Sermon: “Delighting in Christ, Then and Now”

Matthew 5:1-3a
Rev. Mike Werkheiser

Outline:

  1. Blessedness as Reality: Delighting in the ‘Already’
  2. Blessedness as Aspiration: Delighting in the ‘Not Yet’

Quotes:

Living out the Sermon on the Mount can never be divorced from a right relationship to Jesus Christ. […] This teaching will change us only when we submit to the sovereign and gracious reign of the One who preaches it, for the Sermon on the Mount enshrines in its teaching the authority and Lordship of Jesus Himself. —Sinclair B. Ferguson

On first reading [the Sermon on the Mount] you feel that it turns everything upside down, but the second time you read it you discover that it turns everything right side up. The first time you read it you feel that it is impossible; the second time, you feel that nothing else is possible. —G. K. Chesterton

The milieu in which man lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world. —Jacques Ellul

So obvious are the impotence and distress of all men in face of the social machine, which has become a machine for breaking hearts and crushing spirits, a machine for manufacturing irresponsibility, stupidity, corruption, slackness, and, above all, dizziness. The reason for this painful state of affairs is perfectly clear. We are living in a world in which nothing is made to man’s measure; there exists a monstrous discrepancy between man’s body, man’s mind, and the things which at the present time constitute the elements of human existence. Everything is disequilibrium. —Simone Weil

The [self’s] task is to become itself, a task which can be performed only by means of a relationship to God. —Søren Kierkegaard