Dare We Live "The Sermon on the Mount"

I have just left the Sermon Seminar at Rochester College in Rochester Hills, MI. The seminar topic was “Dare We Live in the World Imagined in the Sermon on the Mount.” Without a doubt, the seminar was both encouraging and challenging.

As Christians, here are some of the questions we have been challenged to ask:

Can we be a people who embrace the impoverished and destitute rather than the wealthy and powerful?

Can we be a people who live by grace, compassion, and righteousness rather than a triumphalistic, self-perpetuated glory?

Can we be a people who seek peaceful solutions to justice rather than the violent ways of our world?

Can we be a people so transformed by prayer that we truly become salt and light rather than just another common ordinary people among the world?

Can we be a people so transformed by prayer that we can freely confess our own wrong-doings, seek forgiveness in God, and then demonstrate that same loving forgiveness to the world – even our enemies of this world?

Can we seek the kingdom of God with such vigor that nothing of this world will come between our desire live out our calling?

Can we become so full of faith that the worries of this world depart from us, knowing that our Father in heaven has, is, and will continue to provide for our every need?

Can we learn to walk the narrow road, knowing that the narrow road will incur persecution but that God will give us our reward for faithfulness?

Can we truly learn to be the radical disciple that Jesus calls us to be, who abandoned the many dying kingdoms of this age and embraces the inbreaking Kingdom of God of the New Age?

So how about it? In a world where might is right, where wealth, power, and prestige are valued as essential to living and survival, where roughly 95% of the world exists in slavery for the service of the other 5%... Can we as Christians embrace a kingdom that is inaugurated by its leader hanging on a cross? Can we follow our Lord in such a path, embracing the cross in anticipation of God victory which has been promised in the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?