Sermon on the Mount | Salt & Light | Matthew 5:13-16 | Week 2

We're in week 2 of a series we're doing on the Sermon on the Mount.  If you have your Bible, open to Matthew 5.  This is a picture of a man by the name of Michael Carroll.  Michael Carroll, at the age of 19, won $14.4 million in the lottery.  He was a garbage man at the time, just happened to play, and happened to win.  Over the next decade of his life, from 2002 to 2012, he bought mansions, he bought cars, he bought drugs, he bought a number of different things.  In the course of those ten years, he mowed through $14.4 million and found himself living on government assistance, unemployed.  Now, today, he makes $511 per week working as a butcher.  Which begs the question:  When we find ourselves in the midst of blessing, what do we do with it?  When we find ourselves "at the top," how do we use our resources?  Most people would act similarly to Michael Carroll.  If we find ourselves in the midst of flourishing, it should be used for us.  We should drink every little piece of that down and it should go to serve to make our lives better, whether it's being popular in high school, or whether it's as a nation winning a war.  When we do find ourselves at the top, we tend to think it should be used for us.  Which is exactly what Jesus begins to address in the Sermon on the Mount.  

If you were here last week, you heard these eight blessings that Jesus gives.  These eight statements of wisdom, of grace, of mercy, of invitation to live a life different than anyone had ever seen on the face of the globe.  He made these declarations---sort of crazy-sounding statements like, when you're poor in spirit (which nobody then and nobody now wants to be) you're blessed.  When you find yourself meek---sort of at the bottom of the pile, that pile is actually flipped on its head in the kingdom of God and you're blessed.  When you're persecuted, there's blessing.  Regardless of what situation you find yourself in, if you're in the kingdom, you're blessed.  Jesus's words were dangerous, because you had people who had never heard blessing before.  You had people who were used to the social structures and the political structures and the relational structures, where there's certain people that were always on the bottom.  Jesus says to those people, you're blessed.  The reverberation of that would have gone off of this mountain---this Sermon on the Mount---and gone into culture and into society at large and the question is what happens when it does?  Jesus says in Matthew 5:11-12 that one of the things that happens is you're going to be persecuted.  You want to flip the social societal structures on their head?  It's not going to go well with you so just be ready for that, Jesus says...