WHERE DOES ONE GO TO CHURCH THESE DAYS TO HEAR THIS? How many times have we heard teachers consign the Son of God's Great Sermon to adjunct status, that is, to mere secondary righteousness, mere incidental ethics, now exceeded by the "grace" that is by faith in His death and resurrection? On the contrary, however, by Christ's own words what He proclaims from the Mount exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. It also exceeds the righteousness ("grace") of present day scribes and Pharisees. Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 5:20) This clause built in to the Great Sermon by Christ Himself will not allow it to be "exceeded" by any righteousness, not even the "grace" of glib preachers, for the Sermon on the Mount is grace. God gave Jesus Christ many weeks and months to lay down His teachings before His death on the cross. Had God not done that, all we would have to do would be to believe that "Jesus died for me." But because Christ left behind glorious teachings that must be lovingly incarnated in our lives, we may not just believe that "Jesus died for me." His teachings are the necessary conditions, the required prerequisites, of salvation, for Jesus Christ will not go where His teachings are ignored. This book takes up a loving restoration of the Sermon on the Mount to its central position in the salvation of the human soul. Author Bio: Charles W. Schaefer is a teacher and preacher whose other works include Expanding the Frontiers of Christian Consciousness, The Great Evangelical Dilution, and First Century Christianity in the Twenty-first Century.
