And what about the builders?  ’If any man’s work abide he will receive a reward.’  ‘Their works do follow them.’  ’If any man’s work is burned, he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.’  And if any man has reared a structure of a life ignoring Jesus Christ, and with no connection with Him, then house and builder will perish together.

Jesus Christ does not speak in my text about the righteousness or the unrighteousness of these two courses of conduct.  He does not say, ’a good man does so-and-so, or a bad man does the other thing,’ but he says:  A wise man builds his house on the Rock, and a foolish man builds his on the sand.  To live by faith and obedience is supreme wisdom.  Every life which is not built upon Christ is the perfection of folly.

THE CHRIST OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

     ’And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the
     people were astonished at His doctrine:  29.  For He taught them as
     one having authority, and not as the scribes.’—­MATT. vii. 28-29.

It appears, then, from these words, that the first impression made on the masses by the Sermon on the Mount was not so much an appreciation of its high morality, as a feeling of the personal authority with which Christ spoke.  Had the scribes, then, no authority?  They ruled the whole life of the nation with tyrannical power.  They sat in Moses’ seat, and claimed all manner of sway and control.  And yet when people listened to Jesus, they heard something ringing in His voice that they missed in the rabbis.  They only set themselves up, in their highest claims, as being commentators upon, and the expositors of, the Law.  Their language was ‘Moses commanded’; ’Rabbi this said so-and-so; Rabbi that said such-and-such.’  But as even the crowd that listened to Him detected, Jesus Christ, in these great laws of His kingdom, adduced no authority but His own; stood forth as a Legislator, not as a commentator; and commanded, and prohibited, and repealed, and promised, on His own bare word.  That is a characteristic of all Christ’s teaching; and, as we see from my text, to the apprehension of the first auditors, it was deeply stamped on the Sermon on the Mount.

I purpose to turn to that Sermon now, and try if we can make out the points in it which impressed these people, who first heard it, with the sense that they were in the presence of an autocratic Voice that had a right to speak, and which did speak, with absolute and unexampled authority.

And I do that the more readily because I dare say you have all heard people that said ’Oh!  I do not care about the dogmas of Christianity; give me the Sermon on the Mount and its sublime morality; that is Christianity enough for me.’  Well, I should be disposed to say so pretty nearly too, if you will take all the Sermon on the Mount, and not go picking and choosing bits out of it.  For I am sure that if you will take the whole of its teaching you will find yourself next door to, if not in the very inmost chamber of, the mysticism of the Gospel of John and the theology of Paul.