SOTM intro

Introduction to series

This morning we are beginning a look into the right side up life. Jesus came to offer life to anyone looking. And when we come to Him, He gives us life and forgiveness and mercy through His death and resurrection and then He also shows us what that kind of life looks like.

My family likes to play board games. A couple times a week we will take a game out and play a couple rounds of something. We will hear about a new game and Robin and I will pick it up or borrow it.

There are generally three ways to learn how to play a game.

You can read the instructions. This is possible but often frustrating. As the explanations are all there, you often have no reference for what the pieces even are or what they do. There will often be frustrations on how different people play the game

You can watch a video. Often times that is what we will do. We will look it up on youtube and watch someone else play the game. They are having all the fun and you are just trying to figure out what to do. But there are often disconnection and frustration on how to apply the ga,e. We can’t see, to do it the same way that they can do it

In both cases you can’t jump into the game. You may have an idea, but it gets frustrating real quick.

By far the best way to learn a game is to play with someone who already knows the rules and how to play. You look to that person on what pieces do what, where and when. When there is a question on the rules of play, the person who knows how to play becomes the guide through that.

Life is obviously much more complicated than a board game. But we often try and approach it the same way. We try and read the instructions, we run ahead of the game a little by trying to figure things out through books or so on. We can also pick up videos or stories about others who have had a form of success. We can become inspired by thier actions and try to emulate them

But by far, the best way to understand life is to have someone personally guide us through it.

We are always looking for ideas of how to live a better life. We have to decide where it will come from. because It is too big a thing to figure it out on our own

If you look at your life, you find that Your desires precede your current situation and they proceed beyond you. your desire is too big for you to be able to handle it by yourself

And it’s for that reason that people are frustrated. They are dissatisfied. Our culture lives with a low level of dissatisfaction all the time.

And that is the code that we have been taught . We have been taught that life looks a certain way and we have accepted this strange Consumer driven, buffet style, take and leave what I want kind of thing where we get to be the center of the universe.

That is actually the upside down life. It is not life giving, it is life taking.

but

Christ is inviting us into encountering Him in the right side up life. The life that He built and He Himself will walk with us in it.

When Jesus said,

John 14:6–7 ESV

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

He meant it. He is leading us to eternal life in Him and is showing us what it means to live our live with eternity as reality right now.

Christ has shown us where life is, it’s in Him, and what life looks like in Him.

We are given direction. But direction from in front and above us.

We are looking at what Scot McKnight says is “bringing God’s future to bear on the present.” The SOTM is not example, not principle, it is obedience for now. It is a picture of what life looks like now in the frame of divine grace.

The Sotm is found in Matthew 5-7 and is a collection of Jesus sayings. But they aren’t just spools of wisdom. Jesus is doing something rather incredible here.

He is taking the historical spiritual background of His own Judaism, and he is taking the culture in which he is located, the greco roman world, and He is weaving them together for us to understand that life is found at the intersection of where we are and where God has been.

What we will find is that Jesus will walk us through what the good life looks like. What the right side up looks like. And He will do it looking at culture and His theological background.

This morning I am going to just introduce the chapters by walking through two words that are found all throughout these chapters. Jesus uses them like guardrails for us to understand what it is He is after.

These words are found throughout the Bible and from Christ’s use of them we can see what He meant through the rest of the passage.

The words we will look at this morning in terms of introduction are

blessed and perfect.

These are words used throughout the Sotm

We see Jesus talking all the time about the blessed life.

And then He calls us to be perfect as your father in Heaven is perfect

Let’s look at these words in turn. They will help to prepare us for the rest of the Sotm.

We are going to look at two primary questions regarding these passages. What is God desiring for us. What is God desiring from us?

What is God desiring for us?

Jesus uses the word blessed 11 times in the sotm

We have to talk about the word itself for a few moments. Because we hear the word blessed we may think of a couple of things.

We think of what a blessed life means.

Maybe a life without trouble or problems

Or a life that has everything you could ever want

Or a life that has the favor of God

We have different ways of understanding blessed so we first have to look at the way Jesus uses it.

