Sermon on The Mount: ‘Alms, Prayer & Fasting’ (Matthew 5:1-18)

[00:00:00] we’ve been spending the term in the Sermon on the Mount, which is Jesus’s longest, uh, most famous teaching. Uh, and, and just before he’s– just before he starts this sermon, he goes up onto the mountainside.

[00:00:13] There’s a little bit of context to who’s hearing it. So he goes up onto the mountainside. There are the disciples, the people who he’s called to follow him closely and do life with him, but then there’s also this whole crowd of people listening in. At the end of chapter four, it explains this. Um, people from all sorts of places and all sorts of seasons of life, and then he turns to the disciples, and he teaches them.

[00:00:38] So this Sermon on the Mount is a teaching to people who have decided to follow Jesus, but he is deliberately saying it in earshot of the crowd who don’t really know where they’re at, that, that maybe they haven’t fully, um, seen Jesus as King yet, but they’re potentially interested.

[00:01:00] All that being said, no matter where we’re at on our journey of know- of knowing Jesus as King, there’s something in this sermon for us.

[00:01:09] So I’m gonna pray, and then we’ll look at this passage together. Father, we, I, well, I just wanna thank you for this morning, that we can… We, we have this space that we can come and, and gather and be together and, and sing together, worship you together, sit under your word together. Um, and I pray that you would help us to put things to the side now, things that are distracting us, things that might be taking up our, um, our thinking, uh, and our posture towards you.

[00:01:43] Uh, pray that you break down any walls and you’d help us to, um, to just be open to what you wanna say to us this morning. And I pray that we would also learn more about what you said to the disciples in the Sermon on the Mountain, and what you’re saying to us through that. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

[00:02:04] In the Sermon on the Mount so far, Jesus has been talking about the kinds of people who belong to the Kingdom of God, in the Beatitudes, and then the kinds of ways that his people should really, uh, be seeing and applying the law of God. And both of these are shocking to the listeners because the, His teaching is full of, of grace and love, and, and it’s, it’s shocking because it’s, they’re not used to hearing teaching in that way from the teachers of the law, and they’re not used to seeing that, that way of, of living from the Roman Empire around them.

[00:02:38] And here in this passage that was read out, chapter six, first part of chapter six, um, Jesus now corrects the foundation of their religious practices, corrects the foundation of their actions and their rhythms. He’s calling his disciples to live a certain way, but he gives the foundation for that, saying it, it has to come out of the right reasons There’s a, um, a summary verse in verse one.

[00:03:08] There’s a little, uh, breakdown here. A summary verse in verse one, and then it gives three, um, illustrative examples: caring for the poor, verse two to four; praying, verse five to fifteen; and fasting, verse sixteen to eighteen. And each one follows the exact same structure. Three things. It says, “Don’t”– Jesus says, “Don’t be like the hypocrites.

[00:03:32] Instead, do this before your Father so that your Father sees you and rewards you.” It’s the exact same for each. And then the, the section on prayer has a, has an extension, which we’ll come to at the end. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna follow each of these sections, but without actually zooming in on any of the particular examples or any of the examples in particular.

[00:03:57] Um, so we’ll start with verse one, the summary section. Verse one is a summary of this, of, of these three examples. He says, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness.” Let’s pause. Righteousness. Here, essentially just means, uh, your rightful, your rightful actions, your good works, kind of combining the moral and the religious aspects.

[00:04:26] He, he uses caring for the poor and praying and fasting as examples of practicing righteousness, but they’re just examples. Very poignant, very, um, especially for the time, very relevant examples, but practicing righteousness could be anything that applies to doing a good work It could be like, uh, maybe maybe we would use phrases like, uh, spiritual practices or maybe even spiritual disciplines is how we might say that now be careful not to practice those before others

[00:05:04] That’s not where the sentence ends. Be prac- be careful not to practice those before others. But we often think that it ends there. A lot of interpretation, a lot of application of this passage throughout a long time of Christian history has been to have a private faith because Jesus says, “Be careful not to practice these things before others.”

[00:05:30] To never pray in public, to never show others that you’re doing a good thing. Maybe don’t even attend a public gathering because it’s not meant to be seen. That there’s a whole, there was a whole movement of Christian monastic monks who would live isolated from the world, and they would often use this passage to explain their decision.

[00:05:49] But that’s not Jesus’s point In fact, in the, in the very same sermon, in our Bible it’s a page and a half before, but as Jesus is preaching this, it’s probably just like three minutes before. Two minutes maybe. And he says l- to the disciples, “Let your light shine that others may see your good works.” It just seems like the complete opposite So Je- Jesus is not saying, “Don’t do good works,” but he’s also not saying, “Don’t do good works in front of other people.”

