And I invite you to turn in your copy of God's Word to the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew chapter 4, we'll be looking at verses 23 through the very beginning of chapter 5, verse 2. Now, when we look at chapter 5, that next chapter, that's the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. And you know, the Gospel of Matthew is structured into five major discourses, five major teaching portions. And the Sermon on the Mount is not only the first of those, but it's the most well-known of those. And not just in the gospel of Matthew, but really it is the most famous sermon of all. It is the one that you always hear people quoting, or very often misquoting, and is often appealed to as the gold standard of Christianity. You want to know what Christianity is about? You'll hear people say, read the Sermon on the Mount. Now, in order for us to understand the Sermon on the Mount as we begin it next week in detail, we're going to need to understand the background, the nature of the ministry of Jesus. Here in chapter 4, verse 23 that we're about to read, Matthew gives us an overview, a summary that encompasses all of Jesus' ministry, and it's not accidental that he includes it right before the Sermon on the Mount. He does so because you will not be able to understand the content and the thrust of the Sermon on the Mount until you understand what it is that Jesus is doing and what is the nature of His ministry. So that's what we're going to look at. So let's turn to chapter 4. We'll start in verse 23. And he, that is Jesus, went throughout all Galilee teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures and paralytics, and he healed them. And great crowds followed Him from Galilee and Decapolis and from Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan. Seeing the crowds, He went up on the mountain, and when He sat down, His disciples came to Him, and He opened His mouth and taught them." Thus far, the reading of God's Word, and may He bless it to our hearing, especially as it's preached to us this morning. People of God, as I said at the outset of our service, this has been quite a week. We have seen a young man, a fellow believer, gunned down, and we have mourned his death and continue to mourn his death. And it's not only because we know and recognize, or rather because we know him personally and recognize him as an individual friend, but because we see the things that Charlie Kirk stood for, the things that he openly proclaimed about Jesus Christ, and the implications of what that means to live in a fallen world. And we can see how these actions really have changed and really make the world not what we have wanted it to be. So often we seem to live in an illusion that life is okay and then these moments remind us that the world is seriously broken. That's why we live in an age of cynicism. People have become disillusioned with the world. Each generation that comes along becomes disaffected, disillusioned with the world that they inherit. When they start out young, we're all idealistic. We get taught this is the way that you should behave, this is the way that things should be. But as we get older, we begin to realize that the world fails to live up to those standards, fails to live up to those ideals. When we had the baby boomer generation, They protested against the horrors of war that they saw in Vietnam. When their kids, the millennial generation, came along, they repudiated the greedy affluence of the West, which their baby boomer parents had introduced. And now the current generation, the so-called Gen Z generation, wants to confront both senseless fighting and avarice. But when you look at all of these different generations, all of them being disillusioned with what they see in the world, behind all of that is a hunger for true love, is a hunger for true righteousness. Even people who have said hateful things this week, and you know what they've said and you've seen it. When you dig below the surface, you realize that what they're trying to do is they're looking for something more that's out there. We have a desire as a people to look beyond what John Stott called the superficiality of both irreligious materialism with all its focus on getting stuff and religious conformism. The people who protest, the people who fight back have come to a recognition that this world is not the way that it ought to be. There is an awareness that there should be something more. But we don't find it. And because we don't find it, we end up with these feelings of alienation, of not belonging. C.S. Lewis talks about this quite a bit in his various works. That you often feel like you are on the outside. And this is what creates that disaffected feeling. And then you find others who also feel like they're on the outside. And that begins that movement. Sadly what happens is that longing that we have for something more and something better gets filled with all sorts of wrong things. We know the obvious ones. Drugs and alcohol and sex. Those are the easy ones to point out. But we can fill it with other things. With false spirituality. With false religions. And with activism. Where once we realize that things are not the way they are, we