filled with imperfect people, and it never seems to cater precisely to all your individual preferences!
As we journey through the Sermon on the Mount, my hope for you is simple: Be fascinated again with Jesus. Admire his qualities. Be intrigued again by his teachings. Be truly offended by the radical nature of his kingdom. Be driven to despair by the inescapable acknowledgement that you don’t measure up and desperately need his grace. Be captivated by a love that experiences the cross and a joy and peace that promises a resurrection.
Because what you need is what the church needs: continual renewal centered upon a simple love affair with Jesus.
2) Read along with the Sermon on the Mount.
I became fascinated with Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount as early as my high school days. Hot embers were placed in my soul and a fascination with Jesus and his teaching was partly driven by reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s penetrating study of the Sermon on the Mount in his classic book The Cost of Discipleship.
At the heart of Bonhoeffer’s clarion call in The Cost of Discipleship is a simple admonishment to “get on with it” in obeying Jesus:
“Humanly speaking, it is possible to understand the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. But Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience – not interpreting or applying it, but doing and obeying it. That is the only way to hear his words. He does not mean for us to discuss it as an ideal. He really means for us to get on with it.” (Bonhoeffer)
Currently, our elders are reading The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard which is also a captivating study on the Sermon on the Mount. Dallas Willard is a master-teacher in the art of spiritual formation. How does the soul come alive? How does abiding in Jesus allow us to enter into “the eternal kind of life now”? Dallas Willard longs to connect our life of faith with a robust apprenticeship of Jesus:
“The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.” (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy).
So tolle lege – “take and read”. The Cost of Discipleship and The Divine Conspiracy would both (or either) make great companions for your journey with Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount.