September 21 Daily Devotional

An awful Sermon?

Our Lord ... [leads] up to the great climax in that striking picture of the two houses. These represent two men listening to these things; one puts them into practice and the other does not. Once more we are reminded of the greatness of this Sermon on the Mount, its searching character, the profundity of its teaching, indeed its truly alarming character. There never has been such a Sermon as this. It finds us all somehow, somewhere. There is no possibility of escape; it searches us out in all our hiding–places and brings us out into the fight of God. There is nothing... which is so unintelligent and fatuous as the statement of those who are fond of telling us that what they really like in the New Testament is the Sermon on the Mount. They dislike the theology of Paul and all this talk about doctrine. They say, ‘Give me the Sermon on the Mount, something practical, something a man can do himself.’ Well, here it is! There is nothing that so utterly condemns us as the Sermon on the Mount; there is nothing so utterly impossible, so terrifying, and so full of doctrine. Indeed, I do not hesitate to say that, were it not that I knew of the doctrine of justification by faith only, I would never look at the Sermon on the Mount, because it is a Sermon before which we all stand completely naked and altogether without hope. Far from being something practical that we can take up and put into practice, it is of all teaching the most impossible if we are left to ourselves. This great Sermon is full of doctrine and leads to doctrine; it is a kind of prologue to all the doctrine of the New Testament.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, p. 160