Building Your Abundant Life: A Deep Exploration and Passionate Application of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount

By Kasey Crawford

Do you have a clear, compelling and comprehensive vision for your life?
Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is a visionary masterpiece, and a revolutionary manifesto. Through painting breathtaking vistas of who God is and who each of us is in God's eyes, to a radical call for the invasion of heaven upon earth through your everyday actions, Jesus provides us with a blueprint for the abundant life.
Kasey Crawford reveals how Jesus’s teachings empower us to flourish even amidst the fiercest storms. Learn how to:
• experience the grand adventure of apprenticing all of life under Jesus;
• live out your purpose of intimately knowing God;
• bask in your identity as God’s favored and beloved child;
• fulfill your destiny of becoming more like Christ;
• overcome anger, lust, lying and other character challenges;
• overflow with hope, joy, love, and power;
• develop a continuous communion with God through prayer.
When you catch the vision of Jesus’s teachings and put them into practice, you’ll experience how God is astonishingly good, present, personal, and powerful in your life. You’ll also be equipped to release more of God’s Kingdom on earth as you embody His good news.
You will learn to Build Your Abundant Life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385025299

Kasey Crawford

Kasey Crawford is passionate about the holy collision of dynamic ideas from God’s word with everyday life. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in the Study of Religion from the University of California San Diego and two Master’s degrees from Fuller Seminary. In 2011, he and his wife Dawn, along with his parents and a few friends, planted Elevation Church SoCal in Menifee, CA, where he and Dawn co-lead today. His favorite adventure is partnering with Dawn to raise their three sons into men of courage and character, who know and love God.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1Your Responsibility: Build Your Life

2Your Vision: What Is Your Vision for Life?

3Your Purpose: Knowing God

4Your Identity: God’s Favorite

5Your Identity: Who Are You in God’s Eyes?

6Your Destiny: Impossible Ideals and a Reformation Hangover

7Overcoming Anger, Offense, and Division through Courageous Communication

8Overcoming Lust through Fighting Like Heaven

9Overcoming Divorce through Covenant Commitment

10Overcoming Lies and Hypocrisy through Truth and Integrity

11Overcoming Vengeance through Powerful, Direct Action

12Overcoming Hate through Undeserved Goodness

13Becoming Perfect … Seriously!

14Becoming Genuine: No Faking It Needed

15The Disciple’s Prayer: Continuous Communion with God

16Fasting (Discipline) Equals Freedom and Joy

17Money Matters: Treasure, Trust, and Anxiety

18Judgment Day Is Not Today, and You Are Not the Judge

19Ask, Seek, and Knock—Because God Is Astonishingly Good

20The New Golden Rule: Living from Overflow

21The Road to Hell … or Heaven

22False Prophets, Influencers, and Remembering Your Purpose

23The Best Is Yet to Come: Vision, Vulnerability, and Victory

To Mom and Dad.

This book wouldn’t exist without you. You laid the Kingdom foundation for me in my life and continued with unrelenting support and encouragement to make this project a reality. All your feedback and edits upon the way made the book so much better. I am truly grateful for you.

To Sandy, my mother-in-law.

Your kind words and behind-the-scenes prayers are a secret weapon that I thank God for.

To my beloved bride, my queen, my best friend and teammate for His glory.

This book wouldn’t exist without you either, because for the last twenty-five years, it has been with you more than anyone else that I have attempted (we have attempted together) to put into practice this magnificent vision of Jesus. Our relationship is my living proof that the abundant life is real. In addition, your painstaking efforts in editing every single page and idea made the book what it is. Your presence is in every page.

To my three beloved sons.

You are my greatest treasures. I hope when you read this book it is familiar because you see me (and Mom) live it. I hope the vision of Jesus and what you have experienced from me as your dad (and from mom) authentically converge in a way that puts courage in you to keep building your own abundant life on the rock of knowing Jesus.

To my Elevation Church family.

Some of you have been with us long enough that you have endured me preaching through the entire Sermon on the Mount three times. You get a gold sticker. It was during the second tour that many of you gave the honest and encouraging feedback that this take on the Sermon on the Mount was different in a good way and you should write a book on it. Almost ten years later, here we are. Let’s keep learning how to put it into practice together!

