Sermon on the Mount: Fulfilling the Law

Dallas Willard on the kingdom righteousness Jesus taught at street level

We have spent the last several lectures in the disciplines of abstinence. Solitude, silence, fasting, frugality, chastity, secrecy. The practices that pull a person back from the appetites and the approval that run most lives. Now Willard turns to the Sermon on the Mount.

Most of us read it in fragments, a verse here for a sermon, the Beatitudes lifted out on their own. Willard says that is how you miss it.

“It’s actually a wonderful thing if you could get someone to preach it to you and start out hearing it and go from beginning to end all together. The continuity of a text is always absolutely vital to its meaning and if you just jump on this like you jump on The Beatitudes and now you are going to preach something about that, you are pretty certainly going to miss the whole point.”

The Sermon is not a grab bag of hard sayings to admire one at a time. Willard treats it as a single, carefully prepared discourse, Jesus answering the questions every human being is already asking. This post opens a short excursus on that discourse, the framework Willard hands pastors for kingdom living.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sermon on the Mount: Fulfilling the Law

The Sermon Answers the Questions Everyone Is Already Asking

Willard reads the Sermon as Jesus’ answer to the questions everyone seems to be asking. What is real. Who is really well off. Who is a really good person. And how do you become one.

The first question runs underneath everything. “Repent for the Kingdom of the Heavens is at hand.” Willard calls that a reality claim, an announcement about what is now available. And he gives the reality its plainest definition. “What is the Kingdom of the Heavens? It is God in action.”

That is the ground the whole Sermon stands on. Before Jesus tells anyone how to live, He tells them what is there. God, in action, within reach.

The second question gets answered in the Beatitudes, and the answer overturns the human scoreboard. Willard insists the Beatitudes are not instructions. “They are announcements of who is and who is not blessed. The Beatitudes are proclamation of the Kingdom of God. They don’t tell you to DO anything.” They tell you who is well off, and the list runs backward from the one the world keeps.

Then comes the sentence a pastor in a small church should sit with for a while:

“You can be blessed no matter what your circumstances are in life.” “No matter where you rank on the human scale, you can be blessed. Why? Well, because you can live in the Kingdom of God.”

Think about who is sitting in front of you on a Sunday. The man who got passed over again. The widow who feels invisible now that her husband is gone. The teenager who has already decided she is at the bottom of every ranking that matters. The Beatitudes do not tell those people to climb. They announce that the climb was never the point, because the kingdom is open to them where they stand.

Fulfilling the Law Means More Than Paying the Penalty

The crowd heard the Beatitudes as a revolution. If the rankings are inverted, the law must be coming down. So Jesus heads it off. “Don’t think that I am come to destroy the law; I am come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets.”

Willard pushes on what “fulfill” means, because most of us only hear half of it. One meaning is the one we preach often. The law required a payment we could not make, and Christ made it. Willard does not deny that. But he points to a second meaning we tend to skip, the one Jeremiah and Ezekiel promised, the law written on the heart. “That means that people will do what the law says as a natural thing to do.”

That is the fulfillment the Sermon is after. Not only a debt paid once for all, but actual people in their actual lives becoming the kind of people who do what the law was always reaching for.

Which brings Willard to the hinge of the passage, Matthew 5:20. The righteousness that enters the kingdom has to exceed the righteousness of the scribe and Pharisee. He is careful here. “Righteousness of the Scribe and the Pharisee is DOING what the Law says.” That is outward compliance, and Jesus says it is not enough, and Willard says you cannot pull it off anyway by trying harder.

The alternative is not lower. It is deeper. “If you go beyond that now and you establish a living connection with the action of God in grace living interactively with Him.” Kingdom righteousness is not a better behavior record. It is a transformed will, joined to the action of God, so a person keeps the law from the inside, out of who he has become, instead of forcing himself to obey it from the outside.

Jesus Starts at Street Level, with Anger and Contempt

Willard notices where Jesus begins, and it matters for how we preach. “He doesn’t start with, ‘Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength’ or with ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’” He starts, Willard says, “where the action is,” on the street, with “murder, hatred, contempt, lusting.”

The first illustration is anger. Jesus traces murder back to its root. Anger, he says, “is an intent to harm of some degree,” and it comes “from having your will crossed.” That is why a person who has not surrendered their will to God lives in a low-grade readiness to be angry. Everything that crosses them is a threat.

Then contempt, which Willard says Jesus deliberately mingles with anger. “It is much easier to be angry with a person for whom you have contempt.”