[00:06:26] So what is he saying? Well, we need, we should probably finish the sentence He says, “Be careful not to practice your righteousness before others to be seen by them.” To be seen by the others. Jesus cares about works. He cares about acts of righteousness. He’s just, He’s actually preaching this sermon in public.

[00:06:54] He’s just come from healing all these people in public, the very end of chapter four. He doesn’t want that to stop. What He’s telling the disciples to be careful of is the motive behind the actions, which is just classic Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. Why do you give to the poor? Why do you pray to God?

[00:07:14] Why do you read your Bible? Why do you go to a church gathering? Why do you practice your righteousness before others? Jesus is saying, “Be careful, disciples, not to slip into doing that for the wrong reasons.”

[00:07:32] And I say slip very deliberately. That ov- over the years we’ve seen, um, oh, just seen, probably experienced as well, just many, many Christians slip into self-service, slip into self-righteousness, slip into having the wrong motive for doing the right things. And that’s not new. Jesus is saying this to first century Christians as well.

[00:07:58] This is, there are Pharisees and teachers of the law that are doing this as well. In this passage, three times Jesus calls them, calls the teacher of the law hypocrites, which is still a word that’s thrown around in and about Christianity. But I don’t believe that people intend to be hypocrites

[00:08:19] I don’t believe that people start out being self-seeking. Uh, I believe for the most part, people begin with a heart in the right place. Serving God and loving others is… But then it becomes very easy to slip into doing things for the eyes of others Uh, and, and now in the 21st century, there’s just so much more visibility, so much more possibility to do things for the eyes of others.

[00:08:52] Um, it’s, it’s no longer preying on street corners as, uh, as these guys do to be seen. It can be posting something, just the right thing on Instagram or something like that. It’s no longer just for, like, our parents or our community around us, but it’s for our second cousin who lives on the other side of the world and the person that we met once on a holiday, and they were cool, so they followed us.

[00:09:15] And, and now we do things for them to be seen, to be right. And it’s not just social media. That definitely amplifies it, but it’s work, and it’s parenting competing, which even Bluey comments on. It’s fashion, and it’s so much more. And it’s a desire to be seen, to be doing the right thing. And Jesus is saying, “This even comes into our spiritual formation, how we live in the Kingdom of God, how we choose to live out our righteousness and how God calls us to live.”

[00:09:43] This subtle slip of making things about us, making our good works about us, more, more performance for the eyes of other people, for approval, to be noticed, to be better than the rest, whatever it is, rather than serving God. So Jesus says, “Be careful. Be careful.”

[00:10:07] And then what follows in these three examples of giving to the, uh, caring for the poor, praying, and fasting is, is an antidote, a way to be free from this slip for approval or this desire to be seen and noticed. So two things, how we see God and how He sees us. Those two things. We’ll start with how we see God.

[00:10:36] When, uh, when Michelangelo finished craning his neck painting the Sistine Chapel in 1512, there was an uproar of controversy. There is a lot, uh, there’s a lot that’s controversial in Sistine Chapel painting. But the thing that people picked up on was the depiction of God in The Creation of Adam, the painting, The Creation of Adam.

[00:11:00] Michelangelo painted God as a… N- people, people hadn’t really depicted God much before. P- some people had, but not in a public way like this. And, and he painted God the Father in a, a kind of Zeus-like way. A white bearded man sitting in the clouds. He was, he was trying to capture something in particular, which I think he did very, very well.

[00:11:27] The power of creation, the energy and the movement as he kind of flies through the heavens and, and links heaven and earth together. But this painting has altered how people see God. This is now a, an old bearded man in the clouds is now the classic depiction of God AW Tozer, a, a theologian, says at the start of one of his books, “What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

[00:12:05] As a big claim, especially after the Michelangelo’s painting, because we’re all just thinking of that. No, but it, it could be true. What comes to mind when we think about God impacts how we live. If we, if, if God is someone whose approval must be earned, then we’ll perform. If God is ab- if God is distant, then our works become ritual, or He just becomes irrelevant.

[00:12:32] If God is harsh, we’ll hide. If God is uninterested, we’ll avoid. If God is merely clever, we’ll just take what we want from Him. What comes to our minds when we think about God impacts how we live. And throughout this part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus mentions a correct view of God over and over and over again.

[00:12:56] He uses the term Father In each of these three examples, Jesus says, “Don’t be like the hypocrites. Instead, do this before your Father, and you’ll be seen and rewarded.” Now for us, um, we’ve been hear- hearing the term Father for, uh, for God for 2,000 years. It is a very com- it’s, it’s the start of the Lord’s Prayer, which everybody just knows.

