If you allow your almsgiving, prayer and fasting to put you in the spotlight, you've missed the point. You may get the praise of others, but that's all you'll get. What you won't get are the blessings God has in store for you when you go about doing good deeds surreptitiously.
The Sermon on the Mount is God's Word without the wiggle room.
The love of God comes in only one grade… super, high-test, premium.
The great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth once advised his young colleagues "to take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible."
Lewie Donalson said the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount were not intended as social ethics, but as a model for how we're to live as children of God and relate to each other, one-on-one, as brothers and sisters in Christ.
The meaning is clear: The life of a Christian ought to go beyond that of an unbeliever. There ought to be a clear, recognizable difference in the way we think, talk and act out our faith that sets us apart from others and presents a living witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ.
If we belong to the God of Grace, we must become people of grace. There’s no other way. And someday, somewhere, someone will be explaining how it is that the neighborhood lives at peace, and they will point to you and say “He started it.”
CONCERNING RETRIBUTION AND FORGIVING ENEMIES: A friend of mine was struggling with this text. He didn't like the "turn the other cheek" idea very much. He finally resolved it! He said, "If someone strikes me on one cheek, I will turn the other. But if he strikes me on that cheek, watch out!"
God is the sower. His word is the seed. We are the soil. Substitute “soul” for “soil” and the lesson becomes even easier to understand. The sower and the seed are constants. The soil is the variable. God and his word never waver. But Soil cannot choose to be barren--souls can.
Those of us who are going to Thunder Bay later this week no doubt will be seeing a lot of hard, thorny, weedy, rocky ground. Then why do we bother to go? We go because we’ve got our bags full of seed and we’re looking for a place to sow.