make certain viewpoints and ideologies our religion, our philosophy of life, and we live for them as religiously as any Christian does. And that's the world in which we live. Now, this search for another way of living, for something better, really presents a wonderful opportunity for the church, a wonderful opportunity for us to come and present the gospel. But to our shame, the church has become no different from the world. We have become indistinguishable from the world. One of the reasons that we studied the book of Haggai before we started looking at the Gospel of Matthew is that we wanted to see that there really are two kinds of worldliness. There's the secular worldliness that we all think of. When we think of something that's worldly, then it must be secular, against God. But as we discover in the book of Haggai, there is also a religious worldliness that exists. And too often, the church and the world really seem like just two versions of the same thing, indistinguishable. There's nothing more damaging than when an unbeliever comes to a Christian and says, but you're no different than anybody else. We can see that all throughout the church today. One of the things in which is most evident, not the only thing, but now that the divorce rate is actually higher amongst professing Christians than amongst those who don't profess Christ. We have become just like them, so why should they listen to us? The Sermon on the Mount, however, in this sermon, Jesus is calling us to a different way of living than that of the world. He calls us to a different way of being human. in our relationships, and how we treat one another, and how we deal with conflict, and how we deal with hurt and disappointment. Jesus is essentially calling us in the Sermon on the Mount to a Christian counterculture. Young people, do you want to be counter-cultural? You don't need to dye your hair jet black and put on black nails or whatever that was, the golf movement. You don't need to go punk with your green hair and whatever, you know, and spikes on your shoes, or whatever the latest counter-cultural thing. If you really want to be counter-cultural, you become a follower of Jesus. That's what He's calling us to do. Every group and every family has its own way of doing things, right? If you've ever watched the hit TV show Blue Bloods, you know, Tom Selleck plays this family patriarch and the family gathers, all of them, the children and the grandchildren, around the table and they have a family dinner, which is a wonderful thing to see, and they bring up all the problems that they're facing in that episode, all the things that are happening to them, and you'll often hear them say, well, I could have dealt with it this way, the easy way, but that's not the way we Reagans, because that's the name of the family, the Reagan family, that's not the way we Reagans do things. And it's true, every family, every group has its particular way of doing things, and it's no different for the church. We have been called to be different from the world. We have been called to be holy. What is the word holy? It just means set apart, distinct. When God called His people to Himself, He drew them out of Egypt and brought them to Sinai to enter into covenant relationship with Him. In Leviticus 18, we read, the Lord told Moses to say to the Israelites, I am the Lord your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt where once you dwelt, nor may you do as they do in Canaan to which I am bringing you. You must not conform to their customs. You must keep my laws and conform faithfully to my statutes. I am the Lord your God." He tells them, you are in a relationship with me. I have bound you to myself. You're not to behave like these people whom you have left behind, nor are you to behave like these people into whose land you will soon be, but rather you are to do things differently according to my statutes. You are a unique people." Sadly, as we read the rest of the Old Testament, we see that Israel would periodically and repeatedly forget that unique character, much like we in the church do. But here in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out his manifesto for the Christian way of doing things, and it is radically different from the world. In fact, this new way of life is really the subject and the theme in all of Jesus' preaching. You can see it back in verse 17 of chapter 4, which we looked at several weeks ago, that little summary of Jesus' message where it said, from that time Jesus began to preach saying, repent for the kingdom of heaven, that is the kingdom of God, is at hand. You see, that's really what the Sermon on the Mount is about. It's about repentance. It's about turning away from the world and the way the world does things to a Christian counterculture in which we do things radically different. And all throughout that, all throughout the sermon, Jesus is emphasizing that the reason for that is because we who are His followers are citizens not of a kingdom of this world, but of the kingdom of God. And that kingdom is entirely different from any other that has ever come before it. Now, we've been saying from the beginning of the gospel of Matthew that the focus