Because his usage is strange. Look at the first time He says it

Matthew 5:3 ESV

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

That’s a strange use of the word. It really doesn’t mesh with our ideas of blessed. So either Jesus is wrong or we are.

And remember that when it comes to humble conviction we begin with the truth that God is a perfect communicator and we are imperfect listeners.

So it’s likely we got it wrong.

What does Jesus mean by this word?

Remember that Jesus is not just downloading new information from Heaven. If HE did that no one would understand Him. He is Jewish, and coming from a specific Jewish background with ideas of blessedness.

Jesus is looking for the meaning from the OT.

Look at Psalm 1:1-3

Psalm 1:1–3 ESV

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

That’s the same idea of the word. Psalm 1 is in Hebrew and Jesus is using the Greek version but it is the same word.

And it’s not just blessed, it means happy or fortunate.

JEsus is using the same language. Happy are the poor in spirit.

Happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.

Now next week we will look at the first three verses so we will come back to the poor in spirit but for right now, look at what Jesus is saying by using that word 11 times in the Sotm.

He is showing us what a fortunate, flourishing life is like. To use the word He is using is Him pointing to an example and saying, this is what the fortunate life is like.

Matthew 5:3 ESV

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus is saying, this is the blessed, the fortunate, the happy life. Even though it doesn’t look like blessedness, we can trust Jesus interpretation of it.

He will tell us over and over, this is the picture of the fortunate life.

He is pointing to what flourishing looks like.

And in that flourishing He calls us to live that out. When we hear of the blessed life we get the explanation. The way things are.

He’s not dreaming with us to say what things could be like, he is walking around the city center, showing us all the buildings in the sites

This is what he means by blessed, showing us the concrete way that we are called to flourish in the divine grace of Jesus.

that is blessedness

the other word He uses is perfect

What is God desiring from us?

Again, remember, this message is looking at two words that detail the whole of the sotm. These are the rails on which the train of the passages will run on. We can’t understand what the passage is about without understanding these two words.

We looked at blessedness. Now look at perfect.

Jesus is pointing to the blessed life and saying, that’s it! And then Hes saying, I will give you everything you need to be perfect.

Look at the passage

Matthew 5:48 ESV

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

JEsus is using, not the word, Holy, as we like to think, but He is using the word that means complete or without fragments.

It means that who understands their purpose, means and end. It means that which is complete, inside and outside. That is why Jesus makes this inner outer connection all the time.

Christ is calling us to single heartedness, to wholeness and completeness. He tells us when we live out the reality He is pointing to, we are living complete. That there is nothing false about us.

It is the enacted form of Christs righteousness.

This is not about Christ’s imputed righteousness in our lives.

This is about living out righteousness because of Christ.

About being wholly devoted.

This is not perfection or acting perfect. No one lives that way. No one here, anyhow. We are imperfect with a picture of a better life and everything we need to live that out.

And the words blessedness and perfect are not moralizing. The end of this message is not “behave better.”

As we’ll see in the sermon in the amount, the idea is not that we would be perfect as we understand it, but rather that as we live wholeheartedly devoted to God, we understand the places in which we are not complete or whole, the imperfect parts of us.

And we understand that we take those to God we bring those before him and he reconciles he redeems he restores.

Whole Hearted devoted people take their imperfect parts because they recognize that much better job with him than we do. whole hearted devotion does not fear imperfection because it knows where to go with it and that God can do a much better job with it than we can.

It will be an invitation to look to better sources for life. A blessed life. A flourishing one.

That is the life we will be looking at. The right side up life. To follow Christ is to be the most human you could ever be. It keeps you in close relationship to God and calls you into close relationship with your neighbor.

It’s not always the easy life, or the simple life, or the uncomplicated life, but it is the right side up life. And it works when we live it together. That is our call as a church. To follow Christ in a right side up life in an upside down world. To hear Hisnwords and do them.

But Christ doesn’t just wag His finger and say do it! He calls us close and to Himself. The invitation is to see what Christ is like by living the right side up life

Matthew 11:28–30 ESV

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

There is no better way to live and we will explore what that looks like together.