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

—Jesus (John 10:10)

INTRODUCTION

I have been awestruck by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew chapters 5–7 for the better part of the last two decades. I experience it to be such a veritable feast for the mind, heart, and spirt that I can’t seem to move beyond this portion of scripture for very long. I find myself drawn back time and time again, like a gravitational pull that won’t let me go, to the visionary words of Jesus and his revolutionary call to action. This captivation was catalyzed in my first semester of graduate school at Fuller Seminary in the fall of 2003. I was introduced to a Jesus I didn’t know. By that point in life, I knew, thankfully, the Jesus who died on the cross to save us from our sins and give eternal life to those who believe in him. But in a class called Kingdom Ethics, by Dr. Glen Stassen, I was introduced to a Jesus who had a lot to say about this life, here and now, in a very practical and transformative way. This new (to me) Jesus was the one who said absurdly realistic things like love your enemies, first take the log out of your own eye, simply let your yes be yes, leave your gift at the altar, turn the other cheek, do unto others … and so on. Then I found out that world changers like Martin Luther King Jr. had based their ethics upon those very upside-down Kingdom ethics of Jesus. This world-transforming yet down to earth, life-changing, abundant-life-bringing gospel of the Kingdom was missing in my life. The high and lofty visionary ideals of Jesus were not intended to be esoteric and out of touch. They were meant to be realistic and practical methods to overcome evil and transform life.

Thus, I became enthralled by the magnificence of the Sermon on the Mount as both a visionary masterpiece and a revolutionary manifesto. Jesus paints breathtaking vistas of who God is, who we are in God’s eyes, and the abundant life that is possible when we follow him with everything we’ve got. Yet Jesus was also the ultimate revolutionary, and his Sermon on the Mount is a true manifesto, calling for the invasion of heaven upon earth. It is a call to arms for each of us to do our part in Jesus’s holy revolution by putting every single word he spoke into practice so that we can see the goodness of heaven transform our lives and the world around us.

Even twenty years ago, these two themes began to emerge for me from the Sermon on the Mount: vision and action. If we can capture the vision of Jesus’s Kingdom of God (or maybe be captured by it) and put it into practice through the very specific action steps he lays out for us, we can actually live into the abundant life that he promised to bring.

What you will find in this book is the result of over twenty years of studying, researching, meditating upon, wrestling with, practicing, rethinking, stumbling through, failing, reengaging, sowing into, and experiencing many aspects of Jesus’s vision come to fruition in my life. Along with everyday-person oriented scholarly exploration into the text, I share plentiful real-life application examples and practical stories from my life. I don’t share my personal stories because I think my life is in any way more special than anyone else’s; quite the opposite. I truly believe God is equally available and accessible to everyone through Jesus Christ. I tell real-life stories because of my conviction that if Jesus’s visionary masterpiece doesn’t get put into practice in real life, then we miss the point that it is also a revolutionary manifesto. Thus I offer my own life as one small example of what it can look like to put Jesus’s vision into practice in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, both in the trials and the triumphs. In other words, the stories are meant to encourage you that everyday, ordinary people like me and you can put Jesus’s vision into practice and see God accomplish what is impossible on our own strength.

