Do or Do Not. There Is No 'Try'.

Introduction

Grace and peace to you from in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Turn to 3 people around you and tell them Happy New Year!

Brothers and sisters, this is quite the season we live in. This is the season of new beginnings and the birth of new dreams. It is also the season of change and growth. If you were able to join us for our Focus Day yesterday, you would know that this is a big year for our church family. We have these plans being laid out for our eventual relocation, the arrival of new ministers, the improvements to various ministries like Worship and Youth and Young Adults, and so forth.

I believe that we should think of this year not as “wow look at all these big changes happening to us that we cannot control”, but as one where God leads us with a sure hand. Our natural instinct would be to worry and fret over “Oh dear, what’s going to happen, how will my Sundays change, do we have a plan and contingencies for every single possibility, will everything be okay?”

Slide: Abraham

Perhaps this is an opportunity to respond like Abraham, who heard God tell him to leave home and then he got up and left, trusting simply that God held his life in his hands. Our prayer ought to be “Lord, we trust you. Lead us and hold our hands, be our Shepherd and Guide, show us your will and what you want us to do.”

And as we keep praying that prayer and seeking God’s will throughout the year, we turn to certain passages of Scripture for comfort and direction.

Slide: Living Jesus

Which is why for the first 3 months of 2022, we’re going to look at 3 chapters of the gospel of Matthew which are perhaps Jesus’ simplest and clearest instructions for his disciples. Here our Lord describes the kind of life that He wants His followers to live, and these are timeless instructions that are relevant to anyone living at any time, anywhere, and in any phase of life. There’s a name given to these chapters: the Sermon on the Mount.

This may feel familiar to some of you. That’s because a few years ago, we used a book by Randy Harris titled “Living Jesus” as part of the adults Bible Class, which we are also drawing upon for this series. The main point of that book is that Christianity is ultimately a lived lifestyle. Randy Harris puts it this way: “The Sermon [on the Mount] is not a body of material to be cognitively mastered. It’s a life to be lived.” It’s not just a collection of beliefs and propositions that we keep inside our heads. It also isn’t just a set of moral rules that we follow blindly so that we meet the criteria to go to heaven.

Slide: Quote

Christianity is where Christ fills our heads, immerses our hearts in His love, and empowers our hands to live as He lives. To be a follower of Jesus is to be totally transformed from the inside out, and we live that out in obvious ways that the rest of the world cannot help but notice and question, “Why are they like that? What makes them different? What master do they serve?”

Slide: Title

So this series is not new. You likely have heard these Scriptures many times over and analysed it in multiple ways. Some of you may even have memorised this sermon or some parts of it. So our purpose as preachers is not so much to tell you what it means.

As Irvin described, our purpose is meditation. Our purpose to hold up these familiar Scriptures as though God is shining a spotlight on different parts of our lives. In His light and His truth, we see where we have obeyed and where have fallen short. We want to bring the commands of Jesus next to the patterns of our lives and see where we have obeyed and where we have yet to grow into the fullness and the perfection.

Explaining the Text

My task today is to set up the study so we approach it with the right frame of mind and expectations. And a good way to do that is by starting at the end. Because how the sermon concludes tells us how we should read the rest of it. Have you ever been in a meeting where the manager would start with “Okay, by the end of today we want to accomplish these agenda items”? Same principle—the ending determines what everything else is about.

Slide: Matt 7:24

We know this passage. Almost by heart. At the very least, you probably know that children’s song that goes “The wise man built his house upon the rock.”

It’s hard to misunderstand the words of Jesus here. There are times in the Gospels when Jesus speaks in parables and nobody understands Him.

Slide x2

This is not one of them. What Jesus means is as clear as day: He just wants us to do what He says. Or in the words of a certain small green alien in The Empire Strikes Back, “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no ‘try’.”

That is, things like:

Don’t get angry with your brother or sister. Even when they backstab you or say something hurtful behind your back.

