Well, today we're going to be looking at the sermon on the mount. And this, well, specifically the Beatitudes. But it comes in the middle of the sermon on the mount. And as we look at the Beatitudes, I think of them as a ladder. It's kind of like.

And you'll see this, as this unfolds over the next few weeks, we'll be looking at how they kind of build on each other. The scripture will be in Matthew, chapter five. It's the first twelve verses. And so I'd invite you to turn in your scriptures to Matthew, chapter five. If you're using the Bible on the rack in front of you, that blue Bible is page 1095.

Makes it a little easier to find that way. But these beatitudes here really is kind of a weird word that we don't have in our everyday language, except for when we read it here in the scriptures. And it starts out with this word, blessed are, you know, blessed are these people. Blessed are those people. And Jesus will begin describing these different folks.

So we'll look at what that means in just a couple minutes. But I first wanna start by reading the scripture on this section from the Beatitudes. I wanna start reading it to you, and then we're gonna talk about it just a little bit as far as what these beatitudes are and how they found their place in the sermon on the mount. So this is at a point where Jesus has, if you were to look back behind it, I love looking at the context of things. Jesus had just done a few interesting things.

He had called several people to be his disciples. That was new. He was early on in his public ministry on this earth, and then he also started healing people quite a bit. And he was actually getting quite a name for himself by healing people. The report about him was spreading amongst many people.

And so they started saying, well, I can come to Jesus if I have an ailment. And we see throughout Jesus ministry that he does heal many people who are brought to him. He doesn't turn anyone away who comes to him for healing. And so as we look at that, that's what was going on before this. But now Jesus has started having crowds following him.

Now they're following him because of the miracles and because of his power. But his job, his ministry, was a preaching ministry as well. He was teaching them. So he sees these crowds, and he goes up onto a mountain or a tall hill of some kind. I always kind of had this thing where I look at any place where the interstate is cut through and there's rock on both sides.

I don't care if it's not that high of an elevation. I say we're in a mountain. Cause it's full of rock. And they had to cut the road through it. I call those a mountain.

And I think that's the kind of mountain he was on. I don't think it was like, you know, the Rockies or Mount Everest kind of stuff here. It was just. It was a rocky outcropping, a big, tall hill. And it was in such a place where his voice could travel out over the people in the kind of the geology of the area.

Allowed for his voice to kind of gather or go to the gathering of people that were there. And so here we are. I'm gonna read in Matthew chapter five, the first twelve verses. When he saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain. After he sat down, his disciples came to him.

And then he began to teach them, saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled or satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

And blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. And blessed are you. And this one's really hard for us to hear.

Blessed are you. When people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil things about you on account of me. Rejoice and be glad, because your reward in heaven is great. For they persecuted the prophets before you in the same way. Let's pray.

Jesus, we read these words that you spoke. I'm thankful that the Holy Spirit inspired one of your disciples, named Matthew to write it down, to record it, to put it into this letter, this book form. And that through your prevenient grace, that grace that was already preparing the way for us to come to salvation and knowledge of you. That through that you put it together into this thing that we call the Bible, the holy scriptures. But more than anything, I'm thankful that today it means something to us.

And even though we've got to dig into it to fully understand it, that no matter what level of knowledge we come to beforehand, we come to this scripture today. Lord, knowing that you're speaking to us and that it means something for our lives today. So as we dig into this today and over the next few weeks, may you lead us and guide us and show us how this can be our life. Well, bless us. This morning we pray in Christ's name.

Amen. So this sermon on the mount goes for a few chapters, and Jesus covers lots of different things I someday maybe will go into. I've probably already done it and I've forgotten, but I love this, and I've got parts marked out where clearly I've preached them before. I put little brackets around the scripture I'm going to read. And I say, well, I have preached this and I know that, but I love the sermon on the mount.

There's so much in there that applies to our life. And Jesus takes, well, like, have you ever, have you ever felt like the church has had some teachings that just kind of felt like just religious, but not really anything practical for our lives? Like, here's all these rules now. Follow them. And you're thinking, well, why do I have to follow these rules?

Well, what are they here for? Jesus takes a lot of those rules that people had taken for granted. They were just taught these things. And he says, you've heard people teach you to do this before, but here's how I'm going to explain it to you. And he, he opens it up, but he doesn't loosen it up.