One such example from my life is when my wife’s beloved ninety-five years-young grandpa Henry had a stroke. We got the dreaded phone call with the news, packed up our three sons, and left as soon as possible to go see him. When we arrived at his home in San Diego, he was lying in his bed, unresponsive to the outside world, with the rest of the family and a nurse at his bedside. We noticed a feeding tube directly inserted into his stomach. After a short time of being there, we became concerned that the feeding tube bag wasn’t getting any smaller. We inquired as to why. The nurse bluntly informed us that his organs are shutting down, and his body is rejecting it. In other words, he is dying right now, and it might be only a few hours before he passes. My wife listened intently, took a moment to process, and then blurted out something to the effect of That’s wrong. Everyone was a bit stunned. Medical professionals typically don’t take kindly to being told that they are wrong by ordinary folks, so the nurse understandably responded by reexplaining that she was emphatically sure that his organs were shutting down and there was nothing more to be done. I attempted to have a somewhat private conversation in the middle of the room with my wife. She was adamant that God was telling her that the nurse’s prognosis was wrong. So we took a breather and went outside. My wife called a friend whose son has a feeding tube. We knew nothing about how feeding tubes work, so my wife wanted to learn. After the brief conversation on the phone, my wife was even more resolute that her gut feeling was correct. She learned from our friend that feeding tube blockages are common if the mix is not shaken well enough. Our friend recommended adding Coca-Cola to the bag to eat away the possible clog. My wife turned to me and told me to race to the nearest store and buy a bottle of Coca-Cola Classic. So I sped out in search of this magical elixir, believing Grandpa Henry’s life was on the line. It was about 2:00 a.m., so my first available option was a corner liquor store. I rushed in and asked the clerk where the Coke was at. She pointed me in the direction. I ran to the refrigerated Coke section and ripped open the door. Right in front of me, at eye level, staring at me, were two bottles of Coke Classic sitting side by side in the front row, with the names Kasey and Henry. (If you are not familiar, Coke was doing a campaign at the time with various individual names on bottles so you could, if lucky, find and imbibe your own personalized soda). To be clear, there were only two rows of Coca-Cola Classic, and these two bottles happened to be next to each other in the front row, at eye level as I, Kasey Crawford, went on my 2:00 a.m. run to the liquor store to save Grandpa Henry. I hurried them home, a bit bewildered as my mind began to attempt the mathematical calculations of the probability of those two names (especially with Kasey spelled correctly for me, given it was typically spelled incorrectly as Casey by people my whole life) sitting next to each other on that particular shelf, in the front row so I could see them, in that particular store, on that particular day, at that particular moment. My mind was stretching to remember the formulas from my statistics class in college but could only surmise that the odds of me finding Kasey and Henry in the manner I did are exponentially tiny. Then I let the calculations fade and just basked in the sacred moment. The God of the universe had spoken, first to my wife and then to me. His message was clear: I see you, you matter to me, I know your name, I am with you, and I’ve got this. I arrived back at Grandpa’s home and gave the Coke to my wife. She told the nurse what was happening, and the nurse relented. Within minutes, Grandpa started receiving nutrients again. Turns out his organs were not shutting down; the person who set up the feeding bag caused a blockage because they didn’t shake it well enough. Grandpa regained consciousness, and the whole family was granted a precious extension of time with him. We were all able to share sacred moments of loving goodbyes before he passed. What a gift we had received.

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What does this story have to do with building your life on the Sermon on the Mount? Everything. Jesus’s essential message of the Sermon on the Mount is that if you build your life on the rock of knowing him, then you will thrive, even in the midst of life’s fiercest storms. The way that thriving happens, even in the storms, is through experiencing that God is mind-blowingly real, astonishingly good, present with you in everything, powerfully for you, and shockingly personal with you, his beloved child. Our personal story with Grandpa Henry, I believe, is just one of many ways that we can and will encounter the God that Jesus describes throughout the Sermon on the Mount, the one who is abundantly good, present, personal, and powerful. Knowing God is the abundant life Jesus came to bring.

Twenty years into the Sermon on the Mount, I am more convinced and confident than ever that Jesus’s promise is true, that he came to bring the abundant life, which begins now and wells up into eternity. I hope this book can be a source of inspiring courage for you to partner with the goodness of God that is pursuing you today and thus do your part in building your abundant life.

To further facilitate the building of your abundant life, there are reflection and response questions at the end of each chapter. I encourage you to spend significant time with those on your own and process them with your community—a spouse, a close friend, a small group, and so on.

1

YOUR RESPONSIBILITY: BUILD YOUR LIFE

What if life has such good potential that if you rightly handle and steward yourself, you will grow to overflow with spiritual, relational, emotional, and physical abundance?

How are you building your life?

Are you building a life so formidable that you flourish even in the fiercest storms? Have you experienced that God is astonishingly good, present, personal, and powerful in your life? Do you walk with profound joy at the overwhelming favor of God in your life, so much favor that you feel like his favorite? Are you set free from faking that you have it all together? Are you powerful enough to love your enemies? Have you overcome lust, lying, and being lukewarm? Have you developed a consistent communion with God through prayer? Are you walking in your destiny to release more of God’s Kingdom on earth? Are you filled with the rock-solid hope for your future that the best is yet to come? These are but a few of the elements of the abundant life Jesus teaches that you are made for, all of which propel you forward in your divine purpose of knowing God. With the right vision and practices, this abundance is within your reach.

