Accordingly, the only description of eternal life found in the words we have from Jesus is “This is eternal life, that they [his disciples] may know you, the only real God, and Jesus the anointed, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). This may sound to us like “mere head knowledge.” But the biblical “know” always refers to an intimate, personal, interac

“To believe in Christ for salvation,” he says, “means to have confidence that He can remove the guilt of sin and give eternal life [read heaven]. It means to believe that He can solve the problem of sin [read guilt] which is what keeps a person out of heaven.”13

Warning: against false securities—reputation and wealth (Matt. 6, and chapter 6 of this book). Warning: against “condemnation engineering” as a plan for helping people. A call to the community of prayerful love (Matt. 7:1–12, and chapter 7 of this book). Warnings: about how we may fail actually to do what the Discourse requires, and the effects the

Within that framework, the first part of the talk (on the “blesseds” and the light and salt of the earth) revises prevailing assumptions about human well-being by presenting unlikely kinds of people who in fact found and still find blessedness in the kingdom. We dealt with this part of the sermon in the previous chapter.

The simple but powerful structure of the Discourse on the Hill can therefore be represented as follows: Background assumption: life in the kingdom through reliance upon Jesus (Matt. 4:17–25; chapters 1 through 3 of this book are devoted to this topic). It is ordinary people who are the light and salt of the world as they live the blessed life in th

Just look at the list of the “written off,” of the “sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.”

This in turn has led to what is called the “Lordship salvation” debate among leading evangelicals and their followers.

He trusted God, of course, but it was for things involved in his current existence.

So we must see from our heart that: Blessed are the physically repulsive, Blessed are those who smell bad, The twisted, misshapen, deformed, The too big, too little, too loud, The bald, the fat, and the old—