01/11/2024
THE CHRIST ON THE MOUNT A WORKING PHILOSOPHY.
AN ENCOURAGING EXTRACT FROM
E STANLEY JONES BOOK
There is no possible way to get rid of an enemy except to turn him into your friend, and there is no possible way to get rid of hate except by love. “Name one harlot,” someone has said, “who has ever been reclaimed by treating her as a harlot.” And we may add, Name one enemy who was ever reclaimed by treating him as an enemy. Treat your enemy as a friend and in the end he will be your friend; or, if he is not, you will have become a far finer man in the process. In doing this, said Jesus, “you will be sons of your Father,” for these are his methods. He makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust and he loves his enemies. “God’s punishment is pardon. His retribution is reconciliation, his revenge is forgiveness.” He rules from a cross. His method of omnipotence is the omnipotence of love.
Jesus has done the impossible about God—he has put strict moral qualities and lavish love together in the same Being. Making his sun to rise on the evil and on the good would be looseness had not the portrait of the Father been so amazingly moral that it could stand these touches of lavish love.
If you love those that love you—what do you more than others? You are to have a joy that “exceeds” (verse 11), a righteousness that “exceeds” (verse 20), and a love that “exceeds” (verses 46, 47). Jesus asks, “What do ye more?” That “more” is the Christian difference. All people are religious up to a certain point; it is this plus, this overflow, that counts. It is the overflow of the Nile that saves Egypt from being desert. We belong to the people who go beyond—beyond duties to privileges, beyond the first cheek to the second cheek, beyond the first mile to the second, beyond the coat to the cloak also, beyond the stale-mate of revenge to the victory of love. The victory of love! Love cannot be defeated, for in its very defeat it is victorious. A young, highly intelligent and beautiful-spirited Quaker goes out to China, and after living a life of self-sacrifice is murdered by the people to whom he came. Could anything be more abject in its defeat, both for him and for the Chinese? And yet when the Chinese students chose one word, that would symbolize the whole, wrought out in flowers to lay upon his grave, they chose the word, “Victory.” They were right, for a life of love is deathless, even in death, and victorious even in defeat; life is judged not by its accomplishments, but by its attitudes.
The reward of this kind of living which Jesus has been setting before us in the Sermon is in the quality of being: “Ye shall be sons of your Father,” or as Luke puts it—“sons of the Most High.” Being willing to be the sons of the most low, you turn out to be sons of the Most High. The reward is in the very make-up of your character. It is not in being given a harp in heaven, but in winning a heart that has learned its song; not in being allowed to walk on streets of fine gold, but in having the refined gold of character. Your greatest reward will be that you will be like your Father. And that is heaven, whatever the future may bring. Every man will reflect himself in his environment, he will draw around him in his environment qualities like his own. Any man that takes heaven with him is bound to have heaven. But the basis of that heaven and the degree of that heaven is character.
I HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED THIS LITTLE EXTRACT AND BEEN ENCOURAGED, LIFE IS SO HARD AND IT'S PEOPLE THAT HAVE A CHOICE TO FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE. BUT WE MUST FIGHT WITH LOVE WITH THE LOVE OF CHRIST WE GET AS WE ARE SON'S AND DAUGHTERS OF THE MOST HIGH. SURRENDERED TO THY WILL NOT MY WILL.
MUCH LOVE AND SHALOM JAMES.
🤗✝️📖🙏☝️❤️⛪👣👑
