Matthew 5, verses 1 to 12, this is the word of the Lord.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.
For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
This is God's holy word.
Last week we started a new evening series on the Sermon on the Mount.
And Flynn opened up looking at the Beatitudes.
And he focused on the very center of the Beatitudes, verse 6.
And tonight I'll step back and broaden and look at the whole of the Beatitudes as we enter, again, another intro into the Sermon on the Mount.
And he mentioned this last week, that the word Beatitude, this is what these blessings, these eight ways to be blessed, they're commonly called the Beatitudes.
And that is a Latin word.
They were named by a Latin word.
And the Latin word for Beatitude just means happiness or to be blessed, blessedness.
And so this word blessed gets used a lot, and so they called them the Beatitudes.
But another way that people throughout church history have talked about the Beatitudes is they've called this the description of the beautiful life.
The beautiful life.
And in the old world, the classical world, people would often talk about this, the reality, these principles of truth, goodness, and beauty.
And how in truth, goodness, and beauty, you find the three great attributes of God.
God is truth.
God is good.
God is beautiful.
And God has made the world and gifted the world with truth, goodness, and beauty.
And all three of these things work together.
Truth, goodness, and beauty.
You really need to have all three to have one.
The beautiful life.
You've got to have all three, truth, goodness, and beauty, to have one.
So let me make this more concrete.
Maybe you're talking to your friend, your spouse, your partner, your parent, your sibling, and you say something to them, and it can be true.
You can say something that's true, but your intention was to hurt them.
And so you can say something that's true, that's not a lie, but it's not good because you had a bad intention, and therefore it's not beautiful.
It's not beautiful speech.
So you see, if you want to speak beautifully, you've got to speak not only truth, but also goodness.
You've got to have the right intention, goodness about it.
And so in the old theologians, the pre-modern philosophers, they talk about how you need all three.
You need truth, goodness, and beauty to just have one.
And Christians of old have come and said, Jesus here gives you the prescription for the beautiful life, where truth and goodness meet in order to see what's beautiful about life.
In other words, it's not just that art can be beautiful.
It's not just that paintings are beautiful.
It's not just that landscapes are beautiful, but that you can be beautiful in your person, how you live.
A life can be beautiful.
And this is what Jesus is talking about here at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.
We started a new series this morning as well on practicing the Christian life.
And this semester you'll see that quite often morning and evening will really come together and coalesce.
This morning was quite broad on taking up the Christian life and what it means to change.
And tonight is also quite broad in that.
But as we go through the Sermon on the Mount, it gets more and more specific.
And you really get into the weeds, the details about living as a Christian through lots of specific topics.
But tonight we'll take a panorama view of the Beatitudes and see that Jesus here is talking about the beautiful life.
And let's think about that.
He teaches us something.
He teaches us that to live the beautiful life you need truth.
You need goodness.
You need the good life.
And then you've got to learn from that how to live the beautiful life.
So let's look at the truth himself, the good life that he teaches us about, and then how we can live beautiful lives.
So first, the truth himself.
The question really here is who, let's back up to verse 1 and say, who is giving the Sermon on the Mount?
Who's the one speaking it?
And it's Jesus.
And you know that in other places like John chapter 14, Jesus says, I am the truth.
And so here you've got the truth himself telling you about the good life.
And Matthew is, in the very short introduction you have in verse 1 and 2, to verse 1 especially, to Jesus as he speaks the Sermon on the Mount.
There's so much background there to help you.
I think Matthew is trying to get you to ask the question, who is this speaker as he gives us the Sermon on the Mount?
And here he is in verse 1 preaching on top of a mountain, on the side of a mountain, next to the Sea of Galilee.
And so far in Matthew, Jesus has not taught yet.
He's not given any teaching at all.
So Jesus was born in the first four chapters.
He was born, he was baptized, and then he went into the wilderness and was tempted by Satan.
And now he comes up the mountain and he starts teaching.
But so far there's been no teaching from Jesus.
And now you've got three very full chapters, long chapters, of Jesus teaching.
And in some sense all the action that's taken place in the first four chapters has been prepping you for the teaching that you're about to get.
And three full chapters from Jesus.
And just think about that action.
What's led up to this moment for a second with me?
In the first four chapters, who is Jesus?
Matthew's writing to a Jewish audience primarily in this gospel.
And he opens Matthew chapter 1 with the genealogy.
And he says, Jesus Christ is the son of Abraham from the Old Testament.