or one of the major themes of Matthew is to bring out the kingdom of God. And you can see it in that summary that we just read, repent for the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God is at hand. In verse 23 of our reading today, he went about proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. We have talked about the kingdom, we've referred to it, we've mentioned it, we've unpacked it a little bit. But today, as we dive deep into our preparation for the Sermon on the Mount, we're going to have to do an even deeper dive into the kingdom. So as we look at this passage that we're looking at today, we're going to see three things. We're going to see the coming of the kingdom, the character of the kingdom, and the conduct of the kingdom. The kingdom is coming. The coming of the kingdom. What is it like? The character of the kingdom. How are we to behave? The conduct of the kingdom. Those are the three things. Let's start with the coming of the kingdom. And one of the most important things that we can say about this kingdom is that it is not a physical kingdom. Scott read earlier from John 18.36 where Jesus says, my kingdom is not of this world. The kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom. And this is vastly important to know because, again, we look at the events of the past couple of weeks and we're already seeing people saying, how do we respond to the murder of a young and beautiful woman on a train in Charlotte? How do we respond to the political assassination of a young man? who was speaking to college students. How do we respond to these things? And already some of the responses that we're hearing are responses that are very much in line with the way the world does things. So we as believers have to recognize that Jesus is saying that we belong to his kingdom and this kingdom is not a physical kingdom, it is a spiritual kingdom. The kingdom of God is the rule or the reign of God. To belong to the kingdom of God means that you submit to the rule of God, that you belong to a people who have begun to let God be in control of their lives, let God be the one who reigns and rules over their lives. Where there is then rule, there's, of course, a ruler, and where there's a ruler, in this case, because it's a kingdom, there is a king, and that king is Jesus. So when we talk about the kingdom of God, we're talking about submitting to this king, to this Jesus. As Jesus himself would say, as he ascended into heaven, the very last portion of the gospel of Matthew, chapter 28, verse 18, he said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Not some authority, not all the authority on heaven, but not on earth, and all the authority on earth, but not in heaven, no, all authority. earthly, spiritual, whatever it might be, belongs to Him. The book of Revelation, verse 19 and 16, says that Jesus is the King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the one to whom we submit. And He has come telling us that that kingdom itself is now here. In verse 17 that we just alluded to a moment ago, He said, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It means it's near, it has arrived. And in our own passage in verse 23, we see his proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. It has arrived. And this is very significant, and we've alluded to it before, but we need to see it much more clearly now. That Jesus didn't just come announcing that the kingdom had arrived, but we have to recognize that it arrived because he had arrived. The kingdom is so closely tied to who he is. His very presence brings the kingdom because he is the king. As the third century Church Father Origen once said, Jesus is adobesileia, a Greek word that simply means the kingdom in himself. To put it another way, the kingdom of God is Jesus, and Jesus is the kingdom of God. So when He arrives, the kingdom of God arrives, and it breaks forth into our present reality with all its brokenness, and all its hurt, and all its tribulation. Where do we see that? Take a look at verse 23. It says that He went throughout all Galilee teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. You see three things that Jesus was doing here. He was teaching, He was proclaiming or preaching, same word, and He was healing. Teaching, proclaiming, and healing. Now, these are an excellent summary of the entirety of Jesus' ministry, but it's also evidence that the kingdom has arrived. The fact that he's doing these things points to the fact that he's not just talking about it, but the kingdom has actually arrived with him. Much later in chapter 12, verse 28, he says, if it is by the spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. When we look at verse 24, what does it say? His fame spread throughout all Syria and they brought Him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures and paralytics, and He healed them. These things that he was doing were evidence of the fact that with his coming the kingdom had arrived. Now why does that matter? It matters because it tells us that as he talks to us about the Sermon on the Mount and he talks about what life in the kingdom is supposed to be, he's talking about a kingdom that is not future but is