Posted by Roberta Grimes • November 22, 2025 • 6 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see,
Comin’ for to carry me home?
A band of angels comin’ after me,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
If you get there before I do,
Comin’ for to carry me home,
Just tell my friends that I’m a comin’ too!
Comin’ for to carry me home.
– Wallace Willis, former slave (ca 1820-1880), from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (1863)
Just listening passively to the words of Jesus is a far different matter from truly and deeply, actually hearing what Jesus is saying as He speaks directly from His heart to our hearts! After all, many of the sayings of Jesus are famous. And when you hear His words used, and even misused often enough, they begin to lose their deep significance in your mind. Especially since the religion that carries Jesus’s name has in some cases distorted what seem to have been the Lord’s intended meanings for some of the things that He said, this can be a very big problem! This is why Thomas and I have asked you to imagine for our series of blog posts about The Sermon on The Mount that you are quite literally sitting with us now on that Galilean hill. We urge you to stretch your mind to believe that you are listening to the itinerant preacher who is Jesus Himself, and hearing His words literally the very first time that they were spoken. Think of these words as not tied to any religion at all just yet, but as instead coming directly from God to you by way of God’s living Son and True Messenger.
The Gospel Book of Matthew, Chapter 6, comes next in The Sermon on the Mount, and it deals with our personal relationship with God, and also with some of the more mundane-seeming aspects of our internal lives. Jesus is gently trying to wake us up to the notions that what we are thinking about, and the way that we think, both are really all-important! For us to talk to God every day is important as well. Jesus teaches us in this Gospel Chapter how best to handle these most private aspects of our lives, and even our most intimate daily thoughts. It may surprise you to learn that some scholars now believe that in Jesus’s day, a lot of these ideas in Chapter 6 which seem only normal to us may actually have been heard by their first listeners as brand-new, and even as radical! Back then, all these people were farmers and laborers, and most of them were illiterate; so for nearly all of them, and throughout nearly all of human history, there was pretty much nothing going on upstairs. And this was a more complete nothing going on than anything that we can imagine today: we are told that before electronics, before even literacy, it is suspected now that these people literally did not think much at all, when compared to the way that we think today. I can recall seminar discussions about this problem in college. Our modern minds are encyclopedias chock-full of interesting stuff to think about in every moment of our lives, when compared to the empty minds of those ten thousand people around us, sitting and listening to the words of Jesus on that Galilean hill.
So listening to Jesus is, for the very simple people of His day, even that much richer and more amazing as a life-experience than anything that you and I can imagine. No wonder so many of them would follow Him for days, eager to hear even much more of what He was saying! It would have been for them almost as if an alien from space had landed in your city and started spouting some truly amazing things. So after that wake-up jolt of the second part of Chapter 5, now we move into the comforting and love-filled spiritual guidance that makes up Jesus’s Chapter 6 of The Sermon on the Mount:
(Quick aside as you begin your reading of Chapter 6: there is a wonderful story in the early-twentieth-century afterlife literature about a woman who had obviously read The Sermon on the Mount, and she had taken to heart Jesus’s command that we be secretive in our charity and not let our left hand know what our right hand is doing [see MT 6:3 below]. This woman made a practice of secretly doing something good for someone else every day of her adult life; and if a kindness of hers was discovered, then she made herself do some other secret kindness to replace it, that same day. When this woman died, she was given a gigantic celebration and parade in the afterlife which was said to be like nothing else ever seen there! We know about it only because a man who had died around the same time described it to his family through deep trance medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, and it was preserved in a contemporary book written about that medium.)
6 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.
2 “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
5 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
7 “And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. 8 So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.
(As we can see, a lot of this is about transforming what was the simple and outward-focused very public religious life that prevailed prior to Jesus’s day and was managed by the smug and dominant clergy into a more personal and individual spiritual life that is inward-focused and private, since our relationship with God is meant to be internal. It is no wonder that the clergy soon came to hate Jesus, and were always testing Him!)
“Pray, then, in this way:
‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
10 ‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
11 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
12 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’
14 For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.
Fasting; The True Treasure; Wealth (These titles appear in the Bible only and were, of course, not spoken.)
16 “Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance so that they will be noticed by men when they are fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 17 But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face 18 so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; 21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22 “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
(This beautiful summary of what human goodness is, and what it means to put the pure love of God first in your inner life, could be read again and again, as each word sings in your heart!)
The Cure for Anxiety
25 “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? 27 And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? 28 And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, 29 yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! 31 Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ 32 For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. 34 “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
(This is the most glorious exhortation and call to faith and trust in God that I have ever read! Some who have taken courses that I have given in how to rapidly raise your personal spiritual vibrations enough to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, which essentially teach how to love and trust God enough that you can live by the beautiful paragraph just above, have told me that paragraph is perfectly true! If you completely trust God and live your whole life spiritually in the shelter of God’s perfect love, truly God does indeed provide, and miracles do happen. And my own life-experience has been amazingly the same as theirs has been.)
The treasured wisdom of Matthew’s Chapter 6 is all so beautifully said, dear much-beloved Jesus! Thank you, Dear Heart! We look now toward Chapter 7 of the Gospel Book of Matthew, where Jesus sums up for the quiet crowd of many thousands spread sitting all along this narrow valley below us the rest of what He has been teaching all along the way as He walked through Galilee with His disciples, while the sun begins to sink toward the farthest hills. We will complete our four-part study of The Sermon on the Mount next week.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
I’m sometimes up and sometimes down,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
But still my soul feels heavenly bound!
Comin’ for to carry me home.
– Wallace Willis, former slave (ca 1820-1880), from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (1863)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
simply beautiful…… thank you for this write-up today. I needed it.
Oh my so very dear Sheila H, it thrills me to hear that Thomas and I could be useful to you! We sometimes feel the tug of readers, even as we are writing. Love and blessings and a wonderful Thanksgiving to you, my dear one!!
So much beauty and truth, I can barely stand it!
Oh my dear and much-beloved Vicki, thank you so much! The joy of serving Jesus this way is sometimes more than I can bear as well!
Many of us might have difficulty identifying with the people living in the time when Jesus was teaching in Galilee. Most of them were illiterate and had little to no exposure to concepts such as the afterlife, forgiveness, and all-encompassing love. They must have been totally enthralled by such a radical message (and by the Messenger). On the other hand, we are inundated with knowledge that has been garnered over centuries and refined by some of our finest human minds. As a result, we may perceive that we have more sophistication in the way we think and reason, but a cautious approach to that attitude is needed, especially if we become conceited about our supposed level of intellectual acumen compared to the people of 30 AD. One major point is that the Words and Message of Jesus are so powerful that even people with little intellectual stimulation and educational development can be moved and changed by them. The people of today aren’t different from the people of Jesus’s time, we just have bigger intellectual toolbags (if we bother to use them properly). In some ways, our access to information is a detriment; the element of distraction that Roberta talks about in this blog post is a real problem. Since we live in an anxiety-provoking era (as are all eras, actually) we sometimes seek information as a way to assuage our sense of foreboding, only to find it doesn’t help. “So do not worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. There is no need to add to the troubles each day brings.”
Thanks again Roberta, for a wonderful blog post.
My so dear and very much-beloved Mark, this is all so very beautifully said – thank you!! I do sometime feel that your comments are so deep and perceptive that you really ought to have a pulpit of your own my very dear one. 🙂