The speaker expresses gratitude for the worship and welcomes attendees, acknowledging new faces and addressing recent losses in the church community. The speaker discusses different types of good news and shares personal experiences, leading to a reflection on the concept of good news in the Christian faith. The speaker introduces an eight-week series on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, highlighting its significance and impact on various aspects of society. The speaker explores the concept of the kingdom of heaven, emphasizing the reign and rule of God and the partnership of people in ruling over creation. The speaker reflects on the lush garden in the Garden of Eden, highlighting the flourishing and harmony that existed when God's reign was reflected in creation. The speaker highlights the brokenness of various systems in society, including healthcare, wealth distribution, and truth discernment. The speaker discusses the biblical story of the Exodus, focusing on God's intervention and the escape of the Israelites from Egypt. The speaker explores the worship song of Moses in Exodus chapter 15, acknowledging God's actions and power. The speaker delves into the significance of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross and the possibility of redemption for all. The speaker presents a vision of a new city in the book of Revelation, emphasizing the restoration and rebuilding of all things.

Introduction and Welcome

- The speaker expresses gratitude for the worship team and discusses the connection between worship and his message preparation
- He acknowledges the presence of new faces in the congregation and addresses the recent hardships the church has faced
- The speaker reflects on different types of good news and its impact on individuals and the community
- He introduces a new series exploring Jesus' teachings on the good news of the kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount

- The speaker has a dry sense of humor and is a regular guy
- He believes the news about the kingdom of heaven is the best news he has ever come to understand
- He is excited to share his understanding of the news over the next 8 weeks
- The Sermon on the Mount is the focus of his message, and he will discuss its structure, the idea of the kingdom of heaven, and why it can be interpreted as good news
- The kingdom of heaven is a central theme in the Gospel of Matthew and Jesus preached about it as well
- The speaker will explore the meaning of the kingdom of heaven and its relevance in today's world

- The original words for "kingdom" in biblical languages describe actions, not nouns
- In Biblical Greek, the word for kingdom is "basileus" and in Biblical Hebrew it is "malkuth"
- These words describe the action of reigning or ruling, as kings would do in their kingdoms
- The kingdom of heaven means God's reign or rule
- The characteristics of God's reign are a major theme in the Bible
- The speaker will focus on 4 archetypal examples of God's reign: a lush garden, a parted sea, a wooden cross, and a new city
- The lush garden in Genesis symbolizes flourishing under God's reign
- However, human corruption has led to suffering and neglect in the world, as seen in the state of hospitals in the speaker's province

- The speaker discusses the brokenness of the healthcare system and society as a whole
- They draw parallels between the biblical story of the Exodus and the current state of humanity
- The speaker discusses the protective nature of God's rule and the failure of humanity to live up to God's law
- They conclude by mentioning the significance of the wooden cross in representing God's reign

- The piece discusses the Roman rule in Israel and the harsh conditions faced by the people under their control
- It then transitions to the message of Jesus, emphasizing his power through submission and sacrifice
- The piece also mentions the resurrection of Jesus and his final words to his disciples, commanding them to make disciples of all nations
- It concludes with a description of a new city in the book of Revelation, symbolizing the restoration and rebuilding that comes with God's reign

- The speaker discusses the idea of God rebuilding and restoring everything
- He emphasizes the restoration of peace and harmony between God, humanity, and creation
- The speaker invites the audience to consider the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven and encourages them to come back for more discussions on the topic

The speaker expresses gratitude for the worship team and acknowledges new faces in the congregation. He introduces a new series exploring Jesus' teachings on the good news of the kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount. The speaker has a dry sense of humor and believes the news about the kingdom of heaven is the best news he has ever come to understand. He will explore the meaning of the kingdom of heaven and its relevance in today's world, focusing on 4 archetypal examples of God's reign. The piece discusses the brokenness of the healthcare system and society as a whole, drawing parallels between the biblical story of the Exodus and the current state of humanity. It concludes with a description of a new city in the book of Revelation, symbolizing the restoration and rebuilding that comes with God's reign. The speaker invites the audience to consider the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven and encourages them to come back for more discussions on the topic."""

We should communicate more when I'm preparing a message so that the worship kind of gels with the message.

But it's so amazing when I've been preparing for this along with the other preachers for this new series.

I've been sitting in this material since January.

And so I kind of see the stuff I've been studying in everything.

I could connect it with any conversation I have.

But to hear the songs and the prayers and the passages you've chosen today.

Good morning and welcome to Rosemount Bible Church.

If this is your first time, or if you've only been coming to Rosemount for 1 or 2 weeks, could you put your hand up, please, just so I know?