a present reality. And what that means to us is that what he's telling us in the Sermon on the Mount about kingdom life is something that applies to us and how we are to live right now and how we are to deal with the events that we have seen unfolding in the last few weeks. The Sermon on the Mount applies to us right now. There are brothers and sisters in Christ. who teach the Sermon on the Mount is something future, because the kingdom in their minds is future. It only comes when Jesus returns, but that's not what we see here. Now, you might sit there and say, wait a minute, Pastor, I've read the Bible. There's clearly some references to the future of the kingdom right here in the Sermon on the Mount. Chapter 6, the Lord's Prayer, one of those petitions is what? Your kingdom come. Or how about in Luke chapter 22 verse 18 when the Lord is instituting the Lord's Supper and what does he say? From now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. Aha! The kingdom is future. How can you reconcile then the fact that those passages seem to point to the kingdom being future and yet we've looked at the fact that Jesus' very presence brings the kingdom already. It's not a contradiction, but it does introduce something that if you grab a hold of it, it'll really help you to understand all of the New Testament. Everything, actually even the Old Testament, it all falls into place. It's a concept that we say that the character of the kingdom of God is already, but not yet. And you'll hear us talk about that all the time, especially as we go through this gospel, but even when you look at the New Testament as a whole, the already not yet. is a principle that will help you understand all the different things that you read, not just in the Gospels, but in Paul, and in John, and so on. It's this idea that, yes, the kingdom has already come. With the first coming of Jesus, the kingdom has come because His very presence brings the kingdom. And yet, it is not yet here in its fullness. The already, not yet. When he arrived, the first coming brings the kingdom. However, one of the things we notice is that his glory was veiled. When you saw Jesus walking around Palestine in those days, if you wouldn't have known, he would have looked just like any other person. Now, you can hear the things that he said, you can see the things that he did, and you realize, oh, there's something different about this man. But his glory is veiled, and that's one of the things we see all throughout all four Gospels. So the kingdom has come with Him, but its glory is also veiled and not fully visible. And yet when Jesus returns in His second coming, He will come in the fullness of His glory, and at that time the kingdom will arrive, as it were, in its fullness. But once we understand this idea of the already not yet, the kingdom has already come with Jesus, but it's not here fully. There are aspects of the kingdom that we're living and other things that are still veiled, that are still awaiting their full consummation. Once we understand that, a lot of the tension that people see in the New Testament begins to fall into place. It's interesting that Jesus introduces kingdom life in the Sermon on the Mount, the first discourse, and the last discourse that he has in the book of Matthew is called the Olivet Discourse because he does it on the Mount of Olives. We'll get to that. That's chapters 24 and 25. And there, he's preparing his disciples of the fact that he's going to go away because they're all expecting the kingdom to be consummated right now during his lifetime on this earth. And instead, he's telling them, I'm going to go away. And this is the way you're supposed to live in my absence, my physical absence. And then I will return." He gives a parable in chapter 25 about a master who goes away to a distant country and then returns. He's preparing us for this fact of the already not yet. But he still is calling us to live this way now. And that's really important because you see, even though Jesus is not present physically, His body ascended into heaven, His Spirit has been poured out upon us. That's why the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 is so vital. It's not just some charismatic thing, right? Oh, those guys. No, for all of us, the fact that Jesus' Spirit is now amongst us means that wherever we are, there is the Spirit of Christ. And again, if Jesus' presence brings the kingdom, Jesus is present with us spiritually that means the kingdom is already here And it means that these things that we're about to read in the Sermon on the Mount apply to us right now. This kingdom is now in our midst, and we're to live in that kingdom. So what is then the character of this kingdom in which we already are in as Jesus' followers? So let's look at our second point, the character of the kingdom. And when we look at verse 23 and we see those three things, the teaching, the proclaiming, and the healing, they're not just a summary. of Jesus' ministry, they're not just evidence that the kingdom has come, but they actually reveal to us the character of the kingdom. Those three things tell us about the character. Let's start with healing, because you see, sickness represents everything that's wrong with this world. Take a look again at verse 24. