Part Six: The Hard Words

The Teachings of Jesus That the Contemporary Church Most Consistently Avoids — Delivered Not as Condemnation but as the King’s Mercy Toward His Soldiers

“Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who built his house on rock.”

— Matthew 7:24 (NET)

Every generation of the church develops, over time, a set of tacit agreements about which of Jesus’ teachings will be preached and which will be quietly set aside. The agreements are rarely explicit. They are more often the accumulated product of pastoral caution, cultural accommodation, and the simple economic reality that congregations who are made uncomfortable by their pastor’s teaching eventually find a different pastor.

The result is a canon within the canon — a subset of Jesus’ words that are considered safe, relevant, and applicable, and a larger subset that are considered too hard, too culturally specific, or too likely to cause offense to be regularly preached. The excluded teachings do not disappear from the Bible. They sit in plain sight, in the middle of the Synoptic Gospels, waiting for a generation that will receive them.

Part Six of Volume II receives three of those teachings in full. Not because they are the only hard words Jesus spoke — Parts Three and Five of this volume have already addressed several others. But because these three are among the most consistently avoided in the contemporary Western church, and because their avoidance has produced specific and measurable damage in the lives of individual disciples, in marriages, in the community’s witness, and in the culture the church is called to salt and light.

These are not hard words in the sense of being difficult to understand. They are hard words in the sense of being difficult to receive. Jesus spoke them plainly. The challenge is not interpretation. It is the willingness to let what was plainly said land with the full weight that the One who said it intended.

He said them as an act of love. Receive them that way.