My Sunday School class just finished a several-week study on the Sermon on the Mount. We did not use any study guides as a class, though I consulted three books I publish, One World: The Lord’s Prayer from a Process Perspective, The Jesus Manifesto: A Participatory Study Guide to the Sermon on the Mount, and…
Sometimes the process of preparing to teach Sunday School takes interesting turns, at least for me. I’m currently teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, and I was thinking about the transition from the beatitudes to the discussion of fulfilling the law. Sometimes we get so used to the way Scripture passages read that we…
Scot McKnight asks the question: Is the Sermon on the Mount the Gospel? I think it’s an excellent question, and my answer would be yes. But I see this as similar to the question of whether the gospel can be found in the Old Testament, or in the law generally, to which I again answer yes….
People often think that legalism is about trying very hard to be right, and that the main problem with it is that people can’t succeed at it. I would suggest that there’s something more characteristic of legalism, and that it results from trying to paste on the narrow letter of some “right” things to oneself…
I recalled Micaiah before I thought of Jeremiah in this case, even though Dr. Jeremiah Wright shares the great prophet’s name. Micaiah is the prophet of who never prophesied anything good about Ahab (1 Kings 22). Jeremiah, on the other hand, was definitely an anti-patriot. Very little that he said was appreciated by the hierarchy of Judah,…