And then if you just flip over to some of the stories, I'll just highlight a few.
In chapter 2, verse 13, an angel comes to Joseph, the Lord.
An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,
Rise, take the child and his mother and go down to Egypt and remain there until I tell you why.
Because Herod is killing all the little boys.
He's committing a genocide against the little boys because he thinks he's been told the prophecy about this Messiah.
And so one of the very first things that happens to Jesus after he's born is he goes into Egypt.
And why does he go into Egypt?
He goes into Egypt because there's an evil king who is killing all the little Hebrew boys.
And when you read that, you start to think, that sounds a lot like the story of the Exodus.
How when Moses was born, he went into Egypt because an evil king was killing all the little boys.
And how did he escape?
Well, his mom put him in a basket and sent him not away from Egypt, but deeper in, all the way to the palace.
And Jesus, at the beginning of his life, he goes into Egypt because the evil king is killing all the little boys.
And then right after that, in chapter 2, verse 14, it says that after Joseph rose, he took the child and his mother and they went into Egypt.
They remained there until the death of Herod.
And this was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken.
This prophecy, Hosea 11, out of Egypt I've called my son.
And in Hosea 11, that prophecy was looking back at who?
It was looking back at Moses and Israel being called out of Egypt.
And now, in Jesus' life, we're being told, Jesus went down into Egypt at the beginning of his life, but then God took him up out of Egypt to the promised land.
And you start to get this picture.
Jesus looks a lot like Moses.
He looks a lot like Israel in these stories.
And then right after that, we could go on for a little while, but I'll only give you two more.
Right after that, he comes up out of Egypt, back to Israel, and immediately he's baptized.
In other words, he comes up out of Egypt and he goes down into the water, and then he comes back up again from the water.
And in the Old Testament, when Moses and the Israelites left Egypt, they went down into the Red Sea and they came back up out of the Red Sea in salvation.
And then right after that, what's the very next story?
You could probably guess it.
Jesus is driven from the Red Sea into the wilderness.
And how long is he in the wilderness?
He's in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, just like Israel was driven up out of the Red Sea into the wilderness for 40 years.
And here we are now.
Jesus comes and sits on top of this mountain.
And you're starting to get the picture, I think, that we're being told Jesus Christ is reliving the Exodus story.
He is like Moses.
Jesus Christ, we're being told here, is the true and the better Moses.
And Moses was a very great mediator, a very great savior for the people of Israel.
But Matthew is trying to tell you that Jesus Christ has come to be the true and better Moses.
And not only that, but he's actually also, it's not just Moses that went into the wilderness for 40 years.
Jesus went into the wilderness and he was tempted and he withstood it.
And that means that he's not only, Hosea 11, one says, he's not only the true and better Moses, he's the true and better Israel.
He is, he's taking on the very life of the people of God.
But he's living it in their place without sin.
And that means that we're being told so far, when we come to the Sermon on the Mount, very important for reading the Sermon on the Mount, that Jesus Christ is the true mediator.
The true and better mediator.
The better Moses.
But he's also the true substitute.
He's come to literally live the life of the people of God.
That they never lived.
They were tempted and they succumbed to that.
But he never did.
He's come not only to be mediator, but also substitute as he comes to the Sermon on the Mount.
And then, it doesn't stop there.
When he comes here in Matthew chapter 5, verse 1.
We're told here that in verse 1, there's four verbs.
In verse 1 and 2, it says that when he saw the crowds, here they are.
He went up the mountain.
And then he sat down.
That's the second one.
And then in verse 2, he opened his mouth and he taught.
Very stark Greek.
Very sharp.
Four action verbs.
Jesus went up the mountain.
After he came out of the wilderness, he sits.
Very important.
He opens his mouth and he teaches.
Why?
What's going on here?
You can't pass by this.
Because Matthew is saying, this is the true and better Moses.
And when Moses and the Israelites came up out of Egypt, they went and Moses came up the side of a mountain.
He gave the second law before they entered the promised land.
Deuteronomy.
It's the book of Deuteronomy.
And you remember when Moses went up the Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, the great teaching on how to live life?
He had to go up the mountain and he had to bow down before the Lord and hear the Lord tell him the law.
Hear the Lord tell him how to live.
But Jesus Christ here, the new, the true, the better Moses, he goes up the mountain and he doesn't hear teaching.
It says he sits down, the position of authority, the throne, and he just gives it.
You see, Matthew is trying to get you to see that this is not just the true and better Moses.
