The Sermon on the Mount
“By all means, drink deep of the fountains that are given to you in the Sermon on the Mount, but then you will have to take sackcloth and ashes.” Mahatma Gandhi.
The Sermon on the Mount is “the most luminous, most quoted, most analyzed, most contested, and most influential moral and religious discourse in all of human history.” Harvey Cox.
Walter Kaufmann argues that Christianity is simply “the ever-renewed effort to get around these sayings without repudiating Jesus.” But the Sermon is all but impossible to ignore because Jesus’ words get to the root of the human condition.
E. Stanley Jones, missionary to India, warned readers of the Sermon on the Mount about the temptation to reduce the Sermon on the Mount to a mere “echo of scattered sayings out of the past.” However, that is not the way Jesus’ first hearers took it. They were struck with the Sermon’s utter newness and they commented that Jesus taught them as one with authority and not like their scribes.”
In the Lent season beginning February 18, 2026, we will be diving into Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes. It is an appropriate Lenten Meditation for the following reasons.
- The Beatitudes distill the character of those who seek to follow Jesus.
- The Beatitudes are found enacted throughout the whole Bible.
- The Beatitudes prompt us to examine our inner most longings.
For the period from February 18 (Ash Wednesday) to April 4 (the day before Easter) we will be reading the Beatitudes together. These daily readings can be found at lifespringchurch.net, our church’s website. We hope you will join us.
Prayer:
O Christ, please be with us as we read these words, spoken by you to your disciples, and may they sink deepy into our hearts. May we not try to dance around them or discount the but regard them as your marching orders to a lowly group of people seeking to follow you. In Jesus’ name we pray this. Amen.