Jerry Hendrix: Counter Culture, Part One

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Jerry Hendrix: Counter Culture, Part One (Matthew 5:1-16)

Jerry Hendrix, pastor of First Baptist Church in Sweetwater, opened with a question: “Do you think there is such a thing as privilege in our world today?” He took the question a step further, asking, “Do you think that you are a person of privilege?”

Hendrix admitted these are uncomfortable questions that require more than a surface answer. He was spurred to think about privilege after hearing a podcast about refugees whose first question upon arriving in the United States was, “How am I going to eat?”

“If you can’t see it, you have it. If you do see it, you can’t have it,” Hendrix contended about privilege. “Jesus was accustomed to dealing with people with privilege,” he added. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is just the beginning of his teachings and deals with privilege.

The beginning of Jesus’ sermon—the Beatitudes in particular—flies in the face of privilege. Privilege feeds selfishness, but Jesus’ teachings replace selfishness with selflessness, Hendrix explained. These verses aren’t intended just to make us feel good, but to “raise the tension in our own life as we try to discover what it really means to be salt and light to the world,” he concluded.

This sermon was delivered Oct. 16, 2022, for the morning worship service of First Baptist Church in Sweetwater. It is the first in a series on the Sermon on the Mount titled “Counter Culture.”

A sermon script is available here.


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