He opens it up for their understanding, but he doesn't, doesn't water it down to say, well, here, here's how that old archaic teaching can, can be smoothed over for a generation that doesn't agree with it, Jesus never did that. In fact, in some ways, he increased it quite a bit. He took the ways that they had relaxed the scriptures and he tightened it up. And he says, that's not how God created us to be. Here's how he created us to be.

So without preaching the whole sermon on the mount to you and explaining that we don't have time for it today, and I want to stay focused. We're looking at the beatitudes. And I mentioned that it's kind of like, it's kind of like a ladder, right? It's a ladder that they almost, one after the other, builds on each other. And it starts out with this idea that there are people who are poor in spirit.

And so we're gonna look at that in a minute and what that means. But what I really wanna start out with first is Jesus keeps using this word, blessed. Blessed are you. So we're gonna look at what is the blessed life. We're gonna start with that and say, okay, so the blessed life according to Jesus is what?

It's a fair question to ask. He's painting a picture of that. It's like each one of these, as we look through them, is maybe a ladder rung or a puzzle piece to get to that blessed life. And once it's all put together, we start to see that. And there's a whole bunch.

I do this thing sometimes. I listen to a group of guys called the Bible project. I know a few of you have started paying attention to them, and they've got some really great resources on there. And they went through the whole sermon on the mount, and I was listening to a lot of what they said, and I'll be honest, they got into some really deep language study about what this word blessed means, and I think that's good and important. And I'm also not going to bother.

You, like, to retell their whole thing. I'll tell you, you can go to the Bible project and search for them and look at their podcasts and the way they've taught on it, and you can dig into that all you want. But what Jesus is doing when he uses this word blessed is he's saying, this is something that. A way of life that you can live inside of. And it's not just.

It's not just a blessing that, well, you can't do anything to get it yourself. Like, you don't acquire this. And I think about today, I know some of you guys, you're like, I've never been on, like, Instagram or TikTok. And I'll be honest, I've never been on TikTok, but I do know what it's. I do know it exists.

Ed and I were just talking about this earlier, and it's like, I don't know. You know, sometimes people will send me a link, and it opens on. On the TikTok webpage. I can watch it, but I can't look at anything else. And I just don't want to bother with that in my life.

I haven't added one more social media app there. But people will get on, especially, like, Instagram, and they'll show a picture or a film of, like, their. Their home, the way they decorated it, or maybe a vacation spot that they went to. Or maybe it's a hashtag, you know, that little thing that you used to call the pound sign. Now it's called a hashtag, and it means something anyway, they'll put hash blessed life.

And you're like, what's that even mean? And it's usually something that they have earned or achieved or received from the efforts that they've put into it, and it's something that they've gotten themselves to this place in life. And so they say I'm blessed. Well, man, what about those of us who worked hard and didn't get there? That's kind of offensive, right?

Like, I'm like, hey, wait a minute. I worked hard, but I'm not there. Does that mean I'm not blessed? Does that mean that I have. I haven't figured out how to be as successful as you are, and so I'm not living the same blessed life.

And don't get me wrong, if you have something nice, it's good to be grateful for that. It's good to recognize the blessings that you have. But I don't believe that's what Jesus is talking about is saying. Once you've done these things, you've achieved something, you've unlocked a new level in life, and now you're blessed. In fact, as we look at these things, we start to see that Jesus is talking about people in life situations that really none of us would say that those are blessed people.

Like, just the two we're gonna look at today is the first two. Blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed are those who mourn. As we look at those things, we wonder, like, how can we be considered living in the blessed life if we find ourselves in those situations? This also ties into the fact that Jesus says the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. Now, that's phrased two different ways.

The kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God. And so Matthew, the gospel writer, Matthew talks about the kingdom of God. He talks about that. I'm sorry. He talks about the kingdom of heaven.

The other gospel writers talk about the kingdom of God. I prefer to use the kingdom of God, and here's why. Matthew was a jewish person. He was jewish by birth, and he was steeped in jewish way of doing things. And they didn't write out, they didn't even like to say God.

They would not try to write his name. In fact, they would just leave out the vowels or leave out some of the letters so that they didn't fully spell his name because they didn't want to misuse it or somehow write it wrong and thereby misused the name of the Lord, their God. They were that intent on, and still are, jewish people today. Still are. And so they wouldn't refer to the kingdom of God.