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures and paralytics, and he healed them. And what do you see? You see brokenness on every level. You see physical brokenness, mental brokenness, spiritual brokenness. We see life broken at every level, and yet at the end of verse 24, it says, and he healed them. Verse 23 makes it explicit. He was healing every disease and every affliction among the people. Nothing escapes the healing power of Jesus. It points to the totality of His healing, both that which is physical, that which is mental, that which is spiritual. And the reason this is important is because it reveals to us, that healing reveals to us the character of the kingdom, and it points to the fact that the kingdom reverses everything that is wrong with the world. You see, when Jesus does these miracles, people have often thought, well, the reason he did these miracles was to prove his deity or to prove his power. But that's not the case at all. As we said almost at the very beginning of this series, if Jesus really wanted to prove that, He could have come in, you know, walking on the clouds, shooting fireballs from His fingers and all that other stuff. He didn't do that. He didn't need to do that. Again, His glory is veiled. What do the miracles represent? All throughout the Gospels, what do they represent? They point to us and demonstrate for us the nature of the kingdom. They paint a picture of what life will be like when the kingdom is here in its fullness, when Jesus has returned and made all things new. And what is that world going to be like? It's a world without suffering. As Revelation 21 verse 4 says, God will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And what Jesus was doing is saying, this person has died. I'm going to raise them from the dead to show you that when the kingdom comes in its fullness, there will be no more death. This person is hurting mentally. This person is hurting physically. I am going to heal that person. This person is oppressed spiritually by demons. I'm going to cast those out. I'm going to show you what that kingdom looks like. Now, these are only pictures. Every last person that Jesus raised and every last person that Jesus healed died later, physically died, right? But they were pictures of what that new age will be like. And so when He heals in His healing ministry, in His earthly ministry, He's showing us the character of the kingdom, a world without suffering, a world where everything that is wrong, physical, mental, and spiritual, has been made right once more. That's why He says in verse 23 that He was proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. The word gospel means good news, and that is good news. There is hope for this world broken at every level, and Jesus is the only one who can turn it around. And with his kingdom comes the arrival of the beginning of that turnaround and to setting aside and fixing all that which we have broken. That's good news. And there's more good news because it tells us that this kingdom life, the blessing of it is not restricted to Israel. It's not limited to just a select few. In verse 25, we read, and great crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis and from Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan. Galilee, as we've already seen and we discussed at length earlier in the series, was a very cosmopolitan and mixed population of Jews and Gentiles, people from all over. The Decapolis was almost all Greek. all Gentile, Jerusalem and Judea were more Jews, but what it shows us is that all these people coming to Jesus, being attracted to Him from great distances, it reveals to us again the character of His kingdom, that it's a universal character, that people of every race and tribe and tongue will be able to share in the reversal of all the world's woes. In Revelation chapter 5, we see a vision of heaven, but not something future, but of all the saints who are worshiping God right now. And we read in Revelation 5 verse 9, they sang a new song saying, worthy are you, and they're speaking to Jesus the Lamb, worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals for you were slain. And by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nations and you have made them what? A kingdom and priests who are God and they shall reign on the earth. It doesn't matter whether you are a Jew or a Gentile. It doesn't matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn't matter where you come from, your race, your ethnicity. Paul later would say that there is no Jew and no Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. Your socioeconomic status does not matter. Your sex does not matter. Your ethnicity does not matter. Your race does not matter. If you come to Christ, you will share in this transformational kingdom that will remove everything that we are seeing even this week is wrong with this world. There's one last thing that we see then in the character of the kingdom, and it comes from the teaching and proclaiming aspect of verse 23. We already know that what he's teaching and proclaiming is the kingdom itself. That's the focus. But because