Some of you who listened to this week’s message may have thought this was an easy sermon to prepare and preach.  After all, all you need to do is open up a Bible and read.  But I wanted to do more than that.  As I mentioned in my introduction, these messages were not written down right away and so the actual words and order of the topics may have been slightly changed or remembered a bit differently.  Plus Matthew gives no transitions between the topics which I am sure Jesus (as the ultimate communicator) would have added in order for his audience to understand.  So I knew I needed some editing and some adding of transitional kinds words to transform it from a message into a sermon.  I just could not read it straight from a translation.  And if I could what translation would it be?  These words have been read hundreds of times and are topics of many lesions, so most people know what they say, but do they know what they mean?  I wanted these words to be heard with fresh ears just as they were to the people in that day who heard Jesus preaching them for the first time.  So it was a bit difficult in that aspect as well.  And finally, the last chapter has several topics that seem to be mixed together as if they were summaries from various sermons.  And so I tried to organize the similar topics and ideas together instead of the way they are placed in our Bibles.  For an example Jesus talks about seeking the kingdom of God in two groups of verses but there are verses in between that talk about misjudging others, were as there are two ideas of not judging others and judging them by their fruit that are also separated from each other.  So I did change the order of the verses from what we have recorded and grouped them together under one subject heading.  I hope in the end this message of Jesus was delivered in a way that was both fresh and understandable.