Matthew 7: rebooting for Kingdom of Heaven Living'

For most of this year in the services at St Peter's Presbyterian Church I have been working my way through Jesus Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's gospel. I've tried to do it in bite size sections. we looked at the Beatitudes in 'the Jesus guide to Happiness' then looked at the rest of Matthew Chapter 5 in  a series I called "It's Life But Not As we Know it", then a five week series called "Journey to the heart of Prayer looking at the Lord's Prayer. Last week I preached on the economics of the Kingdom of God.. and now we are finishing off this exploration of the Sermon on the Mount with a Series called 'Matthew 7: Rebooting for Kingdom of Heaven Living'.

Just recently the people who work at the Northern Presbytery office here at St Peter's upgraded their computers and it was interesting watching them adjusting to a new environment as it meant they upgraded to a windows 7 operating system. While it seemed familiar in reality it was vastly different to the way they had become used to operating. It may seem a bit crazy but that kind of experience is behind me calling this final series 'Matthew 7: rebooting for Kingdom of heaven Living' as in the sermon on the mount Jesus gives us a new operating paradigm, a new way to live. In someways we have become familiar with what Jesus said but we are still trying to get used to working and living in that new Kingdom of Heaven environment.

You may ask why focus so much time on the Sermon on the Mount at this juncture of my churches life. In the back of my mind is a quote that I kept coming across in a 'do you think that God is trying to say something' kind of way from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

 “The restoration of the church will surely come from a new kind of community, which will have nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ. I believe the time has come to rally people together for this.”