The Sermon on the Mount

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.”

Acts 26:14b

I think about this statement often. Though Jesus spoke it to Saul (soon to be Paul), I feel as though he is speaking it to me. I am bent toward resisting or being skeptical of authority, which the Lord has both used and corrected at different points in my life. “Aaron, Aaron, why do you make things harder for yourself?”

The ESV Study Bible defines goads as “long, sharpened sticks used to prod oxen when they were hitched to yokes.” This sounds awful to me, but oxen apparently learn “to accept the direction of the farmer.” The phrase “to kick against the goads” was common in Greek literature, but Saul was probably surprised to hear it nevertheless. Up to this point in his life, he had done everything out of zeal for what he thought was God’s will. But Saul was also resisting God’s authority.

We are both saved by grace through the blood of Christ, and not by the things we do. But grace doesn’t end at the saving; we are both saved into a kingdom. And the king has the highest authority. In the wake of grace, how now do we live in this new kingdom?

The Sermon on the Mount holds many of the answers to that question. Join us at Providence Road, starting this Sunday, May 12th, as we begin a sermon series about the greatest sermon. The Sermon on the Mount is a useful guide for us on questions of ethics and priorities, but it also rewires our souls to bow down to the authority of a wise, gracious king who wants the best for us. We invite you to discover with us how good his commands are as we wrestle with the hard truths in the Sermon on the Mount openly and honestly.

“The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd.” Ecclesiastes 12:11