They would refer to the place where God dwells, the kingdom of heaven is how Matthew uses it. And so if you've ever looked through your scriptures and said, wait a minute, is there a difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven? No, it's just a different way of saying it, depending on who you are and who Matthew, who he was writing to, his audience he was writing to. So if I mix up or say it one way or the other, forgive me. That's why.

So the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is what Jesus is talking about. And he says that there are people who the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God belongs to them. And this first group is people who are poor in spirit. Now, we look at these people and we say, how are they blessed? Or why is that a blessing to be in that situation?

Why are these people in the beatitudes blessed for their circumstances? We look at this and we think, what is a blessing about this situation in life? Real simply, we might look at different times in our lives and say, how is this stage of my life able to be a blessing from God? How am I able to be blessed by God while I am right here in this place or position? So you might find yourself somewhere on one of these ladder rungs.

If we're thinking of that first picture where there's a ladder, you might say, well, I'm on one of these ladder rungs. Where am I at? Where am I in this procession up the ladder? And the first one starts out with people who are poor in spirit. And you think, what does poor in spirit even mean?

I look at this one, and I think, we've all been there at times. Maybe you're there right now. I'll be honest, I wake up most mornings lately feeling like I'm right here, oddly enough, on the bottom rung. Maybe it's like a cyclical ladder where you get to the top and you start over again. Perhaps that's where it's at.

Let me describe it to you. He says, blessed are those who are poor in spirit. The best way I've ever understood this was from reading the devotional called my utmost for his highest by Oswald Chambers. Lived a long time ago. He died fairly young.

He was teaching at a school that was preparing ministers for their gospel work, and his wife recorded in shorthand everything that he said in his lectures and in the devotionals that he would give to these students and all that. And she ended up publishing them in several different books. So that's why we have this book called my utmost for his highest. And that's how his wife provided for her and their children after he had passed away was by selling these books. Well, we have benefited from that, because it's not just a daily devotional guide.

This is a daily, like, take a gospel stick and whack you where you're at kind of thing. It'll really just kind of say, psh. Okay, listen up. You know, and so Oswald Chambers describes this as being a spiritual pauper. That's an old school word that we don't really use today.

Maybe if you're more inclined to be, like, british, you might use it more. It seems like a very british kind of thing. But paupers were just abject poverty, just complete poverty. And when you're so poor that you feel it in every, like, just every moment of the day, when you're so poor that it's not just. It's gone beyond hunger.

It's like the place that you sleep, the place that you live, the places that you go, the clothes that you wear, everything you have around you is just screaming about how much poverty you're in. That's the kind of poorness or poverty that Jesus is speaking of here. But he's not talking about a material poverty. Look at the words he says. Blessed are those who are poor in spirit, spiritually poor.

When your spiritual sense is so dry, when you feel like God is so far away from you that you just have your hands out, begging like a beggar, begging for just some food. Just put some coins in my cup so I can go buy some bread, so I can go buy something to eat. If you feel that poor, spiritually blessed are you. It doesn't feel like a blessing when you're that spiritually dry, when you're that spiritually bankrupt, you don't feel blessed, do you? And you don't feel like there's anything you can do to climb out of that.

That hole, that pit, that just emptiness of despair from being that poor. Right. Okay. I think our country feels that in a lot of ways, we saw something. Maybe I just happened to be somewhere where the news was on, and I saw breaking news that somebody took a shot at President Trump on a campaign trail.

Any politics aside or feelings for any people aside, the fact that anybody would do such things and they do happen with some regularity, to some degree, in our country. Country and, for that matter, around the world. But at the point where people would go and do something that despicable shows us just how spiritually poor our nation is, just how empty we are. But even more so than that, I was reading on news sites, and I'm looking on YouTube. I'm trying to find coverage of this.

And I look at people making these comments on there, and the things that they say, I won't even repeat. It shows the disgusting depravity of our human condition that some people wished the shooter was more accurate in their target. There's people that wished that more people had been harmed. These are human beings saying these things, folks, we're spiritually poor. We need not just.

Not just Jesus, like, oh, we need you, Jesus. We need Jesus to come in and clean us up. We need him to clean us out. I had a prayer this morning, a prayer time. I walked into this building and I just knelt down up front or actually lay down to pray, and something hit me.

