What’s The Essence Of Christianity?

The modern left will look to the sermon on the mount as a utopian social blueprint; something like Plato’s Republic or Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. They treat Christianity as mere ethics. The essence of Christianity is not the Sermon on the Mount, although there is a link between the two, or that Christianity is the essence in and of itself. The essence of Christianity is Christ.

When Christianity is proclaimed throughout the world, the proclamation is never “love thy neighbor as thy self” or “love your enemies”, but rather “Christ is Risen!” This isn’t simply an ideal, it’s a real event. Christianity isn’t ideal, it’s real, it’s the “good news”. Where the humanist response is always to “try”, God’s instruction to us is to trust Him.

Matthew 5-7 & Luke 6

God Reads Hearts While Man Reads Appearances

1 Samuel 16:7 KJV

"But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart."

The Lord alone can observe and rightfully judge a person's "Heart," that is, one's thoughts, emotions, and intents. On God's eternal scales, these matters outweigh all other aspects of a human's life. Yet, God's scales not only befuddle Samuel, but it is also perplexing to us now. We also see Jesse, David's father, passing poor judgment on David's value (David was the youngest and smallest in the family) and failing to parade David before Samuel. The smallness of stature does not indicate the grandness of the heart, to which only God can proclaim, "Anoint him; he is the one." David was a foreshadowing of the one true King, our Lord who bore the stature of a mere man, yet is entirely God the Son (the second person in the Trinity). The Pharisees only saw Jesus the man, a threat, and failed to see the Messiah, the lawgiver, the anointed one whose heart was found acceptable to God the Father. This understanding ought to affect how we pray daily; Lord, that we would not only appear to be clean but that you would cleanse our most inner being and transform us to have hearts like Christ.