Up The Mountain
READ
Two verses. That's all we get before the most famous sermon ever preached begins. But these two verses are worth sitting with, because they're a threshold — the quiet moment between everything that's happened so far and everything Jesus is about to say. The crowds around Him are enormous at this point, people pressing in from every direction. And Jesus does something unhurried and intentional: He goes up on a mountainside, He sits down, and His disciples come to gather around Him. Before we hear a single word of the Sermon on the Mount, there's something meaningful in this moment of preparation — in the way Jesus settles in before He speaks.
Let’s take a moment to read Matthew 5:1-2:
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.
REFLECT
The first thing Matthew tells us is that Jesus saw the crowds. It's easy to read right past that, but it's a meaningful place to start. This isn't a speaker scanning a room before launching into prepared remarks. Jesus genuinely sees the people — the sick who have been healed, the desperate who traveled from distant regions just to get close to Him, the searching who aren't entirely sure what they're looking for but sense that something about this man is different from anything they've encountered before. He takes them all in, and then He goes up the mountain.
For a Jewish audience, that detail would have landed with a particular kind of weight. Mountains in the Old Testament are where God shows up — where Moses received the Law, where Elijah heard the still small voice, where heaven and earth press close together and everything changes. Jesus going up the mountain to teach would have felt, to those who knew their Scripture, like a signal that something of that same order was about to happen. Not a repeat of Sinai, but something that would fulfill it and go further.
He sits down — which in the ancient world was the authoritative posture of a rabbi who was about to say something that mattered — and His disciples come to Him. There's something intimate in that moment before anything is said. The disciples draw near not because they're told to, but because they've walked with this man through the wilderness and the calling and the long days of healing, and they trust Him. The Sermon on the Mount doesn't begin with a crowd surging forward to catch something; it begins with people who have come to love Jesus quietly gathering around Him.
And then He opens His mouth. What follows is the most extraordinary teaching in human history, but it doesn't arrive from nowhere. It comes at the end of a journey — through temptation, through a message of hope announced in unlikely places, through fishermen called out of ordinary days, through towns where healing broke loose and the Kingdom showed up in real and tangible ways. By the time Jesus speaks on that mountain, everything He's about to say has already been lived. The life and the teaching are one piece, and that's what makes it so worth leaning into together.
RESPOND
Take a moment to process what God might be leading you to do in light of what you read.
Jesus saw the crowds before He did anything else — really saw them. Who in your life right now might need someone to genuinely notice them, and what would it look like for you to offer that kind of attention?
The disciples came to Jesus and drew close before the sermon began. How would you describe your own posture toward Jesus in this season — are you drawing near, or holding Him at a comfortable arm's length?
The Sermon on the Mount is backed up by a life that already matched it. As you prepare to spend time in these words over the coming weeks, what is it you most hope they will do in you?
REST
Take a moment to rest in God’s presence and consider one thing you can take away from your time reading, then close your devotional experience by praying:
Jesus, thank You for going up the mountain — for settling in and leaning toward us before You ever said a word. Thank You that Your teaching comes from a life already lived in the way You're inviting us into, and that Your invitation is always full of grace and never full of condemnation. As we prepare to sit with the Sermon on the Mount together, quiet the noise and the rush in us. Give us the posture of people who have drawn close because they trust You, and let what You say find a deep and lasting home in us. Amen.