We are about to embark on an exhilarating adventure of exploring Jesus’s paramount visionary masterpiece, often called the Sermon on the Mount. Before we commence, let’s cheat a little bit. Let’s go to the end so that we can begin with the goal in mind. The end shows us that the Sermon on the Mount is also a revolutionary manifesto. Jesus calls for nothing short of an invasion of heaven upon earth, with you playing a critical role in the process. There is a call to arms for each of us to do our part in Jesus’s holy revolution. You have a necessary role to play, especially in your life.

At the conclusion of Jesus’s vision for the abundant life that is possible, he culminates with this serious and sober call to action:

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Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on The Rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on The Rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash. (Matthew 7:24–27 NIV)

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How are you building your life?

That is the question, isn’t it?

That is how Jesus culminates his sublime masterpiece. He calls each individual to an extraordinary measure of personal responsibility and opportunity: build your life!

The primary image that Jesus invokes is that of a single house, either built on the rock or built on sand. What’s truly astounding, if you consider the implications, is that he says you are the one who is building the house of your life. No one else. We cannot depend upon or expect anyone else to build the house of our life. In Jesus’s call to action, every noun, pronoun, and verb is in the singular, spoken to or about the individual (everyone, wise man, his, hears, does, built, house). This is no trivial matter. In these words of Jesus at the crescendo of his vision for life, we should each hear a personal invitation for the redeeming work of God to take place in each one of us, based upon our personal choices. This is a trumpet call to individual response and responsibility. Only you have the power to choose to build your life on the rock or not!

If we think this through, Jesus’s call to action to the individual makes practical sense with what we each actually experience of life. No one can or will build your life for you. For example, when you wake up each morning and it feels like your brain is slowly turning on and your consciousness starts to move from the dream world to your real world, immediately you begin to process your life. You start to consider your day. Sometimes you immediately feel stress or excitement about your upcoming day. You make choices before your feet even hit the floor. You make decisions about actions for the day, attitudes to take on, perspectives to carry, new habits to try, old mindsets to let go of, obligations to say yes or no to, and so on. You do not and cannot share the responsibility of your consciousness with anyone else. At the end of the day (and at the beginning), you and only you are making the ultimate choices that are building your life, either on the rock or on sand. No one can or will do it for you. Not even God.

Please do not get me wrong. God is clearly in the picture. As we will see shortly, God is the main character and the ultimate hero of the vision for life that Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount. After all, the repeated, fundamental visionary image of Jesus’s worldview is the Kingdom of God / Heaven. The remainder of this book is about God’s gracious power and presence at work in your life and the world to advance His Kingdom of Heaven on earth. However, Jesus doesn’t present God’s work in the world to be in conflict with an action call to the individual to take ownership of building their own life. I contend that many of us would have radically more abundant lives if we took personal responsibility for our every single one of our choices. I have seen way too many people use God, or circumstances, as an excuse to relinquish personal responsibility, to their own detriment. Phrases like God’s in control and everything happens for a reason get thrown around carelessly as practical abdications of personal accountability. I once heard a pastor, whom I respect and admire, say, But God is in control. Amen! in the middle of a teaching on marriage, while having just acknowledged that some marriages end in divorce. Hence, the flow of thought was: some marriages end in divorce … but God is in control. Amen!

This kind of application of phrases like God is in control is disastrous. The practical implications of applying theses phrases to struggling people in hard situations are devastating. For example, the same week I heard that sermon about marriage and divorce, I was leading a youth event that had forty or fifty kids from the neighborhood come to a backyard to hear some kind of hopeful vision for life—and for the games and candy of course. Many of these kids were from homes with serious challenges and pain. I remember one young man who decided to bravely share in our small group time about some difficult things he was going through. His parents were getting divorced. There were a number of contributing factors he shared about that I would summarize as adultery, lies, alcohol abuse, and workaholism. Am I supposed to tell this twelve-year-old kid whose world is being torn apart by the forces of hell, About your parents’ divorce … God is in control. Amen! What would that even mean in this moment to this kid? That the torment this kid is going through is all part of God’s good plan for his life? That the sinful and destructive choices of his parents were somehow God’s will, because God is in control. Amen!?

