Sermon on the Mount | In Living Color | Matthew 5:17-20 | Week 3

Take a deep breath and identify that unbelievable smell wafting into the worship center today.  BACON!  If you're a student of the Scriptures, you may be thinking to yourself, "Should we be eating bacon?"  Doesn't the Bible talk about bacon?!  Leviticus 11:1-3, 7  ---  The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "Say to the Israelites: 'Of all the animals that live on land, these are the ones you may eat: You may eat any animal that has a divided hoof and that chews the cud.  There are some that only chew the cud or only have divided hoof, but you must not eat them. (v 7) And the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.  You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.    How many of you sinned already this morning?  How many of you think I'm leading you into sin by having bacon in our lobby?   Can we agree the Bible is a difficult book?  Sometimes, as followers of the way of Jesus, we try to say things like, the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.  I don't know how helpful that is for people when the Bible says, we DO believe it, but we're cooking bacon in the lobby.  What do we do with that?  I think part of the reason our voice in the public square has been tampered, if not put out altogether, is because we haven't been honest about the way that we read this book. 

Some of us have had experiences where we've been beat up by the Bible.  We've had people shove it in our face and say, "Well, you shouldn't do that.  The Bible clearly says...."  Maybe some of us have undertaken for ourselves the discipline of studying the Scriptures and sometimes we walk away scratching our heads going, I'm not exactly sure what I'm suppose to do with this.  If you've thought that, you're not alone.  If you're graduating from high school and you're going to go to college, I can promise you, you will be in a class at some point in time where you'll have a professor that shoves a Bible at you and says, "The Bible says don't eat bacon; do you eat bacon?"  You can go, praise be to God, I do!  The question is did God just recently decide he wants us to be happy?  Did he change his mind?  Does he now think it's delicious and we should eat it?  Did we change?  Did the Scriptures change?...