We all have a choice. Are we going to listen to Jesus or are we going to listen to ourselves and follow our own kingdom? It is easy to travel the wide road, like the majority of people, but trusting in Jesus will lead you down the narrow path to eternal life. God's kingdom is not one of rules and rituals but it is a relationship with Jesus. We hear the words of Jesus and then we are to do the words of Jesus. We do this, not to be saved, but because we are saved. Because we have come into a relationship with Jesus Christ, we follow that through action.

When we make the decision to put God first, Jesus says it should radically change our outlook on life. Using comparisons from nature, Jesus highlights the folly of worrying about the things of this world, even including the essentials that sustain us such as food, drink and clothes. He says that worrying is worthless and undermines our faith to the point where we look no different from the world around us. Instead, we are to be people that trust God to provide for our every need, knowing that He is our Father who loves us, and to seek His will for our life first. Once we have those priorities straight we will be able to more easily deal with each day’s troubles as it comes.

In this part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus turns to religious acts and examines the heart attitudes of those practising them. Today's message focussed on the first two of these, namely giving and prayer. Jesus instructs His disciples not to be like the hypocrites, whose pious acts were for earning favour with God and the praise of people. Instead He says, our giving should be secret and our prayer needs to start privately. Hypocrisy is not the same as falling short - that's sin. Rather hypocrisy creeps in when we use religion to mask our sin and pretend to be doing well spiritually when it doesn't match reality.

Jesus took six important Old Testament laws and interpreted them for His people in the light of the new life He came to give. He made a fundamental change without altering God’s standards. Jesus dealt with the attitudes and intents of the heart and not simply with the external action. The Pharisees said that righteousness consisted of performing certain actions, but Jesus said it centred in the attitudes of the heart. Likewise, with sin, the Pharisees had a list of external actions that were sinful, but Jesus explained that sin came from the attitudes of the heart. Anger is murder in the heart, lust is adultery in the heart. It is these sinful attitudes of the heart that we must cut off now, not just let them fade away slowly.

The Sermon on the Mount describes what human life and human community look like when they come under the gracious rule of God. Jesus emphasises that his true followers, the citizens of God’s kingdom, were to be entirely different from others. They were not to take their cue from the people around them, but from Him, and so prove to be genuine children of their heavenly Father. They were to shine like lights in the prevailing darkness. Their righteousness was to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, both in ethical behaviour and religious devotion, while their love was to be greater and their ambition nobler than those of their pagan neighbours.