A More Christlike Way: A More Beautiful Faith by Bradley Jersak

Author:Bradley Jersak
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781889973333
Publisher: Plain Truth Ministries
Published: 2019-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

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“Take up your cross”

RADICAL RECOVERY

In this section, we move from faith as trust further into faith as discipleship—what I’ve already been calling the Jesus Walk. In this chapter, we will begin with a discussion of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as the core of Jesus’ teaching or what we might call, “the Way of the Cross.” The Sermon’s Way or Walk establishes Christ’s transforming Grace as the spiritual and ethical foundation for our formation throughout this section of the book. It’s not to be mistaken for an “application section”—rather, we’re diving into Christ’s program for our transfiguration into blessed peacebuilders, recreated into the pattern of the cruciform One.

Specifically, the Sermon on the Mount demonstrates that the demands of the Jesus Way are deeper than efforts to obey a series of stricter commandments on enemy love. The Sermon takes us on a journey of inner transformation, described as “taking up a Cross and following” in the Jesus Way. We will see how Jesus’ core teaching transposes his death and resurrection into our lives as daily discipleship. Peacebuilding apart from this transformation devolves into angry activism and violent peacemaking. Christ, on the other hand, goes to work on the very structures of our hearts. This chapter explores that truth.

TAKE UP YOUR CROSS AND FOLLOW ME

More than any other prophet, teacher or preacher, Jesus Christ is what Walter Brueggemann calls “a Voice from Elsewhere” . . . the ultimate foreign prophet. A voice from another land, another kingdom, another realm.

Matthew 5-7 introduces that Voice. It’s Christ’s inaugural Sermon, his life message and his catechetical teaching for those who follow him.

We can leave it to others to unpack what it says. Many have. I especially commend to you the ancient works of St Gregory of Nyssa and St John Chrysostom. And in our days, we have modern classics, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy,

Eberhard Arnold’s devotional, Salt and Light and Jim Forest’s Ladder of the Beatitudes. By all means load up your library—but don’t forget to read the Sermon itself!

My task in this chapter is not so much commentary as it is to cover the following ground

1. What the Sermon is.

That is, what are these words meant to be?

What has its message become for Christianity?

What is its message for the world?

2. What the Sermon does.

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