There's a lot of new faces here, so welcome.

My son was 1 of the jerks who put his hand up.

In case you don't know, we welcome you very warmly, but our church has been hurting for a little time.

We've experienced some losses, and the news that we just heard about hurts a lot because Katie and Dave are, they are pillars in our church.

They are, I want to say fixtures, but sometimes when I say that someone's a fixture it makes them sound like a dusty old couch that just sits there And that is the last thing that Dave and certainly that Katie is.

She's teaching the little children right now.

And the news that she has been afflicted with this cancer, it hurts us.

There are times like this when we could use a little bit of good news.

There are a few times in my life when I have had the occasion to be the bearer of good news.

And at this stage of my life, I've come to observe that there are 3 different types of good news out there.

I remember how excited I was years ago when I shared with my friends and my family and people at church when I got my first real full-time job, like a career job.

I was over the moon happy and everybody was excited for me.

They said, good for you, Louis, but they really meant it.

And that's what I call objective good news.

But just for me, whoops, just for me, it's my good news.

You don't, You get to be happy for me, but it doesn't really impact your life.

I could think of another time in my life later on when I was at a party, and there was a young couple, and they were sitting on the couch talking with me and I could tell that they had good news.

It was like they were holding something in.

They were just waiting to let it burst out.

And so I asked if they had anything they wanted to share and sure enough they did.

They were all smiling and kind of holding their hands and they looked at each other and they turned to me and at the same time almost, they said, we got a cat!

I could be painfully aware of my body language and the expression of my face.

And it's kind of like when it's not really true for me.

And the only thing I could do to affirm them is put it as a question like, oh, a cat.

So that is what I would like to call subjectively good news.

If that was me, if I got a cat, I would be very unhappy.

And I would be thinking things that I shouldn't share right now.

The best news I have ever shared in my life is when I shared with my friends and my family that Kelly and I were getting married.

Or at least 1 of the happiest days of my life.

And later when we would share the news years later that we were going to have our son Nathaniel and our other son Thomas.

Our parents were shaking and crying and hooting and hollering because it wasn't just good news for us.

Everybody was going to enjoy the lives and the relationships that would come out of that and we still do to this day.

That is objectively good news, and it's good news for everybody.

There's this beautiful poetic verse in the Old Testament that reads, how beautiful are the feet of those who come and bring good news.

That term good news appears in the New Testament as the Greek word, euangelion.

It's translated in the Latin to evangelion, which we also translate to English as gospel.

And Christians have certainly presented themselves as kind of cornering the market on good news.

Whether they have successfully communicated that to the world or not is another story.

But the idea of good news is very closely related to the Christian faith in a way that is not quite the same in other faiths or ideologies in the world.

You've probably all heard of gospel music.

You may have heard of the first 4 books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the gospels or the gospel stories.

Possibly you've heard of some groups of Christians who call themselves evangelical Christians and they go to an evangelical church.

And maybe 1 night during the week when you're sitting down to enjoy your dinner, someone knocks at your door, and they ask, have you heard the good news of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Have you ever wondered what this good news is that Christians are talking about?

And if you did, would that be objectively good news that's good for that person but not for me?

Or could that be subjectively good news for them?

I could see why you would like that but it's not really relevant to me?

Or is it possible that the good news that Christians talk about is really legitimately objectively good news for everybody?

Today at Rosemount Bible Church we are kicking off an eight-week series that's going to explore this idea through Jesus' longest and clearest and most thorough teaching ever called the Sermon on the Mount.

Even if you've never stepped foot in a church before today, odds are that you have heard some of these words from Jesus' sermon and they would seem very familiar to you.

Words like love your enemies, that's from the Sermon on the Mount.

Turn the other cheek, Sermon on the Mount.

That's a very important message for all of us.

These are teachings that have profoundly impacted the nonviolent social change movements of the 20th century, Dr.

It's also infiltrated and penetrated all of 19th, 20th century Western art and literature, philosophy, law, you name it.

What's really interesting is that even though Jesus includes these words of wisdom and many other teachings like it in his Sermon on the Mount, the main point of his message and the 1 thing that Jesus talks about in the entire New Testament more than any other subject, hands down, is what he calls the good news.

More specifically, Jesus talks about the good news of the kingdom.

Sometimes he talks about the good news of the kingdom of heaven.

Sometimes he and his disciples refer to it as the good news of the kingdom of God.

So we are going to explore in detail Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.

A teaching that Jesus believes is good news.

The best news that anybody will ever hear.

And good news that is meant for all people.

I'm going to press pause for a second and step outside my message.

