te this Sermon on the Mount, or to deal
with it as if it were the very centre of the Christian Revelation. It is
nothing of the sort. Beautiful as it is, wonderful as it is as a high
ideal of human conduct, it is a law still, though it is a perfect law;
and it has all the impotences and all the deficiencies that attach to a
law, if you take it and rend it out of its place, and insist upon
dealing with it as if it stood alone. There is not a word in it that
tells you how to keep its precepts. There is no power in it, or raying
from it, to make a man obey any one of its commandments. It comes
radiant and beautiful, but imperative, and just because no man keeps it
to the full, its very beauty becomes menacing, and it stands there over
against us, showing us what we ought to be, and, by consequence, what we
are not. And is that all that Jesus Christ came into the world to do?
God forbid! If He had only spoken this Sermon on the Mount--which some
of you take for the _Alpha_ and the _Omega_ of Christianity as far as
you are concerned--He would not have been different in essence from
other teachers,--though high above them in degree,--who speak to us of
the shining heights of duty that we are to scale, but leave us
grovelling in the mire.

The Sermon on the Mount, with its stringent requirements, absolutely
demands to be completed by other thoughts and other 'sayings of Mine.'
And so I remind you, not only that there are other 'sayings of Mine' to
be kept than it, but also that there is no keeping of it without keeping
other sayings first. For the highest of Christ's commandments is
'Believe also in Me,' and you have to take Him as your Redeemer and
Saviour from death before you will ever thoroughly accept Him as your
Guide and Pattern for life. We must first draw near to Him in humble
penitence and lowly faith, and then there comes into our hearts a power
which makes it possible and delightsome to keep even the loftiest, and
in other aspects the hardest, of 'those sayings of Mine.' So, brethren,
the obedience of which this text speaks is second, and the building of
ourselves on Jesus Christ Himself, by faith in Him, is first. Only when
we build on Him as our Saviour shall we build our lives upon Him in
obedience to His commands.

'Behold! I lay in Zion for a foundation, a stone, a tried corner-stone,
a sure foundation, and he that believeth shall not make haste'; and long
after the prophet said that, the Apostle catches up t