Sermon On The Mount Pt 5 How Do You Know

Everyone in the hardest paragraph of this passage is religious. They call Jesus Lord, point to miracles done in his name, and he still says he never knew them. That question sits under the entire close of the Sermon on the Mount, and it is where this final session lands.

This is the fifth and last session in our walk through Matthew 5-7. From here to the end of the sermon, almost everything comes in pairs, and in nearly every pair the difference is invisible until something arrives that makes it visible. The fruit does not make the tree what it is. The storm does not make one house weak and the other strong. Both simply reveal what was already there.

We work through the log and the speck, the narrow gate and the long road after it, two ways a tree ends up with no fruit, the three verses where Jesus stops using pictures and just says it plainly, and two houses built the same, tested by the same storm, with the only real difference in the one part of a house nobody ever sees. We close the bracket that opened back in chapter 5, and we end where Matthew ends, on a crowd left reeling and what he says about the man who had just finished speaking to them.

Righteousness is not the price of the ticket in. It is the shape of a life once it actually belongs to the kingdom Jesus is announcing. Five weeks ago that sentence opened this series. Tonight it gets tested.