The Sermon on the Mount in the Valley of Life

If all of a sudden it became a crime to possess the BIble - as it still is in some parts of the world - and you could only have just one small part of it, which part would you choose? If you could only have just one small part of the Bible to read and memorize and meditate on and think about, you would do very well to choose the Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount takes up just 3 chapters in the Gospel of Matthew. In the English Bible, it is less than 2,500 words. If you were to read the Sermon in one sitting, it would take you just 15 minutes.

But in that brief few paragraphs, Jesus gives us the essence of what it means to be a Christian. He doesn’t do that by talking about lofty theological concepts, like justification, and sanctification, and election. He explains what it means to be a Christian by showing you how a Christian lives, how he thinks, how he feels in his heart. He paints a picture of a Christian.

You see, although this sermon was given by Jesus on a hillside somewhere in Palestine, it’s really about life in the valley - down in the village, in the marketplace, at work, at school, at church. It’s about relationships, and attitudes, and behavior.

We all have a tendency to want to leave our religion up on the mountain. We have our relationship with God, which we practice on Sunday in church. That’s special. But then we have the rest of our lives, our inter-personal relationships, our jobs, our problems, which we try to deal with during the rest of the week.

But God wants us to take our relationship with him down into the valley of life. If we’re going to be followers of Jesus Christ, then that is going to have a profound impact on the way that we live our lives from one end of the week to the other - not just on Sundays! It’s going to have implications for our relationships; in our marriages, in our role as parents, in our dealings with our neighbors, our acquaintances, and even our enemies.

It’s going to control the things we allow ourselves to think about. It’s going to shape our dreams, our aspirations, our hopes. It’s going to affect our relationship with material things. It’s going to have an impact on our priorities, and how we schedule our time. It’s going to determine how we spend our money.

The Sermon on the Mount is about all of these things. It’s about life in the valley. So if you begin to understand the Sermon on the Mount, and if you begin to put it into practice, you’ll be getting a handle on what it means to be a Christian. That’s why this sermon is so valuable.

Well, if the Sermon on the Mount is the essence of Christianity, what is the essence of the Sermon? It’s Matthew 5:48, a verse which says “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.”

Now you may be sitting there saying “Great. This is really good news! All God wants is for me to be perfect. I’m so glad that this verse is in the Bible! This is really encouraging.” We all realize that we are far from perfect. When we read a verse like that in the Bible, it makes us want to throw up our hands and quit before we even begin.

Wait a minute. Let’s find our what Jesus really means here. Let’s start off with the word “perfect”. It’s an interesting word in Greek, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means. When we use the word perfect, we usually mean without flaw, without any errors, or mistakes, or failures. When you hand in a math test and you’ve done all the problems correctly, you get “perfect”. 100%. There are no errors.

But that’s not exactly what the word means in Greek. The word in Greek is “teleios”, and it refers to something that is whole, or complete, lacking nothing. A man who has reached his full-grown stature is teleios, in contrast to a half-grown boy. A student who has reached a full knowledge of his subject is teleios, in contrast to a learner who is just beginning.

Our idea of perfection is static - the math test has no mistakes. But the idea of perfection in Greek is functional - a thing is perfect if it fully realizes the purpose for which it was planned. You might say that the Verazzano Narrows bridge is perfect. Not that it doesn’t have minor flaws, or that the paint might not be peeling in certain places. But it is perfect in the sense that it is accomplishing the task that it was designed for. It’s realizing its purpose.

Suppose that on your car, a piece of trim comes loose. You find that you need a certain kind of screw driver to tighten the screw that is holding it in place. You rummage around in your toolbox and you find that you don’t have exactly the kind of screwdriver to do the job. So you go to the hardware store and buy one. You find that the screwdriver has a nice contoured handle that exactly fits your hand. You bring it home and you put the screwdriver into the screw, and you find that it exactly fits the screw. And you tighten the screw up and your problem is solved. That screwdriver is teleios. It is perfect in that it is doing the job for which it was designed.

Now try to transfer that idea to this verse, Matthew 5:48. You’ll begin to see it in a different light. When Jesus says “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” what he means is “be whole, be complete, be realizing your purpose” - because that is the way God is. God is whole. God is complete. There’s nothing lacking about God. He’s perfectly carrying out his role as God. And if we are carrying out our purpose as human beings, then we are like God in that respect.

A person who is perfect is a person who is realizing the purpose for which God created him. He’s a whole, complete human being. When God created Adam and Eve, they were perfect. They were whole, complete human beings. They were realizing the purpose for which they were created.

But then something happened that changed all that. They sinned. They disobeyed God. They turned their backs on him. They disregarded his authority over them. They began to live life with themselves as their ultimate frame of reference. St. Augustine wrote “Sin is believing that you are self-created, self-dependent, and self-sustained.” And that’s what Adam and Eve started believing.

Now when they sinned, their relationship with God was broken. And the moment that happened, they were not perfect anymore. Men and women have been created to have fellowship with God. It’s part of their purpose. It’s the reason God created them. And the moment that they are out of fellowship with God, they’re not realizing their purpose anymore.

That’s why the Bible talks about sin as “Falling short of the glory of God”. Because sin brings incompleteness. Sin severs our relationship with God, it breaks our fellowship with Him. And if we do not have fellowship with God, if we’re not connected with God in a personal relationship, then we cannot be complete people. We cannot be whole. We cannot be realizing the purpose for which we exist. We’re broken. There’s an essential part of us missing. The great mathematician Blaise Pascal said “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man.”