Jesus is the kingdom, as we begin to look at the Sermon on the Mount and it lays out for us the character of the kingdom, we're going to see that the character of the kingdom is shaped by the character of Jesus. When it calls us to live in certain ways, when it tells us to turn the other cheek, when it tells us to treat others as we would like to be treated, what we're really seeing is not just how we're supposed to live, but we're seeing what Jesus is like. And that's an important point. The character of the kingdom is a reflection of the character of Christ. And that's what we're to live up to. So that's the character of the kingdom. The kingdom in which we're called to live in now, a kingdom which has begun a transformation to reverse all the world's woes. And the last thing we want to look at then is the conduct of the kingdom, because if this is describing life in the kingdom, what is that life like? How are we to conduct ourselves? And of course, that's going to be unpacked in the weeks ahead, but there's some things that we can say now. As we've already said, the whole focus is life right now in the kingdom of God, and that can be both exhilarating and daunting as you go through the Sermon on the Mount. Don Carson, who's a recently retired New Testament scholar, a Canadian man who's been teaching at Trinity up in the Chicago area, very godly man, once wrote, the more I read Matthew 5 through 7, and those are the three chapters of the Sermon on the Mount, The more I read Matthew 5 through 7, the more I am both drawn to them and shamed by them. And I think that's a very apt description. We read it and we're drawn to it. We get excited because we say, this is the way the world should be. This is what I should be. This is how I should be treating others and how others should be treating me. And this is a world in which I want to live. But by the same token, it's a little bit scary because we look and say, I don't think I can live up to that. I know I can't. And so it does raise a question then, should the Sermon on the Mount apply to me? Or is it something that I can kind of, you know, skip around? I think some Christians have tried to get around it and say, well, it's all future. You don't have to worry about that now. So how should we approach the Sermon on the Mount? And I think it's worth pointing out there are two significant approaches to it. And the first of those approaches is simply a moralistic approach. It's moralism. And it actually comes in two flavors. The first one is a social justice flavor. And you see a lot of the liberal churches picking this up. They look at what Jesus is teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek, treat others as you would have them treat you, so on and so on. And they say, look, this is just social justice. This is just general truth that's found in all the world's religions. That we're to care for other people and so on. And when they say that, they're denying the unique nature of Jesus and His gospel, which we're going to see is in the Sermon on the Mount. But there's another flavor of moralism as well that's not the liberal Christians, but actually many conservative Christians. And that's why they look at the Sermon on the Mount as simply the New Testament version of the Ten Commandments. If you can keep these rules, these new rules that Jesus has given me, the Old Testament people, and again, this is many of our dispensational brothers and sisters tend to break up the Bible in this way. Ten Commandments apply to the people of Israel in the Old Testament, but for us, this is a new set of rules, and if you keep these rules, you'll be saved. And the problem there, of course, is it denies grace. But the one thing that unites both the social justice view of the Sermon on the Mount and the New Testament version of the Ten Commandments view of the Sermon on the Mount is that they both see the Sermon on the Mount as doable. And that's where the moralism comes in. You can do this. You can be a moral person if you just keep these rules. It's doable. Now the other approach to the Sermon on the Mount is what I simply call the abdication approach or the resignation approach. And what distinguishes it from the other is that it sees the Sermon on the Mount as undoable. You can't do it. And it also comes in two flavors. The first is that of our unbelieving friends. They look at what Jesus is saying and they say, look, that's just the idealism of a visionary. It's unrealistic in a broken world. Nobody can live that way. So I just give up. I won't try to do that because I can't. And the other comes from Christians, again from the dispensational view, who says, it is something that we're to do, but much, much later when the kingdom comes in its fullness. It's unattainable in this life. It's the ideal for the new kingdom and the new age and the future. And essentially denies the kingdom is already here. But the thing that ties both the unbeliever and the dispensational view is that they see the Sermon on the Mount as impossible to achieve in this life, and therefore, they abdicate their responsibility to even try. And both of these approaches are wrong, and they fail us. The moralistic approach that