Sermon on the Mount. Do Christians Obey It? NO! Why?

A question is often asked by Muslims: Do you Christians obey the Sermon on the Mount? If we answer 'yes', he will believe we are hypocrites, for nobody does and nobody can. If we answer 'no' then he will tell us to go home and practice what we preach before trying to teach it to him.

So…what can we say about the Sermon on the Mount, a real cornerstone to our Christian faith? The uncompromising absolutism and perfectionism of our Lord's ethical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount can be most clearly seen in his conception of the holiness of God. It is because we believe that Jesus reveals God to us in all that He was, said and did--including his ethical teaching--that we can accept the Sermon on the Mount into our faith experience with Him. We see that the ethics of Jesus show us what man is NOT and what God IS. Our Lord's teaching does not relate man to man so much as it relates God to man. Put in another way, when a man stands in the presence of God, after having had Jesus as his Teacher, he realizes that his ethics are not God’s ethics. Man’s ethics were designed to help and protect man against man in the crosscurrents of conflicting social claims. Man’s ethics come from the practical efforts to control the explosions caused by aggressive egoism, and they are not the ethics of pure love and absolute, infinite perfection. Man’s ethics are but the makeshift measures of a corrupt humanity in its effort to control and suppress the grosser forms of evil in society. The man standing in the presence of God, as Jesus presented Him, understands that he will be judged, not by the standard of his own very best efforts, but by the standard implied and expressed in the ethics of Jesus.

For the Christian, the Sermon on the Mount is the inspiration and the motivating force behind his every ethical decision-—achievable or not-—these principles are the things that should motivate our every decision. The principles of the Sermon on the Mount should, also, motivate and drive every policy decision made by our government and by other organizations to which we belong.