Sunday, 10 April 2022
Duration: 29 mins 35 secs
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.
Sunday, 03 April 2022
Duration: 33 mins 19 secs
Jesus has been saying that the Pharisees were guilty of exercising a false judgment about themselves, other people, and even Jesus. This He says is hypocrisy and is seen in many different ways to do with giving (6:1-4), prayer (6:5-15), fasting (6:16-18) and the use of our wealth (6:19-34). Their false righteousness helped to encourage a false judgment. Now as Jesus closes His sermon, He ends with a discussion about judgment. How are we meant to judge others in a way that honours God? How do we approach God as a loving Father?
Sunday, 27 March 2022
Duration: 18 mins 54 secs
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.
Sunday, 20 March 2022
Duration: 32 mins 49 secs
In this passage, the focus is on fasting and money. If we elect to fast, it should be done for the right reason, where the time we would normally spending eating is the time we devote to God. Jesus also reminds us the importance of storing treasures in heaven and not on earth. Being wealthy is not evil, but when this takes us away from God, Jesus tells us we cannot serve both God and money. We can't take any of our earthly treasures to heaven. The only thing we can take to heaven is other people!
Sunday, 13 March 2022
Duration: 37 mins 16 secs
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.
Sunday, 06 March 2022
Duration: 34 mins 36 secs
Jesus’ non-legalistic attitude towards righteousness has led some to regard him as a rebel and a lawbreaker. However, Jesus declares that he didn’t come to abolish or break God’s Law, but to completely uphold it and fulfil it. As with every seed of sin, we must constantly be uprooting any form of bitterness before it grows into something worse. Then we must go even further and replace this sin with the fruit of love, even for our enemies. In this passage, the challenge for us is where in Jesus’ sermon He commands us to, “Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect”.
Sunday, 27 February 2022
Duration: 34 mins 16 secs
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.
Sunday, 20 February 2022
Duration: 25 mins 45 secs
Through this message Jesus teaches that we can either fulfil or fail in our role as His ambassadors in the transformation of this world. In our response to Christ’s teaching we need to avoid blending in with our environment so as not to standout and be noticed. As Christians, we can slowly adopt worldly ways of thinking and acting until we lose our Christ-like distinctiveness. Or we can spend so much time talking about the world, as if it were our mortal enemy, that we can forget that God so loved the people of this world that he sent his only Son to die for us.
Sunday, 13 February 2022
Duration: 27 mins 40 secs
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.
Sunday, 06 February 2022
From the high and holy experience of the blessing at the Jordan, Jesus was led into the wilderness for testing. Jesus was not tempted so that the Father could learn anything about His Son, for the Father had already given Jesus His divine approval. Jesus was tempted so that every creature in heaven, on earth, and under the earth might know that Jesus Christ is the Conqueror. He exposed Satan and his tactics, and He defeated Satan. Because of His victory, we can have victory over the tempter.