People treat anger as a tool. They keep it in the drawer because they believe it gets things done. Willard says they are wrong:

“You can do everything without anger and you can do it better than you can do it with anger.”

He is honest that people resist this. They are “tied to the righteousness of anger.” He is also honest about the exceptions, the wife who has to call the police, the situation that has to be broken open now. He does not pretend the better way is always available in the moment. But he refuses to let the exception become the rule. The kingdom person is being trained out of anger and contempt, not because the feelings are forbidden, but because there is a way to live that does not need them.

And none of it happens by deciding. “People have to be trained.” Willard sketches what that training looks like in a church, a small group that spends weeks learning to watch anger, name its sources, and change them. That is the pastoral payoff. The Sermon is not a standard to feel guilty under. It is a curriculum to be taught. And the pattern is the same for every sin on the street: watch the behavior, find its sources, change the sources. Anger is only where Willard shows the work.

The Kingdom Heart Lives Free of Human Applause

Willard moves quickly through the rest of the Sermon, and a thread holds it together. The kingdom person is being freed from the systems that run everyone else.

Freed from manipulation. Willard reads the teaching on swearing as a teaching against working people over. The issue “is manipulation. You are manipulating other people to believe or do something they don’t particularly want to do.” Let your yes be yes. Stop spinning people.

Freed from the need to be seen. On Matthew 6, Willard is brief and exact. The kingdom heart “doesn’t perform for human credit. It doesn’t try to get approval or applause and that is a part of learning to stand before God in the blessedness of His Kingdom.” Part of blessedness, then, is the death of the audience. The man who is free of applause is free.

Freed, finally, from the habit of condemning. Willard handles “judge not” with a distinction every pastor needs. Jesus is not banning discernment. He is banning condemnation. “You don’t have to condemn people to discern.” Discernment names what is good and what is evil, which Willard says we cannot abandon and stay useful. Condemnation adds the extra move of “distancing,” he says, “of pushing away, of saying you are worthless.” We are called to the first and warned off the second.

All of it culminates in “being perfect as Your Father in Heaven is perfect,” and Willard cuts the verse loose from the despair it usually produces. He does not read it as flawless moral achievement. “I think the word there refers to being fully mature for where you are.” Not finished. Not faultless. Mature, grown up, responsible for the place you occupy.

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A note for pastors:

Our first task with the Sermon on the Mount is to proclaim it. To preach it, plainly and confidently, as the clearest picture we have of what life in the kingdom looks like on an ordinary street.

Two failures wait on either side of that task. One is to preach the Sermon as a set of beautiful ideals, admired from a distance, never expected to touch a real week. The other is to preach it as an impossible demand, a bar so high its only function is to make people feel guilty before they go home. Willard rejects both. He treats the Sermon as concrete teaching for people who are learning to do what Jesus said, on purpose, with help.

So preach it that way. When you stand up Sunday and open Matthew 5, you are not handing your people a verdict they have already failed. You are announcing that the kingdom is open to them where they stand, that God in action is within reach, and that a person can learn to live without anger and without contempt and without the tyranny of who is watching. Proclaim the righteousness that exceeds the scribe and the Pharisee, not as a heavier rulebook, but as the deeper, freer life Jesus is describing.

And proclaim it as something teachable. Willard’s whole point is that this does not happen by a decision in a pew. It happens through training, the kind a church can run, eight Thursday evenings learning to be rid of anger. When you preach the Sermon, end by opening a door to that work, not by closing an argument. The proclamation is the invitation. The teaching instructs the congregation in the steps and disciplines needed to live free.

That is the pastor as teacher of the nations: one who declares the kingdom is here, and then shows his people, week after week, how to live in it.

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For Reflection

1. Willard says Jesus answers the question “who is really well off?” by announcing that a person can be blessed no matter where they rank on the human scale. When your people listen to you preach, are they hearing that the kingdom is open to them exactly where they stand, or are they hearing one more ranking they are failing to climb?

2. Willard insists that “you can do everything without anger and you can do it better than you can do it with anger,” and that people resist this because they are tied to the righteousness of anger. Where in your own ministry have you kept anger in the drawer as a tool? What would it mean to lead, correct, and confront without reaching for it?

3. Willard answers “who is a really good person?” not with better compliance but with a transformed will trained over time, since “people have to be trained.” Are you preaching the Sermon on the Mount as ideals to admire and demands to feel guilty about, or are you proclaiming it as a life your people can actually be taught to live, and then giving them somewhere to learn it?