The Demands Placed on the Followers of Jesus According to the Sermon on the Mount

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Introduction

Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount in his first year of public ministry; on a small mountain on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, near the town of Capernaum.

The Sermon on the Mount was the major ethical teaching event of Jesus’s ministry. Matthew’s gospel tells us that this was not a public meeting but was reserved for his immediate followers, his disciples. The disciples were all ordinary hard-working men, mainly from humble backgrounds. It would not have been an easy mixture of personalities and some of them, Matthew the tax collector and Simon the zealot, for instance, would have been openly opposed to each other in normal settings. In many ways, this mixture of backgrounds, social standing and personalities is still represented in His followers today. In the gospels, we are often given examples of the disciples’ constant struggles, doubts and their jostling for position. Having already called them to follow him, Jesus teaches the disciples the principles of being in a relationship with himself and God the Father. He laid out to them, and to us, the specific instructions and expectations of Christian discipleship. William Barclay goes as far as to describe the Sermon as the disciple’s ordination ceremony. It was certainly His rousing, and motivational campaign talk to them. Jesus’s message was clearly laid out in a simple format with explicit analogies used to emphasise his points. Only Jesus could have known at this moment that these twelve ordinary men, who were often full of doubt, would become completely transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and become powerful men of God. The transforming power of Jesus’s teaching was never meant to be restricted to the disciples. It was...

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...r God’s forgiveness and restoration. We must accept our place, which was subservient to God and equal to our fellow man.

Being a follower of Jesus is not be about getting applause for being religious; our behaviour should reflect His, and our lives should bear the fruit of being a disciple. Finally, We have too long for the life in God’s coming Kingdom because ultimately that is more valuable to us than anything available in this world.

Works Cited

Drane J, 1999, Introducing the New Testament Lion Hudson plc.

1995, Life Applications Study Bible (NIV) Tyndale House Publishers Inc.

Stott J, 1988, The Message of The Sermon on the Mount Inter-Varsity Press.

Barclay W, 2001, The Gospel of Matthew Volume 1 Saint Andrew Press Edinburgh.

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