Issue 208
This is part of a six-month series looking at the Sermon on the Mount from a workplace angle: enjoy the ride!
The marketplace is full of units of input designed to produce resulting behaviour. Before you splutter coffee over your keyboard (or whatever your tipple on whatever your workspace) let me explain.
We call them codes of practice, guidelines, procedures or even advice. We use the words protocols, best practice or directives to prescribe and proscribe what should and should not be done. In health and safety manuals there are rules and regulations which literally govern our practice.
We are not unfamiliar with the consequences of ignoring advice, procedures or regulations. The phrase “gross misconduct” is the catch-all trap which is triggered when you step out of or over the line.
When it comes to spirituality we have a tendency to feel that there is a softer edge. It is about friendship with God and an outworking of a personal relationship with Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount contains around forty five such units of input. Jesus does not describe them as guidelines, suggestions or even principles – he calls them commandments. The response to these commandments should be to practice them and teach them or it could be to break them and teach others to break them. The result of the path of practice is greatness in the Kingdom of Heaven. He is not saying that keeping them is the way to earn your status – he has already spelt out that poverty of spirit is the precursor to rescue. The keeping of the commandments is an expression of the Kingdom not of the entry terms. (By the way, if any of this sounds legalistic, tedious and heavy the first of the forty five is “rejoice and be glad” Matthew 5:12).
So if you want to move from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the least to the greatest, to be a powerful expression of faith, here are the tools. They are not optional extras, they are there to be obeyed. Interestingly the scale runs from least to greatest in relation to obedience. Thank God it doesn’t run from being out to being in; that would be to miss the point of the sermon. Anyone who thinks these commandments don’t matter at all because they are merely fruit will need to remember that it is by our fruit that we are known and by our fruit that our power is demonstrated so let’s go for greatness. Jesus is about to spell out the rules of the ‘game’.
Matthew 5:17-20
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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