I said, God, I'm not worried that I have hatred or anger in my heart. I do at times, but I'm aware of that. But the thing that he revealed to me was an apathy towards others. That's the thing that I don't see. I can see my anger.

I know when I've been angry. I know when I've gone over that line. But when you're apathetic, when you just simply don't care about others in their situation, that's the thing that God was trying to break me from this morning and saying, listen, you are so spiritually poor, you don't even realize when you've stopped caring about other people's situation. And I can pass judgment when I read a comment on YouTube about how somebody's attitude is bad, but I don't even see my own attitude towards others who are in need or struggling in some way. And I just kind of go on about my day and say, it's no concern of mine.

You see, those are the things that I don't realize just how poor I am. And so I think what Jesus is saying here, when he says, blessed are the poor in spirit, we're all there. We are each one there. None of us are at a place where we don't need more of the spirit of God in our lives. None of us are so filled with the spirit of God that we say, okay, I'm good, I'm full.

I don't need anymore. But the problem is when we don't recognize it. So if we're going to have our little ladder of the beatitudes and we climb up on that first rung, we gotta be able to stand there and say, I need more of you, Lord. I need more of your spirit in my life. I'm so spiritually poor that I can't climb anywhere else.

I can't go to the next step. I can't take the next step forward or the next step up until I acknowledge where I'm at. And until we acknowledge where we are and who we are, we can't possibly progress not only on this ladder through the beatitudes, but we can't understand what it means to live in the kingdom of God. You see, Jesus starts talking about the kingdom of God here, and a lot of people probably had questions about what does that even mean? What is God's kingdom?

I mean, we could simply understand it to say God's kingdom is here and now Jesus, in fact says the kingdom of God is here, and yet he says the kingdom of God is still around arriving. It will be here at some point, but it's not fully here yet. And as he talks about the kingdom of God showing up, he starts talking about ways for us to usher it in. In other words, the kingdom of God is anywhere where God is right now. God's presence is where his kingdom is.

And so his kingdom is on this whole earth. And yet we don't see it affected in our world. We don't see it effectively laid out in front of us. Jesus talks a lot about people who are able to see the kingdom. In fact, he talked about you have to come as a child with the simple faith of a child if you want to see the kingdom of God.

He talked about those who are able to perceive it. In other words, they're looking for it and they see the kingdom of God on its approach, and they recognize that this is where God has broken into the messes of this world and the brokenness of this world and where he is ushering his kingdom. And weirdly enough, somehow he chose, as broken as we are, he has chosen to use us to partner with us to do this work. Sure, the redemptive work of saving our souls and rebuilding us for the sake of eternity is only by Jesus Christ. We can do none of that.

And yet he has called us to begin ushering in his kingdom. In fact, we'll look at it next week. But when he talks about blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, he's not just talking righteousness as in this personal holiness that we might have. It's actually that righteousness would be enacted across all people in the whole earth. And in order to do that, the justice of God must take place.

The fairness and equalness of God must take place. And yet he does that through, through grace and mercy, it's an odd thing, and we'll take some time to get into that. But as Jesus is talking about, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those are the types of people who are ushering in the kingdom of God. In fact, all of these are. And so what we're looking at is not only as we climb this ladder for our own personal sake, but it's also bringing in God's kingdom.

And so Jesus starts talking about not only the poor in spirit, but then the next one is blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Now mourning, I believe he has in mind here those who have lost someone, who died, those who have recently experienced the death of someone. When that happens, you mourn over them. A lot of times. Our traditions in mourning the death of a loved one are a lot more subdued than they did in some of the biblical times.

Think of Joseph when his father died. And they're in Egypt when Jacob died. Joseph, he's kind of, even though he's a Hebrew, he's been living as a Egyptian. And so they do a lot of things according to, like, the customs of the Egyptians. I mean, they mourned for like 40 days.

They embalmed him. You know, they do all this stuff. It was like 70 plus days that they mourned for, for Jacob, the father of Israel, of the children of Israel. And then you look at job after his family dies in the mourning that they do, you think about, he sat down in the dust. He took off his nice clothes.

He put on sackcloth, which is itchy and scratchy and miserable. He sat down in the dust, put dust on his head, and just sat there for seven days and didn't even talk. Just mourned for seven days. We don't mourn like that. We don't really process grief and loss in a lot of the same ways that they did in a lot of biblical times.

