It’s been a while. Life has this infallible way of throwing curveballs into our lives and schedules to disrupt what we want to be doing. Sometimes, a part of that is simply a lack of motivation. It’s been hard to find the motivation on top of school and other projects to find topics I truly care about. However, with this new year almost a month through, I feel as though it’s time to hunker down, put in the work, and get in the Word.
One topic that has been consistently kicking around in my brain has been Practical Christianity, and that’s what I want to spend a few weeks talking about. How do we live our lives, with all their modern trappings, in a way that not only pleases God but shines His light? Luckily, we have a pretty good guidebook laid out for us, with plenty of examples and guidelines to give us a plan to tackle the world and to challenge ourselves to turn the world upside down this year.
There are few better places to start our discussion than a passage known to some as the “guidebook to Christian Living.” The Sermon on the Mount shows Jesus at His most practical, working in very direct terms, and relating what a life of discipleship should look like. We’ll be primarily be basing this study on the book of Matthew if you want to study along, but we’ll be incorporating the other gospels as well to provide some context and help deepen our understanding.
With that out of the way, let’s begin with a fairly good place to start: the beginning. How does Jesus open up a sermon on Christian Living? Does he give us a step-by-step plan to get to heaven with boxes to check off every day? Does He tell us a tell-all secret that no one else could ever possibly think of, a secret to the universe? Does He construct the world’s most perfect thesis statement to lay out an outline of all he intends to say, setting up His good old three-point sermon? Not quite.
To begin the greatest sermon on Christian Living ever preached, Jesus gives us the beatitudes. Simply enough, Jesus tells us to start by getting our attitude right. If you’re anything like me, the way people talk, preach and present often makes me think. I sit and analyze “why did they say it that way?” “why put it in that order?” “What did they mean by putting this point before that one?” Here, I don’t think it takes too much effort to understand why He may choose this instead of some bombshell, mic drop spiritual truth. As much as we would like to brag and say “not I”, we’ve all woken up on the wrong side of the bed before. We all understand what a bad attitude can do to our mood, productivity, treatment of other people, and outlook on the world.
In elementary school, we were forced to participate in a program named “7 Habits For Happy Kids.” It was a derivative of a book with the same premise yet targeting an adult audience, but that didn’t matter much to us, because we hated it growing up. It seemed boring, repetitive, and filled with way too much memorization of little sayings to ever be useful in life. However, reflecting on it now as I enter adulthood, those little rhymes all had one thing in common: they were all about getting our attitudes right. Thinking ahead towards future goals, making the right decisions, and giving ourselves time to recover when we begin to wear out.
The Beatitudes likewise is Jesus pointing out that our attitude needs to be right to walk forward. In the first ten verses of Matthew chapter 5, Jesus lays out 8 principles for us to understand. These dive into everything from being peacemakers to mourning from hungering for righteousness to simply being meek. Each one is connected to a spiritual consequence, with Jesus telling us in spiritual terms why we should pay attention to these things.
We’ll get into the beatitudes themselves next week, but for right now I want to keep our focus on attitude. Our year is now almost 1/12th of the way over. We’ve nearly spent 31 days, or 744 hours, or a little under 440,000 minutes of 2022. How has our attitude been?
Have we been a Jonah, running from what we feel obligated to do? Have we been the apostles, hiding when it becomes tough to follow God? Or have we been Habbakuk, knowing we don’t understand God but willing to be corrected? Have we been Paul, content in all things? I can tell you now, my life on most days does not look like the attitude of Habbakuk or Paul. I am imperfect, impatient, and short-sighted, and those three traits make for a pretty tough go at things. Yet, being aware of our attitude, and working to realign it with the things of God will begin to make a world of difference.
Paul in his letter to the Romans gives them an attitude adjustment. Starting in chapter 6, they were having some trouble with the idea of grace and how it relates to sin, and it seems as though some of them may have been running around sinning to receive more grace. Paul quickly shuts that idea down at the beginning of the paragraph and begins to make his case through inspiration as to what their attitude towards sin should be. He writes a little later down in verse 11 “Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Brethren, I know I’m not perfect, and I know that if I challenge us to be perfect this year we’re all going to mess that up. But, Paul here is giving us an attitude to aspire to keep with us as we go throughout our daily walk this year. Let’s put away the things of sin. They’re dead to us, we don’t need them, because we have been given something better. Let’s walk as though we are Christians, let’s behave like we know what has been promised us. Let’s get our attitudes right so that when we face the difficult days ahead, we can still say that we are alive to God.
Photo by Alejandro Luengo on Unsplash
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