[00:13:28] Um, but back then, they didn’t use such intimate language for the God of heaven and earth You know poor Godfather A German theologian said, “There’s, there’s not a single example of the use of Abba,” meaning Father, “as an address to God in the whole of Jewish literature.” It was too informal. It was too intimate to use for God, but Jesus insists on it here.

[00:13:58] He insists on it, not just using it himself, but calling his disciples to use it, too. Verse four, “Your Father will see what is done in secret.” Verse six, “Your Father will see what is done in secret.” Verse 14, “Your Heavenly Father.” Verse 16, “Your Father, your Father.” And verse eight, “This then is how you should pray, ‘Our Father in heaven.'”

[00:14:20] Jesus is saying to his disciples, “The God of Heaven and Earth, the God of creation, is your Father.” What comes to mind when we think about God impacts how we live. And Jesus wants his disciples to notice this truth: God is your Father

[00:14:43] Now I’m, I’m very aware that this may mean many different things to many different people. For some, that doesn’t sound like the good news that Jesus is int- is intending, and I know that there are felt experiences of poor parenthood and, and that’s just, that’s, that’s not okay But Jesus is saying this with all the intimacy and perfection of his heavenly Father in mind There’s a, a story in the Bible which, um, Jesus tells.

[00:15:17] We, we know it as the story of the prodigal son, and the story gives a picture of what God the Father is like. I won’t read it, but I will summarise it. It’s in, it’s in Luke 15, if you wanna go there and follow along. Um, essentially, there was a father with two sons, and the younger son asks for an early inheritance, and the father gives it to him, and then the son takes it, goes off to a distant country, and spends it all on women and drink and a way of life that is totally opposite to the righteous way of life that Jesus is talking about, to the point where he ends up having no money.

[00:16:01] He hits rock bottom. He has no people around him and no food. And then, in that kind of pit of despair, he remembers his dad, his father, and he thinks, “I could. I could go and apologise to my father, and maybe he will make me a servant in his house.” Which, if he did do that, would have been radical. That would have been a, an extremely gracious thing for the father to have done.

[00:16:43] The, the norm would have been excommunication at best. No place in the family that brought, you brought shame to. No place in the community that you brought shame to. It would have been normal to not have even accepted him back in the town. But the son remembers, he must have remembered, that the father is gracious, that his father is gracious So gracious that he would have him back in his house, maybe even as a servant who he feeds So the son practices his apology.

[00:17:16] He approaches the house. We- a lot of us know the story. The father, while it, while, while the son’s still a long way off, sees him, runs out to him, embraces him, clothes him, puts a ring of belonging on his finger, and calls for a feast because the son who was lost has returned. And the son realises that the father, who he thought gracious, is just exceedingly more gracious than he could have ever imagined He was picturing grace and kindness, but he received love and forgiveness in abundance.

[00:17:52] “Your Father, who sees what is done in secret” Is not a God standing off in the clouds, distant, unattainable, like the creation of Adam. He’s not a boss waiting for you, tapping his finger, watching your every move. He’s a father, better than you could possibly imagine And, and that’s the painting that Jesus is craning his neck trying to, trying to illustrate for us Because what comes to mind when we think about God impacts how we live.

[00:18:32] If God is someone whose approval must be earned, we’ll perform. If God is distant, then our works become ritual, or he becomes irrelevant. If God is harsh, we’ll hide. If God is uninterested, we’ll avoid. If God is merely clever, we’ll take whatever we want from him. What if instead we know God as Father? Well, that’s just incredibly different

[00:18:54] We come before him as children, adopted and loved, welcomed sons and daughters. And what if that view of God is then our motive for living our lives, for practicing our spiritual practices, our spiritual disciplines? Well, that helps us to be careful, to be careful not to do works before others for their appro- approval, because God is our Father

[00:19:26] Now that’s how, how we see God. Second thing is how God sees us. Um, A.W. Tozer, he, w- he said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” C.S. Lewis says that there is something even more important. What comes into God’s mind when He thinks about us So what does he think about us?

[00:19:54] Well, to state the obvious, apologies We need to go back to the beginning The creation story in Genesis tells us a lot about what God thinks about humanity. Humanity even in general. In the creation story, he created everything, and it was good. And then he created humankind, and it was very good. But not just very good in an objective way like, “Wow, look what I’ve done.

