Introduction:
A great light had dawned in the midst of the darkness of death. In the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the people dwelling in darkness saw a great light. The sun had risen — the light was shining — in the preaching and teaching of Jesus, and in the miracle working power of Jesus.
Matthew tells us what he does about the ministry of Jesus so that all might see that this is no ordinary ministry.
The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth is proof that He is the promised deliverer. He is the Messiah. He is the Son of God.
That ministry is summarized at the end of chapter 4. It is summarized again at the end of chapter 9. Between those two summaries we find two extended examples of what was summarized.
Chapters 5-7 give an extended example of the preaching of Jesus; chapters 8-9 give an extended description of the signs that accompanied His presence.
Today we come to chapter 5, and as we do, we come to a sermon that Jesus preached.
Augustine was the first to refer to it as “The Sermon on the Mount.”
We do well to stop and let it sink in that what we have in your hands is a sermon that the Son of God, our Savior, preached on this earth.
I have seen the handwritten manuscripts of the original six-page article that C.H. Spurgeon wrote for the August 1887 edition of the Sword &Trowel at the beginning of the downgrade controversy. I saw them in Dr. Jason Allen’s office at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. What a treasure he has in that manuscript.
But we have, in the Word of God, is an inerrant summary of what came from our Lord’s lips as He preached this sermon, somewhere in Galilee.
Matthew just told us that Jesus was being followed by enormous crowds. His fame is at a high point. The hunger of the people, both for His words and His wonders is at a fever pitch. Like sheep without a shepherd, they travel from all over that part of the world to be with Him.
Matthew tells us that Jesus, seeing the crowds, chose a prominent high place, a high hill, a mountain, and Luke tells us (Luke 6:17) that He selected a flattened area somewhere in that high location, and sat down, surrounded by the crowds that were following Him (not the twelve, see Matthew 7:28), and taught what we read here.
WE WERE NOT THERE, BUT WE ARE THERE NOW BY VIRTUE OF MATTHEW’S ACCOUNT.
What we read is what He said. What we read is what we would have heard.
IT IS, BY EVERY STANDARD OF MEASUREMENT, ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SECTIONS IN ALL OF GOD’S WORD.
Andreas Köstenberger — “The famous Sermon on the Mount, arguably the greatest body of ethical teaching of all time, one that has truly shaped Western civilization, constitutes the first of five discourses in Matthew’s Gospel containing Jesus’s teaching on the kingdom.”
R. Kent Hughes — “For the Christian believer, it is simply the greatest sermon ever preached. …The original sermon was probably quite long, possibly even several hours, and what we have in Matthew 5–7 (which takes about ten minutes to read) is a distillation of his teaching. The Sermon on the Mount is the compacted, congealed theology of Christ and as such is perhaps the most profound section of the entire New Testament and the whole Bible.”
This is a weighty section of Scripture. At the outset we have some important questions.
What exactly is Jesus doing in this sermon?
What is the sermon’s purpose?
What did He mean for His hearers to do with its demands?
There has been a lot of debate about these questions. Read the commentaries and you will see how much disagreement there is among commentators about those questions.
I could take the time to walk you through a history of the interpretation of this sermon, but I don’t think that that would be the best use of our time. There are many books you can read that will do that. I can briefly say that many of the views of this sermon differ because they recognize some legitimate element that they find in the sermon, but then restrict the purpose of the sermon to that one element instead of recognizing that the purpose of the sermon embraces a variety of elements.
Instead of walking us through a list of what I don’t believe the sermon’s main purpose to be, I simply want to tell you (1) what I think the sermon is meant to accomplish, (2) describe how it does what it sets out to do, and (3) why we should look forward to this study.
• THE PURPOSE OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
The purpose of the sermon of the mount is to set forth what it means to live life under the reign of Christ. What it means to live life under the reign of the King who was preaching it.
This is why it culminates with the question of whether He really is your Lord, or you simply say, LORD, LORD? Whether your life is truly built on His Words, or instead your life has been constructed on sand?

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