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by Oswald Chambers (Author)
From the best-selling author of My Utmost for His Highest, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount is a grace-filled exposition of Matthew 5-7. Much has been written about these 3 chapters of the New Testament, but Chambers' insightful and theologically rich treatment of the text is both challenging and refreshing.
"If Jesus is only a Teacher, then all He can do is to tantalize us by erecting a standard we cannot come anywhere near. But if we know Him first as Savior, by being born again from above, we know that He did not come to teach us only: He came to make us what He teaches we should be. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is having His way with us.
The Sermon on the Mount must produce despair in the natural man; and that is the very thing Jesus means it to do, because immediately we get to despair we are willing to come to Jesus as paupers and to receive from Him. "Blessed are the poor in spirit"-that is the first principle of the Kingdom. So long as we have a conceited, self-righteous notion that we can do the thing if God will help us, God has to allow us to go on until we break the neck of our ignorance over some obstacle, then we are willing to come and receive from Him. The bedrock in Jesus Christ's Kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility-"I cannot begin to do it." Then, says Jesus, "Blessed are you." That is the entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor. The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works."