believes that it's doable, that's foolish optimism. It denies and ignores the reality of our sinful nature. And those who resign and say, ah, you can't do it at all, who abdicate, that hopeless despair misses the whole purpose of Jesus giving us the Sermon on the Mount, which is to say, you can live and you must live it out now. So the correct approach that we need to take as God's people is one that one recognizes that the kingdom has already come. And that's why I had a whole point because, again, there's many Christians today who think that's future. We have to recognize that it's already here and that it reflects the character of Jesus. So it's calling us to live and be like Him. And once you recognize that, you realize that is not attainable unless you're actually united to Christ. And that's the right approach. You are called to do the things that you're going to see in the Sermon on the Mount. But you can only do them if you've experienced a new birth in Jesus Christ. If you have become that new creation of which Jesus speaks about in John chapter 3. And Paul speaks about in 2 Corinthians chapter 5. It's only when you've accepted Christ as your Savior, when you've been converted, when you've experienced the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that you're able to do these things. Martin Luther said, Christ is saying nothing in this sermon about how we become Christians. but only about the works and fruit that no one can do unless he already is a Christian and in a state of grace. So when we turn to the Sermon on the Mount, we're going to see things that you will not be able to do on your own strength. When Jesus will say things, and we'll look at this more in detail, of course, when he says, you've heard it said that you are not to commit adultery. But I tell you that even if you've looked at a woman with lust in your heart, you've committed it. It's supposed to be such a high demand that we realize I can't live this way unless I've experienced that new birth in Christ, unless I have been transformed by the gospel. Outside of Jesus, kingdom life is unattainable. And that's why He said, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The Sermon on the Mount is a continual call to repent, to leave behind the way the world lives, and to belong instead to this kingdom of God that enables us to live differently because we are united to its King. So that's what we see here. The Sermon on the Mount is going to describe the life and the community of those people who are under the gracious rule of God equipped by Him to live in a way that's different. So if we bring together everything that we've learned, what do we see? We see that to belong to the kingdom of God means to submit to His rule. At the very end of the Sermon on the Mount, chapter 7 verse 28, we see when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at His teaching, for He was teaching them as one who had authority and not as their scribes. The scribes would always say, such and such says, the Torah says, and so on. Jesus would say, I say to you, this is the King who speaks, who are we to refuse Him? To belong to His kingdom means to submit to His rule. Every generation of disciples has to submit to the authority of Jesus. And when we submit to His rule, that means that we undertake a new way of living, a new lifestyle. We belong to a new order, a new age, a new humanity. And it's only possible through Jesus. And that's what the Sermon on the Mount describes, a new way of living that is wholly different from the way of the world. And it's to be lived out in the world. Right now, not in the future, but right now. It's the already, not yet. And because of that, it's going to be counter-cultural. It's going to be opposed to the world, and to the flesh, and to the devil. In 1 John 2, verse 15, it says, Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, and the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever." Every paragraph in the Sermon on the Mount is going to contrast a Christian way of living and a non-Christian way of living. And that's so important as we begin this deep dive in the next few weeks because it really speaks to the things that we've seen happening these last few weeks. You saw the murder, I don't know if I'll get her name right, but you saw the murder of Irena Zaruzka in Charlotte. And a lot of people are saying, we've had enough. There's been a lie that has been told to many people in the black community. All white people are bad. All white people are racist. All of them are white supremacists. And they deserve what they get. And some people believe that, and now they have killed because of it. And we get that people are saying no more of this. They call it black fatigue. And it's right that we should say that is wrong and that kind of behavior should not continue. But already we're seeing online and in other places people beginning to say the problem is all black people. So you have on this side one group saying the problem is all white people. Another one saying we're tired of this. The problem is all black people. And that's how we're going to respond. People of God, both of those are wrong. Both of those are worldly approaches. The