Learning to Live Without is our Term 2 series and it’s all about learning to live like Jesus. And learning from Jesus. It’s about discipleship – being discipled by Jesus. It’s about our maturity, our changing lives, the refreshment of our weary souls. It’s about the slow, often painful, always grace-soaked work of being trained by Jesus into the ‘yoked’ life he describes in His sermon on the mount. It’s about learning to put off our old patterns of the self, by learning to "live without"… and learning instead, to live in his gentle rhythms of grace.

Not grace as vague sentiment.

Not grace as permission to remain unchanged.

But grace as the personal, transforming loving-kindness of Jesus who teaches us how to live.

This is why our series title matters.

Why “Learning to Live Without”?

Because much of Christian growth feels, at first, like subtraction. Letting go. A giving up of certain ways of ‘living’.

To be ‘yoked’ to Jesus is not just to add a few religious practices to an otherwise unchanged life. It’s not merely to hold new beliefs while continuing to live by old patterns. It’s not simply to become a more respectable version of the same person. It is to take up his invitation: to come and learn from Jesus is to bring to him our burdens, heavy and wearisome that they are. And to let him take them from us. To come alongside him, and to swap those ways of living, by given them over to him. It is to unlearn ways of seeing, wanting, reacting, speaking, and surviving that may once have felt normal to us, but have no place in the Kingdom of God. To be yoked to Jesus is to learn to live without our burdens, so we can learn to live with him,

This series is called "Learning to Live Without" because Jesus teaches his disciples to live without the very burdens we thought would bring us life.

We will be learning to live:

• Without anger that weighs us down with regret.
• Without lust that consumes us.
• Without lying that isolates us, making us lonely.
• Without revenge that ultimately destroys us.
• Without ‘vainglory’ that distorts our souls.
• Without greed that enslaves us.
• Without worry that masters us.
• Without judgmentalism that blinds us.

Jesus doesn’t merely forgive our failures; he teaches us how to live faithfully. He doesn’t simply announce the Kingdom of Heaven; he comes alongside us to gently lead us in learning how to live in it – by living like him.

So we will be learning each week to live without, and instead to live with Him, newly pacing our lives according to his gentle rhythms of grace.

Why return to the Sermon on the Mount?

A fair question arises straight away:

Haven’t we already done the Sermon on the Mount?

Yes, we have.

And that’s exactly why we return.

Because where else would we go to learn from Jesus how to live?

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ teaching for learners, for followers, for those called to walk with him.

For those invited to come give him our heavy burdens, and to receive his restful burden in exchange.