Believe...or Not.

There is one thing everyone has to do with the Sermon on the Mount.  When the last word is uttered, we have to decide what we are going to do with it.  There are only two options.  One option is to ignore it and declare it to be irrelevant.  The second option is to accept it as a Word upon which faithfulness to Christ is built.  We either can choose to refute it, or believe it.  As the Sermon winds down to its end at the close of the 7th chapter of Matthew, those two choices are presented as Jesus spoke of listeners hearing His words and acting on them or hearing them and not acting on them.    

C. S. Lewis put the choice most succinctly as he wrote, " He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse."  Jesus never made it easy.  He was not interested in pleasing people in order to build the number of disciples.  The gospel of John is often called the gospel of belief because of the way it challenges people to choose either belief or unbelief.  Jesus was not a teacher who sought to cultivate fence sitters.   

While Jesus never lived in such a hurry to get where He was going that He could not stop and care for someone in need, He did live with a sense of urgency about what He was doing.  We see this in that moment described by Luke as he wrote, "When the days drew near for Him to be taken up, He set His face to go to Jerusalem."  (Luke 9:51).  Jesus surely knew His time here among us was short and there was not time to waste.  Some would choose to obey His teachings.  Some would choose to follow Him.  There is, however, never any evidence of any guilt based persuasive preaching, or chasing after someone to twist the arm of their conscience one more time.  The choice to believe and obey always belonged to the one listening even as it does today.