Sermon on the Mount is going to give us the means to know how do we deal with that murder and the attitudes that led to it. And it's not going to be of this world. That's why this is important. And the murder of Charlie Kirk this past week, a political assassination because of his views and because of what he did, already has certain people sitting there and saying, we're going to have to fight back. And there's a very real temptation for believers to fight as the world fights. The Sermon on the Mount is going to tell us how we are to deal, not just with justice for Charlie and his family. But for the threat, and it is a real threat, that you feel to your freedoms and to your convictions, to your safety, to your livelihood, the Sermon on the Mount is going to address that. Before we started the service, Scott asked me, are you going to be one of those guys that tells us that we're supposed to just all lay down or line up and walk into the gas chamber smiling? No, that's not what the Sermon on the Mount is teaching. But the response is that we're already beginning to see from some people, shows us we're called to be different, and the Sermon on the Mount is going to tell us and show us how we respond to these things. The one thing I can tell you is the Sermon on the Mount will drive you back to Jesus because He's going to call us to live up to these standards that you and I simply cannot fulfill in our own strength. We can't do it. We're going to need Him. We're going to need His forgiveness for when we fail again and again and again. But again, the crucial point to realize is you cannot live out the Sermon on the Mount. You cannot live out this new way of being human apart from a right relationship to Christ. It all comes through Him. He is both our Savior who saves us and our Lord who calls us to a new way of living, but it's the same man who is both Redeemer and Teacher to us. And so let's look at this in the next few weeks and let's find in there what some people have called the gospel dance. The gospel dance. They call it with three Ds. Despair, dancing, and direction. There's despair when we realize that we're living in a broken world and we're called to live differently and we can't do it. But there's dancing when we realize that Christ has given us the answer, that there can be joyful repentance in Him. He gives us the grace to be able to live it out, and then that gives us the third deed, direction. We have a new life, a changed life that we can obey as it comes from Jesus. May He indeed shape His people, shape His kingdom, that we might indeed show, even in this crucial moment in the history of our nation, perhaps in the history of the world, how we are to live in a way that truly honors Christ. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we come before you today having come off of two weeks of horrific events, life-altering events, certainly for the people who have been affected directly. But in reality, people all throughout our nation, indeed all throughout the world, have felt the horrors of these events. There is no doubt and no escaping, O God, that we live in a broken world and that no matter what the politicians say and the politicians do or the pundits or the ideologues or the professors, nothing is going to fix it outside of Jesus Christ. And the only answer that is possible, as we read your word, is a new way of living, a new kingdom. And we are so thankful that Jesus brought that kingdom, and more importantly, that He brought us into that kingdom by His grace. Father, we have already confessed that we are incapable of living this life in our own strength. We so desperately need Christ and we pray that you would strengthen our reliance upon him. Enable us to keep our eyes fixed firmly on Jesus, the one who is the author and perfecter of our faith as we see these horrible events and we wonder how do we respond. We also pray for those who are not believers. that as they see these events unfold, that it would open their hearts, that it would drop the scales from their eyes to see that the answer is found only in Jesus Christ. In the midst of this, Father, we do ask. We ask for comfort. We ask for comfort for the family of Irena Zaruzka and so many others who have suffered violence. We pray, Father, for comfort for Erika Kirk and her family and the loss of Charlie. Comfort them, Father, with the hope of the resurrection. And comfort us as a nation and draw us, what we so desperately need is a revival. and a reformation. Yes, we pray for a reformation in our doctrines. We pray to those churches that have turned their backs on the Word of God and who have introduced all sorts of alien thoughts. into your word and who claim things that are contrary to your word, that those churches would reform or be done away with. And instead, that you would fill the pulpits with men who are not afraid to preach the whole counsel of Christ. And that we in the pews, as we go out into our schools, into our workplaces, into our gyms, into our neighborhoods, into our grocery stores, and everywhere that we are, that we would no longer be afraid to say, this is how Jesus calls us to live. We ask, Lord, that you would indeed turn the nation around.