[00:20:30] I’ve, I’ve absolutely nailed that.” But very good in, in a, in a subjective way as well to God, that He chose us to bear His image, to be created in His likeness, to carry something of beauty in ourselves of Him, and to be in partnership with Him, growing the garden, cultivating the world with Him. Which then, then, if, if you see it like that, makes so much sense as to why He then seeks to restore what was lost after the story of the serpent and the tree.

[00:21:02] He constantly wanted to restore that relationship because He doesn’t think of humankind as just another part of creation, but as His special possession, His image-bearing, beauty-carrying partners. So it goes a lot deeper than what you do or what you’ve done. God sees you and knows you as His image-bearing, beauty-carrying partner, and the extent to which He goes to restore the relationship between us and Him shows the extent of love He has for us, and He s- He sees us.

[00:21:34] And, and in, in the New Testament, we see Jesus then coming in flesh, God coming in flesh, God lowering Himself and emptying Himself to serve us and to die for us so that the thing that entered into the world at the story of the serpent and the tree, and distanced us from God, dies along with Christ. So that we can be restored to relationship with him.

[00:22:00] He doesn’t just see us as creatures. He sees us as people worth pursuing, people worth coming for, people worth dying for, and people worth adopting into his family C.S. Lewis concludes his, uh, kind of sentence, the statement from earlier, by saying, “To be loved by God, not, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son, it seems impossible.”

[00:22:37] a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain But so it is

[00:22:49] Jesus says here in these examples of righteous living, “Don’t live like the hypocrites, doing things for the approval of others. Instead, do it in secret before your Father, and your Father who sees you, sees what is done in secret will reward you.” And that just begs the question, well, how does He see me?

[00:23:09] How does He see me? Well, from the story of God and the life and death of Jesus Christ, we know that He sees us in love despite what we do He sees us as worth dying for. He knows us as His children. And knowing that and believing that makes all these acts of righteousness, these good works that so easily slip into performance for approval, to be noticed, to be better than most, whatever it is, simply a response A response to God who sees us with love and who we, if we accept the invitation to adoption, get to call Father

[00:23:55] And that’s the motive That’s the heart that Jesus is getting at. This is the antidote to be free from this slip of approval or desire to be seen and noticed. Your Father, who sees what you do in secret, will reward you

[00:24:15] But be careful. Be careful, disciples. Be careful, crowd listening in, not sure where you stand. Be careful not to live for these others, for the eyes of these others when God is and can be your Father And when he sees what you do and sees what you’ve done and loves you all the same, this passage is, this teaching really is simply a call to live for God and God alone What comes to mind when we think about god impacts how we live.

[00:24:53] And what if we see him and know him as a father who loves far more than we can imagine and one who has reached in to save us to be his?

[00:25:09] In the middle of all of this, um, is the, in, in the prayer section is this part that I haven’t talked about, the Lord’s Prayer. I, I really want to talk about it, but now we don’t have time. Um- But just, just, just one minute. Jesus extends the section on prayer, verse nine to 13. Um, it’s the Lord’s Prayer. We know it, and it’s Jesus teaching his disciples how to pray.

[00:25:39] And, and the prayer begins with this reformed view of God, Our Father in heaven And it goes on to pray for His kingdom to come on Earth, for forgiveness to take place, for evil not to win, and it’s a beautiful prayer. And it’s rightly memorised. We shouldn’t lose that. Don’t, don’t, don’t stop. Keep teaching our kids to memorise it.

[00:26:03] It’s a good prayer. Um, Jesus, it teaches a lot and it asks a lot, but what I would love us to do is to read this. Not, not now, but for all of us, no matter whe- whether we’re in the crowds or we’re one of His disciples To go into a room and close the door and read this prayer knowing that your father in heaven sees what is done in secret

[00:26:41] I, I just wanna finish with, um, an excerpt from a storytelling podcast that I love. It’s called The Holy Ghost Stories. And in one episode, my favourite… Oh, man, it’s so good. There’s, there’s an episode, uh, to do with the Garden of Eden, and in a part of that episode, there’s this little part which is a creative interpretation of what a day in the life in the Garden of Eden might have looked like.

[00:27:10] Uh, and, and I just wanna read a little bit from that ’cause I think it captures some of what we’ve been talking about, and then I’ll finish up

[00:27:25] Together, the three of them, the man, the woman, and Yahweh take a walk Yahweh listens as his children tell him about their day, about how far he swam, about the monkeys that she saw. He loves how much they love this time. It’s clear that they feel free with him

[00:27:57] The woman has made herself a crown of orange blossoms. Yahweh knew she’d love them the moment he made her. Dressed in his radiant light, a daughter wearing her dad’s coat, she dances ahead like some kind of goddess, looking back to see if her father approves. He smiles. “Very good.”