How about the fact that all the choices that are contributing to the young man’s parents getting divorced are specific things that Jesus addresses in the Sermon on the Mount as not God’s will for your life and certainly not things God is controlling in people’s lives! For example, Jesus speaks to the hazard of the love of money, which leads to actions such as workaholism. Jesus also addresses lust and adultery, which disconnect intimacy in marriage. He warns against telling lies, which breed mistrust, as well as how we are made to hunger and thirst for God as our source of satisfaction, not alcohol. In other words, the awful things contributing to the pain and suffering in this young man’s life are precisely what happen when people choose to not build their life on the rock but rather on the sand of things such as greed, lust, lies, and adultery. The forces that are wrecking this young man’s home are not God in control; instead, they are literally the forces that Jesus came to fight against on our behalf. God’s will is done in our lives, according to Jesus, when we hear him and make it our sacred and noble duty to choose every day to build our life on the rock of his vision, purposes, ways, and actions.

To be clear, whereas I completely respect and agree with the desire to recognize God as the ultimate sovereign of the universe (in control), I assert that Jesus exhorts each of us to not blame God for the dysfunction in our lives but rather to take personal ownership and responsibility to build our life on the rock. Some people attempt to comfort themselves from the pain and brokenness in their lives with the phrase God is in control or others like it (everything happens for a reason), when clearly they are in a mess of their own making through bad decisions and low character. How dare we blame God for the very things that he names as sins that are completely against his nature and will.

While Jesus is astonishingly compassionate to the sinner who has failed and fallen, which we will see in the Sermon on the Mount, he also gives us a vigorous dose of much-needed personal ownership for the fruit in our lives. As we will see in the chapters to come, Jesus’s good news is that God is doing an extraordinary and unprecedented amount of gracious activity in the world, on your behalf, to make an abundant life possible, but you must choose to respond and take responsibility to build your life! If we just assume that everything happening, including bad things, by our own hand or the hand of others, is due to God being in control, then we are building our lives on sand, and a great crash is coming.

Pressing further, Jesus’s call to build your life is also unexpected and sounds somewhat unreasonable given to whom this message was originally delivered. Jesus’s audience was primarily Jews. The Jewish people during the time of Jesus lived under Roman occupation.¹ It was not a pleasant situation. Those of us who live in the twenty-first-century Western world live in perhaps the most free, just, and prosperous society in history (though not without its problems). Most of us can probably identify well with the notion of building your life. We have resources, freedoms, examples to aspire to, and a culture that promotes, to some degree, this type of mindset. Yet how was a message of personal responsibility supposed to connect with those living under military occupation and tyrannical oppression? They essentially had little to none of what we would consider basic human rights, freedoms, justices, or hopeful possibilities. So either Jesus was naïve and foolish in his call to build your life, or he embodied a vision so profound and potent that, if actually lived out, it could infuse a life with a transcendent and triumphant power over even the grimmest and most dismal of circumstances. More on that in a moment.

Looking at it from another angle, the responsibility to build your life is also the great privilege and opportunity of your life. You are an empowered agent in the universe, one who has power to make thousands upon thousands of daily, weekly, and monthly decisions that aggregate to build the life you presently have and will continue compounding to shape your future. This is an awe-inspiring privilege that we can be abundantly grateful for. Your life is full of potential. How you steward it will dictate the outcome. God has done and will do his part. Will you do yours?

Without attempting to be grandiose, this call from Jesus can certainly be understood as a call to the hero’s journey. You, like many others, might find it compelling to understand your own life as the protagonist on a heroic journey. Many have written about how this image has been cultivated across the globe for thousands of years and continues today in every major story we watch on the small and big screens. There appears to be a universal longing to be this type of character and live this type of life. As preeminent mythologist and professor Joseph Campbell summarizes,

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The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (x): fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (y): the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (z).²

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If you think about your favorite character, there is no doubt that this hero or heroine was called out of the status quo with a vision for a better future, but in order to achieve that victory, they must choose to shoulder a massive load of personal responsibility that costs them greatly. If they are to be victorious, they must learn, grow, and transform in and through