This is not just the substitute of the people reliving the life of God's people but doing it without sin.
This is God.
He is able to go up to the top of the mountain and he doesn't have to be taught in order to teach you.
He can just tell you this is the beautiful life.
This is the way to live.
In every way, wow, the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament has been talking about.
Right here in this moment.
And that's very important for us.
It's very important in this series as we approach the Sermon on the Mount.
Because we are, all of us in this room tonight, no matter how long you've been a Christian,
you are a late modern human being.
You exist in the period of late modernism.
And late modernism is an age where we are constantly being told all the time
that the ideals of the enlightenment, the revolution away from authority,
are the most important thing in our lives.
Where we're being told that we are made, we exist to seek true individual, rugged individual freedom.
And that means that we want maximum choices in our lives.
We want to have choice without constraint.
We want to be people who are free from burdens, free from commitment, free from constraint at all costs.
And that's the lessons that our culture is constantly telling us.
And that means that as late modern people, even as Christians,
we can come to something like the Sermon on the Mount and read what the blessed life looks like
and read what Jesus teaches about things like lust and forgiveness and reconciliation
and all sorts of moments and say,
you know, Jesus' teaching, the Sermon on the Mount feels a little bit like a net closing in on me.
It feels constraining.
You know, I feel like I'm a person made for freedom.
Options.
I don't want to be constrained by law, by rules, by being told what to do in my life.
And you've got to see that what God is saying here, what Matthew is saying here,
is that this is the true and better Moses, God himself speaking with such authority that says to you,
everything you've been taught about the modern life, the sense of freedom that our culture gives is not true.
And that the only real path to freedom is through constraint, but the kind of constraint,
the kind of constraint that leads you, that gives you the ability to love.
That true freedom is coming and submitting to the true and better Moses,
the God himself who really can teach you what it's like to live a beautiful life.
And so that's this verse first.
He came up the mountain.
He sat down.
He opened his mouth.
And he spoke.
He's the true and better Moses.
He's the great lawgiver.
And it's the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount.
And we've got to submit.
We've got to see that what he teaches us is beautiful here
about the way to live life.
All right, secondly, so what is that good life that he teaches us about?
And we'll move through it very quickly, these Beatitudes.
One of the ways you can talk about it, if you look down at verse 2,
he says in verse 2, sorry, verse 3,
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And then down in verse 10, one of the very last Beatitudes,
Blessed are those who are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And so this idea of being a person fit for the kingdom of heaven
is the bookends of the Beatitudes.
So what is the Beatitudes talking about?
It's talking about the life of a citizen of the kingdom of God
or the kingdom of heaven.
And really what it's talking about is bringing your citizenship as a Christian
from the kingdom of heaven into the now,
reaching into the future when the kingdom of God will be fully realized in this world
and bringing it into today.
That's the Beatitudes.
That's the blessed life.
And the commentators, I think, have been very helpful to look at this
and show us that the Beatitudes are broken down into two sets.
There's four negative Beatitudes and then four positive Beatitudes.
And they're telling a story, the Beatitudes are.
And you've got to really see that to get the deep meaning of the Beatitudes.
And so let me show it to you.
Just look at the first three.
The first three, he says,
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
So he's saying, first of all,
if you want to live the blessed life, the happy life,
the life of the kingdom, the good life,
you need to know that you are in poverty.
You need to be in poverty.
You need to mourn.
You need to be sad.
And you need to be meek.
Meek here is a word,
praous,
that just means powerless.
It means so humble that you know you don't have any resources.
All right?
That's the good life.
Sadness, poverty, and powerlessness.
Is that the good life?
What is he doing?
These are the negative Beatitudes.
You see what's going on in the Beatitudes.
To read them correctly,
you've got to see that he's telling a story.
And what he's talking about here is the process of the good life.
In other words, the process of faith,
of coming to faith,
of exactly what we talked about with the kids,
of what it means to be saved.
And a real key here is to see the first one.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
And you can see in your Bible,
it should be at least,
that in verse 3,
the word spirit is not capitalized.
And that's because poverty of spirit
is not talking about
blessed are the poor in the Holy Spirit.
It's saying blessed are the poor
who know they are poor in their spirit,
in your soul.
The first step is saying,
the first key to the good life,
the blessed life,
is to say,
I am poor in my soul.
I have a poverty.
I have a lack.
I am a rebel against God's will.
I am not who God made me to be.
And I am poor.
I don't have the resources
to ever achieve that.