Don’t look at others to lust after them, in person or on a screen.

Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or wear, what school you will go to or what job you will work, or how your life will be like during the rest of this pandemic.

Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you and pray for those who do evil against you. Yes, even the person that you are thinking right now that you cannot possibly love.

"Whoever hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”

Slide: Hokmah

When Jesus speaks of being wise, he is likely thinking about the Jewish understanding of wisdom, which is the Hebrew word hokmah. Basically it means something like “applied or practical knowledge for daily living”. This is a kind of a knowledge that doesn’t sit in the head. It is a knowledge that changes the way we live, the way we behave, the way we interact with people we don’t like, the kinds of entertainment we choose, where we spend our money. No one can read this Sermon and not recognise some area of life that we need to work on.

Slide: Two challenges

I’m going to say that there are two challenges for us as we read the Sermon on the Mount. It is not challenging because it is confusing or hard to understand. It is not an abstract theological treatise. It is not a university lecture dealing with high philosophy and big words. It is challenging because it forces us to take a long, hard look at our lifestyles and our habits, and it demands that we do something about it.

Slide: First challenge

The Sermon on the Mount requires knowledge to progress to wisdom. It is so much easier to let knowledge remain as knowledge without changing our lives. To learn the information is much easier than using that information. But knowlege that stays in the head without impacting our hearts and and flowing through our hands is not wisdom as Jesus understood it.

It is possible to memorise the entire Sermon on the Mount and continue to be a person of anger, arrogance, greed and judgmentalism. I’m sure we’ve all encountered people who claim to be Christians but don’t behave like one. These people may go to church and participate actively and appear to be followers of Jesus on the surface, but when trials come and the storms of life start to rage, the human nature takes over. And worst of all, sometimes these people are us.

I don’t believe that Jesus is as interested in people who can memorise the Sermon as much as people who will do the Sermon.

Slide: Impossible

There’s a second kind of struggle with the Sermon on the Mount, which is probably the greater challenge for many of us. Maybe we do take the Sermon on the Mount seriously and we decide we’re going to do what Jesus says, but we fail so often that we think it’s impossible. And I think you all know exactly what I mean.

We try to turn the other cheek, but then someone else takes credit for work that we did, and we cannot take it, so we demand our rights, we demand justice for ourselves, and we refuse to let someone get the better of us.

We try to love our enemies, but then they offend us, backstab us, and slander our reputation in front of everyone else for something we didn’t do, and in a moment of rage the only thing we want to do is punch them in the face. We think to ourselves that they are so rotten that there’s no hope for them, and not even God can forgive them.

We try to store up for ourselves treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-20) but then the Lazada and Shoppee apps tell us that this thing we’ve wanted is on discount, and as we scroll through them we see five other things that look really good and we tell ourselves that we must have them. Or we treasure our studies, our work, our hobbies, maybe even our families above our relationship with God, so that we can give hours and hours to those things but we can’t spare five uninterrupted minutes to pray, or we can’t spare one afternoon a week to join with other Christian brothers and sisters and encourage one another.

The Sermon on the Mount is easy to understand, but when we try to live it out, we find it’s near impossible.

So we have a dilemma. On one hand, it is crystal clear that we need to do what Jesus says and not just know it. But on the other hand, experience tells us that we cannot seem to do it, and we always fall short of the standard because of our weaknesses.

So are we doomed to fail? Are we supposed to resign to our weakness and just keep trying knowing that holiness and perfection is impossible?

Slide: Blackout

Here is where we meet with the heart of Christianity.

Slide: Quote

Here is where we pay attention not only to the content of the Sermon on the Mount, but the Preacher of that sermon. This is what makes Christianity distinct from any other faith system or moral code. We are Christians not because we are nicer people and we have higher morals or we are just better than other people. We are Christians because we are really bad people who realise we have a really good God. And that changes everything.

