like it or not, everyone in western civilization has been touched in some way by the Sermon on the Mount. No one can legitimately minimize its influence. For the Christian believer, it is simply the greatest sermon ever preached. Why is this? To begin with, it came from the lips of Jesus. The original sermon was probably quite long, possibly even several hours, and what we have in Matthew 5–7 (which takes about ten minutes to read) is a distillation of his teaching. The Sermon on the Mount is the
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