Morality: How Shall We Live?

Most of us are happy to bring God our requests. We are much less happy to have anyone tell us how to live. In week three of the Sermon on the Mount, Pastor Roberto Chaple opens Matthew 5:38-48 - turn the other cheek, hand over your coat, go the second mile, love your enemies - and puts each one back in the world it was spoken into. "Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth" reads as savagery now, but it began as a ceiling. The principle runs through Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and shows up in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi around 1750 BC, and its whole purpose was to stop a slap becoming a feud. Damage control, which is roughly what human justice still is. Jesus takes his hearers past that ceiling into something considerably less reasonable. A slap to the right cheek had to be a backhand, and Jewish law treated the backhand as the especially degrading version - the message being "you are beneath me." Turning the other cheek hands that message back. And the verb behind "forces you to go one mile" is Roman conscription language, the same word used when soldiers pulled Simon of Cyrene out of the crowd to carry a cross. It ends on the word we all stumble over. "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." The Greek is teleios: complete, whole, mature. Something is teleios when it has become what it was made to be. New Hope Church | Brandon, Florida - findnewhope.com Watch and listen to past messages: findnewhope.com/message-archive