So when we read the sermon on the Mount, it is not a list of burdensome commands made to make us feel guilty when we fail. It is not an impossible standard that we just need to try so that God can see we put in the effort. We can live out the Sermon on the Mount, but not because we try hard enough, but because there is a new power working within us. The life of Jesus Christ transforms our weakness into strength; He redeems our sin into righteousness. When we abide with Christ and Christ abides with us, His Spirit empowers us to do what we could never do on our own.

The Lord’s Prayer

So how do we tap into that power? How do we allow the Spirit of Christ to work within us? We don’t have to sit passively and wait for God to do something, but we get to participate in God’s work in us.

In my last sermon, I shared with you a prayer from Paul, and I talked about how prayer is the vehicle by which God transforms us. I believe that it is no accident that right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, right at the heart of the Sermon, is a prayer that you most certainly can recognise, if you haven’t already memorised. It goes like this, using the classic King James English:

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and glory forever and ever. Amen.

I won’t steal too much from the sermon you’ll hear in a few weeks’ time, but I want to point this out because prayer is the primary way that we participate in what God is doing.

Now, this prayer is not a formula or the magic words that cause instant transformation, as much as we want it to be sometimes. If you say this prayer tonight before you sleep, God will not snap His fingers to make you a completely different person when you wake up.

Slide: Quote

But this prayer is the beginning of that transformation process, where our will begins to align to the heart of God. This prayer is how we open our hearts to receive the power of the Holy Spirit and let Him take charge.

I also advocate this prayer for a more practical reason. If we look at the whole Sermon on the Mount, we may feel discouraged because there’s just so much to do—where do we begin? And that’s when we resort to the mentality of “Okay, let’s just try and see what happens. Probably cannot succeed but I’ll try anyway.”

Well, here is something you don’t have to just try: this is something you can do. Make the Lord’s Prayer a regular part of your life and ideally part of your family’s life. Say it when you wake up, or say it before you go to sleep, or both. Pray this prayer with your family around the dinner table, or on your own while you’re showering or just sitting around. Before you think that the Lord’s Prayer is too short or too simple or too rigid, remember that this is how the Lord Jesus instructed us to pray. Faithful men and women for the past 2000 years of Christian history can testify to the power of praying this simple prayer over and over and over again.

Closing

Today is the second day of 2022. 364 and a half days remain. It is a life waiting to be lived, like a blank notebook that is waiting to be written in. Throughout this series, we’re going to be asking the question, what are we going to fill it with? What kind of life are we going to live?

Some of us may have made New Year Resolutions about the kind of 2022 we want to live. Maybe we aim to save more money. Pick up a new skill like investment or a new instrument. Be a better parent or spouse or son or daughter. All great resolutions. And by the way, you should really go look at the Focus where brother Lee Hock has written an article about godly resolutions.

How about this as a New Year Resolution: I want to be wise. I want to go beyond just knowing the facts; I want to do what Jesus calls me to do. I want to make prayer and specifically the Lord’s Prayer a regular part of my life. I want to build my life on the foundation of Jesus Christ.

Let us pray.

We praise your name, O Father Almighty; we lift up praises to Jesus Christ the Son; we confess the Holy Spirit, and by Your indwelling we are nourished and sustained and filled with all Your fullness. Indeed, O Lord, You fill earth and sea and sky, and not heaven not the highest heavens could contain you, and still You have chosen to dwell in us, that we might be transformed into Your holy temple.

Today, O Lord, we desire wisdom. We hear the words of Christ and we long to obey them, just as the wise builder builds his house on the rock. But we are frail and fragile and weak, drawn all too easily by the attractions of this world. As hard as we try to obey and live out your commands, we fall short.

Yet in You also there is hope. For You are the very strength we need. And you say that when we build our lives upon you, the Rock of Ages, we shall be able to withstand any storm and remain unshaken no matter what happens to us. Fill us therefore, O Lord, with all the strength of the Spirit. Fill us with the knowledge of the surpassing love of Christ, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God. We pray that Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, in us as it is in Christ Jesus our Lord.