I have a poverty of soul.
And it moves on from there.
The commentators will say that
in spirit controls
the rest of the meaning of the passage.
And so this also happens
in the Lord's Prayer.
But here,
you're supposed to read it like this.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
And then,
blessed are those who mourn
in their spirit.
Blessed are the meek
in their spirit.
In other words,
the negative beatitudes are negative
because they're saying at every level,
I lack all resource.
I have nothing to offer to the Lord.
I'm without hope.
I'm without resources.
Blessed are the poor
who know they're poor in spirit.
And then,
blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are those,
do you have,
listen,
does your sin make you sad?
Do you have,
in your heart,
at all,
the Holy Spirit working
and saying to you,
grieve.
Grieve over your sin,
over your struggle.
And then that makes you,
wakes you up and say,
blessed are the meek.
Blessed are the powerless.
To do anything about it.
Can you get to a place
where you say,
I have no hope to fix this.
That's what he's,
that's the negative beatitudes.
I love the essay competition.
I've said this a couple times in 2024,
but not in 2025.
So I'm free to use all the illustrations again.
New Year.
What G.K. Chesterton said
when the essay competition was put out
from the times in the early 20th century,
the essay competition,
that said,
write an essay
that answers the question,
what is wrong with the world?
And G.K. Chesterton wrote,
dear sir,
I am.
Yours truly,
G.K. Chesterton.
He got it.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are the meek
who know that they're powerless to fix it.
And then the turn,
the climax,
the crux,
the hook
is the fourth beatitude.
And it's the one that Flynn focused on last week.
And in the fourth beatitude,
it says,
blessed are those
who hunger
and thirst for righteousness.
Meaning that when you're poor in spirit,
when you're mourning over your sin,
when you're meek
and you know you can't do anything about it,
you've got to come to a place
where you say,
I must hunger and thirst
for a righteousness
that I cannot provide.
A hunger and thirst
for an alien righteousness.
It's only somebody else's merit
that could ever be enough
to bring me into the good life,
into the blessed life.
Now Flynn touched on this last week,
but I want to come back to it
just for a moment
before we turn to the final point.
This metaphor
of food and drink,
blessed are you
when you get to a place in your life
where you can say,
I hunger,
I thirst
for righteousness
that I do not have.
Why this metaphor
of food and drink,
hungering and thirsting?
And Flynn pointed out last week
that in Genesis
chapter 1, 2, and 3,
the very first context,
God put in front of Adam and Eve
two trees,
the tree of life
and the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil.
And they were told,
you know,
you can take out
and you can reach
and you follow the Lord,
you give yourself away to God,
you be who you were made to be
and you eat
from the tree of life.
You take and you eat.
You hunger and thirst
for God,
righteousness,
you eat something
that will satisfy you forever,
the tree of life.
But when the serpent
came into the garden,
he said,
do you want to be like God?
In other words,
do you want to have autonomy,
freedom,
true freedom,
where you can define
who you are?
You don't have to listen
to the constraints
that God has put on you.
You can become like God,
knowing good and evil.
That's the temptation
to be truly free,
to have all your options,
to be self-defining.
You can determine
your own essence.
It's the essence
of the modern life.
That's the great temptation
of the serpent.
And what did they do
to get it?
Do you hunger and thirst
to live a life
that's not,
where you're not told
by God who you are
and how you should live?
And they took out,
and Derek Kidner,
as Flynn quoted last week,
Derek Kidner said,
when they took,
when she took,
when Eve and Adam
took and ate,
so simple the act,
such a simple act,
but so hard it's undoing.
Such a disaster.
And one of the things
you can do
is you can ask yourself,
what do I hunger
and thirst for?
Here's the test
that we give.
What do I hunger
and thirst for
when I am alone?
When nobody's around me,
when nobody's holding
me accountable,
it's me standing
before the presence
of God by myself.
What is it that I desire?
And boy,
I bet some of us
can say,
I don't usually
sit by myself
and think,
I want God
above everything.
I want to know Him.
I want to see Him.
I hunger and thirst
for a vision of God
to see,
what did David pray?
I long to gaze
upon the beauty
of the Lord
all the days
of my life.
And when you're alone,
what are your desires like?
Where does your heart go?
What do you hunger
and thirst for?
Now here it is,
the beauty of the gospel.
The great,
this is,
the fourth beatitude
is the gospel.
Why?
How?
Because Jesus Christ
came,
the true and better Moses,
the mediator,
and took on
the very life
of the people
of God of Israel.