And so we even see that with Jesus when his friend Lazarus dies, even though Jesus knows he's going to raise him from the dead, Jesus still weeps in the time of mourning. I mean, the shortest verse in the Bible is Jesus wept. I think it's short and sweet for a reason. It needs to stop us for a moment to realize that even Jesus understood and practiced the things he was teaching. And so Jesus, he wept at that moment, even knowing that he had the power to and was about to raise Lazarus from the dead and bring him back to life, he still wept because he felt the pain of loss as a human being.

And so when Jesus when he talks about blessed are those who mourn, he's talking about a condition that we all will experience at some point. Death won't escape us, and the pain of death of a loved one won't escape us all. We'll all be encountering that at some point in our lives. And I don't mean to get all dark on us here, but at this point, Jesus is saying, if you're somebody that's currently in a place of mourning, then you're blessed. We don't see people on Instagram saying, hey, so and so just died.

Hash blessed. They just don't do that. We don't think of life in those terms. And so we're just looking at these two today. Blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed are those who mourn.

And we think, how in the world is this blessed? And Jesus says, in each of these, there's a second side of each equation. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. How can that be? Well, you can't get into this kingdom lifestyle if you're living your life on your terms, thinking that you've already got it all figured out and that you've got your own way kind of mapped out and paved in front of you.

But if you're so spiritually poor that you don't even feel like you can put one step in front of the other, unless the spirit of God gives you that ability and gives you new life, then blessed are you. Because now you've begun to understood what the kingdom of God is like, that you're able to walk in his kingdom because you're totally and utterly dependent on him. And if you're mourning, and I think mourning isn't just for the death of a loved one. But I believe when we mourn the spiritual poverty in our lives and in the world, when we lament that or confess that and weep over that, when we see that. I mean, there was a prophet in the Old Testament that was the weeping prophet.

He was continually on his face just weeping and crying over the condition of his people. King David, at times with his own sin, he wept over his own sin and the condition of his own heart. And he would just weep. And he write it in the psalms and say, you know, my tears are just staining my floor. I just.

I'm on my face crying before you. When will my tears stop? See, these are the type of people who understood mourning and lamenting the way that I believe Jesus is talking about. But we don't see the idea of somebody going around crying and think, they're blessed, aren't they? So, how can we live the blessed life today?

How can we live this sermon or this beatitude in our personal life? The first thing I believe is to understand that there's really nothing that we do that makes us blessed. There's nothing that we do that is the cause of the blessing that falls on us. The only responsibility or culpability we have in that matter is if we have recognized this and if we allow Christ to do the work in us. And so Jesus, he's telling us about this kingdom life, and he's inviting us into it and saying, I don't want you to be tied down like the people of this world are.

I don't want you to live as the people of this world do. The scripture tells us we shouldn't live as those who have no hope. See, we have this hope in Christ that through these things that we're going through now, that if we keep climbing this ladder, if we keep progressing through the beatitudes, that he will continue blessing us and that he will continue to make us into the kingdom citizen that he has created us to be. And so, as we do that, we find out that we truly are blessed by God, not because of what we view as bad things happening, but because of the presence of God in our lives that empowers us to walk through each and every day. You see, we have this opportunity.

How do we walk in this blessed life is simply to walk with Christ daily, to recognize our spiritual poverty and to realize there's nothing that we can do about it except fall on our face before God and say, heal me and fill me. I need you, God. It's that simple. And so, as we walk with Jesus daily and we invite him more and more into our lives, he is willing to fill us, the spirit of God. Jesus promised he would never leave us or forsake us, and so he sent his holy spirit to be with us each and every day.

If you think, well, what's this holy spirit stuff? I say, well, here's the deal. You are an eternal soul that has a body. You think, oh, I got to take care of my body. Why do we talk about our body as if we possess it?

Well, it's kind of because we do. The part that's you isn't the part that dies and gets buried. The part that's you is the part that goes on into eternity. That's your eternal soul, and that's the part of us that we need, that spiritual filling of the spirit of God. We connect with God that way.

And so it might sound weird to say, well, the spirit of God fills us, but it's not weird. That's how we were created, to relate to God on that spiritual level. And so we need that in our lives. How do we live this blessed life? We recognize our need for God.

We mourn over our own spiritual condition and over the condition of the world that needs God so much. And we come to him and just say, I can't fix this, but you can. So how do we live that blessed life? Walk with Christ each and every day. Amen.