Some people in this building and online know me a little bit more than others.

And I'd like to think that I am not what someone would call a typically religious person.

I love reading and watching science fiction.

I have a sense of humor that tends to lean towards the drier, darker side of things.

But before I go even deeper into this teaching, I want to share with you all that It is my deep personal conviction, my testimony that this good news I'm going to talk about today about the kingdom of heaven, it is legitimately the best news that I have ever come to understand in my personal life.

It has fundamentally changed the way that I see the world and the way that I live my life.

And I'm still trying to understand all of this.

I think today I'm just scratching the surface.

My prayer days and weeks leading up to this message has been, God, I have put together this little lump of clay.

You know, Can you take this and do something great with it?

But from what I do understand, I am seriously excited about it.

Because from what I understand, this news I will be talking about, the news Jesus is talking about, is like a grand unified theory explaining everything.

It explains, you know a lot of people look to science or even to the Bible to explain how everything was created.

But this talks about why everything was created.

Do you ever wonder why everything exists?

It explains why things are the way that they are now, which by the way is not very good.

And it explains to me what I can expect after I draw my last breath on this earth.

Over the next 8 weeks, the other preachers and I are going to do our very best to convey our understanding to you in a way that you too might come to appreciate and get excited about, have goosebumps about what Jesus believed was the best news ever that he came to share with us and I share with you today.

So for the rest of this morning, as I simply come back to what I'm talking about, as I introduce this series on the Sermon on the Mount, my goal for today is threefold.

I want to present the structure of Jesus' message, His Sermon on the Mount.

I want to unpack what this idea of the kingdom of heaven could possibly mean.

And then as well as I might have done that, we're going to finish by exploring why this nearness of the kingdom of heaven could be reasonably interpreted as good news.

The Sermon on the Mount is found in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the book of Matthew.

It's less than half the length of my message today, which is probably too long.

And you'll see that Jesus' teaching isn't just a bunch of wise quotes or clever sayings that are stitched together.

It has a real introduction and a real main body and a real conclusion that is presented as a choice between 2 things.

In his introduction to the sermon, Jesus paints a picture of what God values most in the Kingdom of Heaven, and by extension, for whom the Kingdom of Heaven is intended, based on those values.

In our society, we are accustomed to the 1% of people always getting the best out of life.

The richest, the most powerful, the most connected, the famous.

Next week I will come back here again and share with you exactly what Jesus thinks of that model.

In the second section, in the main body of the sermon, Jesus talks a lot about righteousness.

For today, we are going to define righteousness as living in a right relationship with God, in a right relationship with other people, and in a right relationship with the rest of creation.

By listening to God's wisdom for how to do that.

Here, Jesus sets the record straight on exactly how this kind of right living would look like in the Kingdom of Heaven, especially compared to how we live things out today, day to day.

And then finally, in the third section, in the conclusion of the sermon, Jesus makes it clear that we have to choose between 2 ways of living.

And not making a choice, by the way, is a choice.

He will describe that choice in different ways.

He will describe it as choosing between a wide gate or a narrow gate.

He'll talk about a good tree or a bad tree, a true disciple or a false disciple, a wise builder or a foolish builder.

Jesus unpacks all of these ideas, the kingdom of heaven, righteousness, and our life choices in this 1 incredibly structured message, sitting on a hilltop to crowds of spiritually hungry listeners from all over the place.

And right in the very middle of the middle of this sermon on the mount, in Matthew chapter 6 verses 9 and 10, Jesus starts praying this prayer.

And he even tells us, this is how you guys should pray.

And his prayer, which may sound familiar to you, is this.

Our Father in Heaven, may your name be kept holy.

May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This prayer, remember it for the next 8 weeks.

We're going to pray it at the end of this message.

But this prayer is what I would call the foundational verse for the whole series on the Sermon on the Mount.

That we have called flourishing in the Kingdom of Heaven.

So the Gospel of Matthew alone has 35 references to the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God.

John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus' ministry, told people to repent or change your ways.

I don't know if you think you might be my age, I remember doing fire safety drills in elementary school.

They would tell us if you happen to be caught on fire, no matter what the circumstances were that led to you being caught on fire.

Does anyone know what those 3 things are?

Repent means stop, turn away, and go in a different way.

So that message was repent or change your ways for the kingdom of heaven is coming near.

Jesus himself started preaching the exact same message.

Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

And later in Matthew's gospel, when Jesus first sends out his 12 disciples to go to the different towns and villages and teach, what did he tell them to teach?

He told them to teach the kingdom of heaven has come near.

The idea of a kingdom is difficult for most of us, it is difficult for me because it is a form of government called a monarchy that we don't hear so much about anymore.