And in that,
what was He saying?
He was saying,
I've come to live the life
with the desires
you should have had,
but you never did.
Jesus Christ came
and not only lived
in perfect obedience,
He desired God
perfectly
at every way,
at every step,
across every step.
And the gospel says,
look,
here it is,
the gospel is not that,
it's not this,
it's not that if you
really,
really desire God,
if you really,
really,
really look into your heart
and say,
I'm a sinner
and I want God,
that God will forgive you.
Not at all.
The gospel says,
you were never,
ever going to merit
God's favor
by your desires.
You were never going
to desire God,
you were never going
to work through
these beatitudes
and ever do it good enough.
Never.
But Jesus Christ came
and lived for you,
desired for you,
hungered and thirsted
for God the Father
for you.
And then He went
to the cross
and He was murdered
in your stead,
in your place.
You know,
the one person
in all of world history
that deserved to be heard
by God the Father
because He desired God the Father
perfectly,
heard silence
in the moment of the cross.
He came and desired
in your place
so that you could have
the righteousness
that you don't have,
an alien righteousness.
And that means here
that Derek Kidner,
I'll finish the quote,
Kidner says this,
in the beginning,
the Garden of Eden,
Adam and Eve,
they took and they ate,
so simple the act,
so hard it's undoing.
God Himself
had to taste
poverty and death
before take and eat
would once again
become verbs of salvation.
Now lastly,
if you've got that,
you can live
the beautiful life,
and we'll finish
with this.
How to have
the blessed life.
Four negative beatitudes
that lead you
to the gospel,
four positive beatitudes
to respond.
And here's how
we can respond tonight.
One commentator
points this out.
When you get to
the negative beatitudes,
when you get to
really all of them,
what it doesn't say,
it doesn't say this,
blessed are those
who hunger and thirst
for blessedness.
In other words,
it doesn't say,
blessed are those
who hunger and thirst
and long
for a happy life.
No, it says,
blessed are those
who hunger and thirst
for a righteousness
that is not their own.
In other words,
one writer
puts it this way,
if the happy life,
if you've,
if right now
in your life,
you desire
above all else
to seek the things
that you think
will make you happy,
if the happy life
is your ultimate goal,
you will never get it.
You will just put
so much pressure
on every object
that you're chasing,
every person
that you think
is going to make you happy,
that they will all
be crushed
by the weight
of that burden.
By the weight
of that job.
If you say,
I just want to be happy,
that will never
make you happy.
What are the Beatitudes
saying?
They're saying,
not,
blessed are those
who hunger and thirst
for happiness.
They're saying,
blessed are those
who hunger and thirst
for a righteousness
that's not their own,
that leads them
towards the four
positive Beatitudes.
And what are they?
Blessed is the person
who seeks
to give mercy.
Blessed is the person
who seeks purity
in their heart,
who wants to kill
their sin.
Blessed is the person
who is the peacemaker.
And blessed is the person
who's willing to suffer
for the name
of Jesus Christ.
In other words,
you don't get happy,
you don't get a blessed life,
you don't get contentment
in your life
by chasing contentment.
You don't get happiness
by chasing happiness.
You get happiness
by getting out
of your own head,
by getting out
of your own heart,
by getting away
from yourself
and becoming a person
who wants to give mercy
because you've gotten mercy.
Becoming a person
who wants to seek purity,
seek to kill your sin
because Jesus Christ
became impurity for you.
You want to become
a person who's a peacemaker
precisely because
Jesus Christ came
and made peace with you
while you were at war
with Him.
You want to give yourself away
and even suffer,
even be persecuted
for the name of Jesus Christ
because you say
He suffered for me.
In other words,
He's saying
the truly blessed life,
the truly content life
is actually to get
out of yourself,
to get out of your head
and to give yourself away
because He gave
everything away for you.
That's the positive Beatitudes.
Speaking of illustrations
that we used in 2024
in a new year,
C.S. Lewis'
wonderful book,
The Great Divorce,
it's a thought experiment
about heaven.
It's not a theology.
Do not build your theology
of heaven on C.S. Lewis'
Great Divorce,
but it's a helpful
thought experiment at times.
And in one instance
in the book,
there's a man
and he's taken up
into heaven
to see a vision
of the heavenly life
and he sees a woman.
He sees a parade
and he sees a woman
and this woman
is described as
having lived out
the Beatitudes.
This is my paraphrase.
