The Rodeo

Mike Raiter (a missionary in Pakistan for eleven years) gave this talk on Matthew 5:1-16.

• Teaching and Healing were Jesus’ ministry
• Matthew chapters 5-7 show his teaching and 8-9 show healing and miracles.
• You can’t have Jesus as a teacher without the miracles, and you can’t have the miracles without Jesus as teacher - you have to take both.

• The sermon on the mount is not how to become a Christian or how to get right with God. It is what we should be doing once we are.

• The beatitudes describe the disciples (i.e. us) and their (our) future.

• Poverty is powlessness and helplessness and hopelessness. People in abject poverty cannot help themselves - they have to beg of those who are rich.

• You cannot save yourself, no matter how hard you try.

• We are helpless (poor in spirit).
• We have to go to the one who is rich.
• We have to ask for help (meekness).

• Of the eight blessings described six are yet to come, two are already here. Read the passage, it should be pretty easy to see which is which.

At this point Mike talked about a swimmer who swam some huge distance to the Californian shore (from an island or something, I can’t remember which). She swam for fifteen hours and she was exhausted. It was foggy and she couldn’t see anything and she asked the people in the boat with her to pull her out of the water. Once she got back in the boat the fog cleared and she could see the shore just ahead - she had given up with only a short distance left to swim. She said that she’d have kept going if she could see the shore.

• We need to keep our eyes fixed on the shore (i.e. the rewards described in the beatitudes), if we only see the fog we will give up too early.
• The one thing that sustained Israel in Babylon was the hope of Jerusalem.
• We need to keep our eyes on the shore (repeated for truthiness).

RodeoClown: hopes the fog lifts soon.

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