"Just What You Need To Make You Happy" Series

Mal 4:6

6He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse."

Now Jesus opens His ministry with the blessings we know as the beatitudes. The Old Testament law demonstrates man’s need of salvation, and the New Testament message offers the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Our Lord had to begin with a proper presentation of the law, so the people would recognize there sin – then come to the offer of salvation. However, Jesus makes it clear that man’s effort can never earn him righteousness or salvation. Only the new nature that God gives can enjoy the blessedness that Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Mount.

AMERICA IS IN A HURRY. We are the only nation on earth with a mountain call “Rushmore.” In 1965 a testimony before a Senate subcommittee claimed the future looked bright for free time in America. By 1985, predicted the report, Americans would be working twenty-two hours a week and would be able to retire at age thirty-eight.

The reason? The computer age would usher in a gleaming array of advances that would do our work for us while stabilizing our economy.

And now the computers are byting, the VCR’s are recording, the fax machines are faxing. Yet the clocks are still ticking, and people are still running. The truth is, the average amount of leisure time has shrunk 37 percent since 1973. The average workweek has increased from forty-one to forty-seven hours.

Why didn’t the forecast come true? What did the committee overlook? They misjudged the appetite of the consumer. As the individualism of the sixties led to the materialism of the eighties, the free time gained for us by technology didn’t make us relax; it made us run. Gadgets provided more time…more time meant more potential money…more potential money meant more time needed.

Many of you have so many irons in the fire that you can’t keep any of them warm.

Now with this in mind we look at the opening of the Sermon on the Mount.

Matt 5:1-2

5:1 Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them, saying:

Notice the first thing Jesus did, He went up on the mountainside. He didn’t go into their midst. He didn’t heal their sick. He didn’t immediately begin to teach them on the spot. Before He went to the masses He went to the mountains. And before the disciples faced the crowds they faced the Christ.

Jesus wants us to come up out of our hectic lives that are keeping us too busy to even do what we want, and follow Him to the stillness of the mountainside. To turn our backs on the noise of this world so we can hear the still, small voice of the Father. The reason many of us don’t hear God isn’t because we have God tuned out, He is simply flooded out by the overwhelming demands of everyday life. God’s summit is clear, clean, with crisp air to fill our spirit. The noise and busyness of the world is far below, and it’s their with God that we get the perspective we need to see true blessedness.