But he sees this parade
and this is what he writes.
If I could remember
the singing
and write down the notes,
no man who read that score
would ever grow sick or old.
Between them,
the angels,
the people in the parade
went musicians
and after these,
there was a lady
in whose honor
all this was being done.
I've forgotten most of it.
Only partly do I remember
the unbearable beauty
of her face
and I asked my guide,
is it,
is that?
He thought it was,
he thought it was Mary,
the mother of Jesus.
And the guide said,
no,
not at all.
He said,
this is someone
you'll have never heard of.
Her name on earth
was Sarah Smith.
She lived at Golders Green.
And I said,
she seems to be,
a person of particular importance.
And he said,
aye,
she is one of the great ones.
You'll have heard,
you've heard that fame
in this country
and fame on earth
are two very different things.
Well,
was she famous?
No,
not like what you mean.
Was she beautiful on earth?
No,
not like what you mean.
All this people,
they must have been
part of her family
or something like that.
No,
not in the way that you mean.
No,
the guide said,
all the boys and girls
that Sarah encountered,
she regarded
as her sons and daughters.
Every single person
was her brother and sister.
She gave to the least.
She forgot herself.
Because of the mercy
she had gotten,
she lived the life of mercy.
She lived the life
of the kingdom
in a place
that the kingdom
was not on earth.
And now,
her true beauty
is on display.
A fierce beauty,
he writes,
at which I could barely
stand to look at.
Now,
in Christ,
the true Moses,
the true and better Moses,
he is calling us
to exchange
the ugly life
of self-seeking,
autonomous freedom,
and personal selfish ambitions
for the beautiful life,
a life lived for something
much better,
much greater,
and you can never do it
apart from the mercy
of the gospel.
But when you come to Christ
and the Holy Spirit
comes into your life,
he's saying,
now look
at the Beatitudes
and say,
I want to be
a person of mercy
and peacemaking.
I'm willing to suffer
for the sake of Christ.
I'll finish with this.
I'll combine this morning
with tonight.
Practicing the Christian life,
we said the one thing
this week you can do
to practice the Christian life
based on Colossians 3,
seek the things
that are above this morning,
was when you wake up
in the morning,
don't touch your phone,
keep your phone
far away from you
in the room,
and get on your knees
next to your bed
and take three to five minutes
to set your mind
on the things above
to talk to yourself
and tell yourself
who you really are in Christ.
That's what Paul means
in Colossians 3.
That's a way to practice it.
But here's a way
to be more specific.
Now you can use
the Beatitudes.
And tomorrow
you can take the Beatitudes
and you can walk through them
in that three to five minutes
twice.
And here's what you do.
Christian meditation,
taking on,
preaching to yourself
in the early morning.
Here's what you do.
You say first,
who am I?
Apart from Jesus,
I'm poor in spirit
and I'm sad
at the reality of my son.
And I am powerless
to do anything about it.
And then you say to yourself,
what do I need?
I need a righteousness
that is not my own,
an alien righteousness.
And then you say,
but what could I become?
And you say,
boy,
because Jesus' righteousness
is enough,
I can become today
a person of mercy
because I've received mercy,
a person that's pure in heart,
because God has pronounced me cleansed.
I can become a peacemaker
because he made peace with me.
I can today seek
to reflect the reality
of my heavenly life
by being willing to suffer
with Christ in his name,
for his name's sake.
In other words,
you gotta wake up tomorrow,
you gotta talk to yourself
and you gotta pray
and you gotta say,
this is who I am
because of the righteousness
that is not my own.
Let us pray.
Father,
help us to practice
the Christian life.
We ask,
help us to
see the truth
about who we are,
to turn outside of ourselves
for a righteousness
that we don't possess.
Lord,
and tomorrow,
do the work
of deep change in us
that we would
be like Christ.
We would see
great examples
in the lives
of other people around us
of mercy and peace
and being willing
to suffer for the sake
of Jesus.
Lord,
we ask,
we wanna be those people.
We long for that.
So,
Holy Spirit,
we ask that you would
come and kill
all the parts
of our deep,
deep desires
that are selfish
and self-interested
and overly attached
to freedom.
Lord,
that we would be trained
far more by the Beatitudes
than by selecting things
on Netflix tonight.
We pray for that.
We want that.
But we also don't want it
in our old self.
And so we ask,
Lord,
that you would just
do a great work in us
to continue to change us,
to purify us,
we pray.
And we ask this
in Jesus' name tonight.
Amen.