"Beware of placing our Lord as teacher first instead of Savior. That tendency is prevalent today, and it s a dangerous tendency. We must know Him first as Savior before His teaching can have any meaning for us or before it can have any meaning other than that of an ideal that leads to despair.
Fancy coming to men and women with defective lives and defiled hearts and wrong mainsprings, and telling them to be pure in heart!
What is the use of giving us an ideal we cannot possibly attain? We are happier without it. If Jesus is a teacher only, then all He can do is to tantalize us by erecting a standard we cannot come anywhere near.
But if by being born again from above we know Him first as Savior, we know that He did not come to teach us only: He came to make us what He teaches we should be. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is having His way with us."
Oswald Chambers, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 1960.
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