Editorial September 27, 1993 Issue

The Sermon on the Mount: the way to live

Barbara M. Vining

Human life can seem to be a very complicated affair. Consequently, people tend to expect that there is a need for complicated answers. And this expectation often prevents them from finding real and satisfying solutions. The answers to what seem to be complex human problems may be embedded in such simple, straightforward precepts that people completely overlook them or, at best, fail to take them seriously enough to consider how they relate to the circumstances at hand. Or, worse yet, having found such precepts and appreciating the practical application to human needs, they fail to put them into practice and continue in their complicated ways.

Practical precepts for living are often simple, but they are not simplistic—unrealistic. If they were, they would not be practical.

The Sermon on the Mount contains the simple precepts that Christ Jesus lived by. Jesus was a highly practical man; the way he lived—keeping his thoughts, motives, and conduct always in perfect agreement with God—gave him his total victory over every form of human error, over mental and physical discord, and over death itself. It would be hard to imagine a more practical way to live. In view of that fact, every human being should be extraordinarily interested in the Sermon on the Mount.

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