Suppose you buy a radio. The purpose of that radio is to receive radio broadcasts. Now you happen to notice that on your new radio, there is a little sign on the back that says “Do not open the case of this radio, or you will damage the components and void the warranty.”

So you listen to the radio for a few days and you’re enjoying it a lot. But there is one particular station that you can’t get to come in very well. The reception’s poor. So you decide to open the case, and see if there’s some way that you can improve the reception. But as soon as you break the seal and open the case, you damage a delicate transistor that happens to be the most important transistor on the circuit board. Now you’re radio is broken. Instead of beautiful music, all you get is static. And not only is it broken, but you’ve voided the warranty, so you can’t take it back to the manufacturer to get it fixed.

You’re stuck with a radio that doesn’t work. What to do? Well, you decide that all is not lost. There’s got to be another way you can put this radio to use. It still heats up when you put the plug in, so you figure “Well, maybe I can use it as a toaster.” So you take it to the kitchen, and you pile bread on top of it, and turn it on. But it doesn’t do a good job as a toaster, and it’s getting all messed up with crumbs and butter and jam all over the front.

So you say, “well maybe I can use it as a night light - it does have a lighted front panel.” So you take it up to the bedroom and you plug it in, and sure enough it makes a great night light. Except for the fact that the sound of the static keeps you awake all night.

So you say “Well, I guess I can use it as a door stop - that dining room door never stays open.” So you prop your nice expensive radio up against the dining room door and it stays there for a few days. Until one of the kids trips over it, kicks it, and cracks the case. Now the radio looks a real mess.

So you decide to put it in the garage, and it just sits there on a shelf, gathering dust. It’s not doing what it was designed to do. It’s not doing what you bought it for. It’s broken and useless, without meaning and without purpose.

Do you get the picture? This is what has happened to mankind. People were designed by God to have fellowship with Him. That’s their unique purpose. But because of disobedience, they are broken. They can no longer have fellowship with God. And so they are looking around for some other reason to exist, but it’s just not working. They live for fame but they find that it’s not satisfying. They live for fortune but they find it doesn’t fulfill. They live for pleasure and adventure, but they find that it leaves them empty. Nothing can substitute for what they’ve lost - no other role, no other purpose can bring a sense of fulfilment, a sense of meaning. Nothing can take the place of the Designer’s original plan.

But thank God that’s not the end of the story. Christmas, which is coming up soon, is about how the manufacturer decided to replace the original warranty with an unlimited warranty that would specifically cover deliberate breakage and misuse. And he sent a repairman out to fix the problem, and that repairman was His son , Jesus Christ.

Jesus left his home in heaven and came to earth to fix the problem. Understand that Jesus Christ, from eternity past, was in perfect fellowship with God the Father. We do not understand the relationships that exist in the Trinity, but we do know that there was perfect communion, perfect fellowship between God the Father and His Son.

I want you to realize that when Jesus came to earth and died on the cross, he became the bearer of our sin. That had some awesome implications. That perfect and unbreakable cord of fellowship between the Son and the Father that existed from eternity past was broken when Jesus died on the cross. As he hung there in agony, he cried out “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” At that moment, He took upon Himself all our pain, all our guilt, all our sin. He experienced the horror of knowing what it felt like to be separated from God. When he became our sin-bearer, he was becoming broken, less than complete, less than whole, less than perfect, so that we might be healed.

He did that so that we could come back to God. So that we could become complete. So that we could be made whole. He did it because He loves us that much.

So when we look at Matthew 5:48 and we hear Jesus saying “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” we have to remember to understand that in the context of what Jesus came here to do. His mission to earth was to make us perfect.

He’s not saying “Now children you have to try real hard to be good little girls and boys so that you can get 100 on your test.” That would be the same as if the radio repairman went out to the garage, and looked at your broken, dusty radio sitting there on the shelf and said “OK radio, fix yourself.”

The Sermon on the Mount is about following Jesus. And you start off following Jesus by realizing that you can’t fix yourself. That’s why Jesus said “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.”

God isn’t some cosmic headmaster who sits up in heaven with a big red pencil grading our exams, just looking for mistakes. He isn’t the kind of person who comes up to you and rather than saying something nice to you, launches into a big tirade about all the mistakes you’ve made, and what an idiot you are. If God was like that, I wouldn’t want to go to heaven, would you? Who would want to spend eternity with a person like that? There’s enough of them down here!

Arturo Toscanini was a musical genius. He was the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and the NBC Symphony Orchestra until he died in 1957. Toscanini had an unbelievable musical memory. One night, just before a concert, a clarinetist came up to him and said that he would be unable to play that night since the E-natural key on his instrument was broken. Toscanini thought deeply for a moment and then said “It’s all right. You don’t have an E-natural tonight.”

But for all his genius, and musical brilliance, Toscanini was a very difficult man to get along with. He demanded perfection and he flew into a rage when he didn’t get it. He was known to snap his baton and throw the music at the orchestra. One time, during a rehearsal, he screamed at a trumpet player “God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.”

God is holy. He is perfect. There’s nothing wrong with him. But the really beautiful thing about God is that just because he’s like that doesn’t make him a bad-tempered, unapproachable tyrant. He has taken the trouble to get involved with us. He sent His Son here to die for us. A God like that is worth loving and worth serving. The Sermon on the Mount teaches us how.