The followers of Jesus are to be different —
different from both the nominal church and the secular world,
different from both the religious and the irreligious.
The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete delineation
anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian value-system,
ethical standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition,
life-style and network of relationships — all of which are
totally at variance with those of the non-Christian world.
And this Christian Counterculture is the life of the kingdom of God,
a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.
John Stott