The Sermon on the Mount: 14 Days
Walk through Jesus's most famous teaching passage verse by verse with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and N.T. Wright as your guides. Discover what the kingdom of heaven looks like when it takes root in everyday life.
The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is the most concentrated block of Jesus's teaching in the Gospels. It has been called the manifesto of the kingdom, the charter of Christian ethics, and the most searching moral teaching ever delivered. It has also been called impossible.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gave his life resisting Nazi tyranny, insisted that the Sermon was not an impossible ideal but a description of real life for those who follow Jesus. N.T. Wright argues that Jesus was not giving a new law but painting a portrait of what it looks like when God's kingdom breaks into the present world.
What You'll Discover
Over 14 days, you will move through the Sermon on the Mount verse by verse:
- Days 1-4 — The setting, the Beatitudes, and the calling to be salt and light
- Days 5-7 — Jesus and the Law: the six antitheses that radicalize the commandments
- Days 8-9 — The hidden life: giving, prayer, fasting, and the Lord's Prayer line by line
- Days 10-11 — Treasure, anxiety, and the single-minded pursuit of the kingdom
- Days 12-13 — Judgment, the Golden Rule, and the two paths
- Day 14 — The astonishing authority with which Jesus spoke
Guided by Trusted Voices
This plan pairs Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship — his classic commentary on the Sermon on the Mount — with Wright's Matthew for Everyone and After You Believe, which set Jesus's teaching in its first-century Jewish context.
Who This Plan Is For
If you want to move beyond admiring the Sermon on the Mount to actually understanding and living it, this plan provides the framework you need.