Although the truth is, and this surprised me, but I did the research, there are no less than 43 state nations on earth that still consider themselves a monarchy, Where their head of state is a monarch, and Canada is 1 of them.

We have what's called a constitutional monarchy.

His Majesty, King Charles III, is our head of state, and quite literally, he is the king of Canada.

I know that, but the idea, the term king of Canada, I've never heard of that before.

So when I hear the word kingdom, though, I have a very visual mind, so I picture things in my head.

When you say the word kingdom, I picture a medieval castle, I picture towers, I picture knights in shining armor, and horses.

Most of those things didn't exist in biblical times.

We study the language behind the actual words of the Bible in their original languages.

It's interesting to note that the modern word, the English word for kingdom, is a noun.

It's a thing that generally represents a place.

We would qualify that noun by saying, well, we mean the United Kingdom.

Or we might say the kingdom of East Watini in southern Africa or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But in biblical languages, the original words which we translate into English as kingdom don't describe nouns.

In Biblical Greek, the word we find in Matthew's gospel is basileus.

In Biblical Hebrew, the word we find in the Old Testament is malkuth, or it's at least 1 of the words used to describe kingdom.

In both cases, these words describe an action, and the action that they describe is to reign, to rule, which is what kings would do in their kingdoms.

So the kingdom of heaven, which describes God's kingdom, means God's reign, or God's rule.

In other words, when Jesus announces in the Gospel of Matthew that the kingdom of heaven has come near, another way to understand that, maybe a more relatable way to understand that, is that the reign of God has come near.

God's reign, that is to say, his role as ruler of the universe is 1 of the greatest themes in the entire Bible.

It stretches from cover to cover and everywhere in between.

Not just that he reigns, not just that he reigns, but how he reigns, the manner in which he reigns, the characteristics of his reign.

You could have a good reign, you could have a bad reign, a just reign, an unjust reign.

There are certainly a gazillion examples of rulers today, of systems of government, of systems of people being together, where we are certainly reigning over 1 another, it's not a very good reign.

If I had the time and energy, I think I could teach a different example of God's reign and what God's kingdom is like from different parts of the Bible every day for a month straight.

And I would never have to do any repetition.

But this morning I am running out of time and I'm running out of energy.

I'm even running out of voice because worship was so good, I really got into it and now my voice is going.

But Today what we're going to do is focus on 4 kind of tentpole examples, 4 archetypal examples or pictures of what God's reign looks like and especially the characteristics of his reign that hold up the whole idea in Scripture.

These examples and the lessons that they reveal are really important to us today because they are going to reveal over the next 8 weeks what God's heart is really like in everything that he does.

When we understand what the Kingdom of Heaven really is, not just the fact that God reigns, but when we understand how he reigns, what his heart is like as he reigns.

His vision for reigning justly and for reigning in partnership with us.

That's when we start getting excited because we start to see the whole picture of what God is doing from when he started this whole thing and where it's going, and why things are the way they are now.

We can start working up ourselves emotionally and intellectually about this grand design God has in store for us.

So we're talking for the rest of this morning about 4 examples, 4 pictures of God's reign.

The first picture, we can look at this kind of counterclockwise, starting at the top left.

The first picture we're going to look at, a picture of God's reign is a lush garden.

To the right of it, you'll see a picture of a parted sea.

It's a different way of looking at God's reign.

I'll use these pictures on their own later, so it will kind of make sense.

So let's start with this first picture of a lush garden.

The Bible starts in the book of Genesis, which describes the creation of everything that is.

He creates dry land and seas and plants and trees, animals that live in the sea, in the air, in the water.

All of this is described in Genesis chapter 1.

You'll see it on the screen as I read it.

God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number.

Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

God created people in his own image, it says there.

Part of God's image, part of God's fundamental nature is that he rules over his creation.

Everywhere you put people, we work our environment, we partner together to establish some kind of order and we eventually rule over it.

And not only is it in our DNA, God gives us an actual mandate to do it.

He told us to subdue it just in case our image bearing nature didn't kick in.

God is not telling them to till the land so you can eat.

He is telling them to exercise authority over something.

In his grand design, God saw it fit that in his rule over everything, he would invite people, you and me.

He invited us to be involved as partners in ruling over his creation.

Do we have any special gifts that make us worthy of doing it?

In Genesis chapter 2, we are introduced to Adam and Eve, who God places in the Garden of Eden.

In the Garden, they have these jobs to do that have been given to them.

They work the land, it says, they take care of it, they give names to all the animals.

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Flourishing in the Kingdom of Heaven