“Pursuing the Blessed Life”

THE BEATITUDES: How to Be Truly Blessed Sermon Series

“Pursuing the Blessed Life” (Part #10)

KEY PASSAGE: Matthew 5:3–12 (NASB)

Father, may we know Your love and compassion for us in greater measure because of our times spent here at the church in Your holy presence. Until Your Son Jesus returns, I pray that You often remind us of the importance of living out the truth in Your Word. Fill us with encouragement and joy as we anticipate that hour Your Son Jesus will appear. We Thank You for a place of worship where we can gather every Sunday to praise you, worship you, fellowship, and encourage one another. We thank You for that and commit the rest of the service [into] Your hands of living God. Amen. You may be seated. Worship band, thank you for blessing our hearts with praise and worship songs.

TITHE and OFFERING

Giving to God is part of the Sunday Worship experience, and this church depends on your tithes and offerings to do God’s work and keep the church operational. There are many other areas where we honor God in our faithfulness, and paying our tithes and offerings is one of those areas. I want to thank this church for being faithful to God in tithe and offering. I will call on the ushers to pass around the plates to collect our tithes and offerings. Please follow the instructions on the screen on how to give to the church. The worship team will lead us with a song as we collect our tithes and offerings.

WELCOME

Please stand up, greet some folks around you, and welcome them to worship. We welcome you [all] again to our Sunday Worship Service and are glad to have you in God’s house. Our first-time visitors, please stand so we can see you. We also welcome all who join us online.

ANNOUNCEMENT

· The Church Leadership Meeting is on Saturday, November 16th, at noon. All ministry leaders, please take note of that date and time.

· The Thanksgiving Potluck is on Sunday, November 24th. This will be a time of fellowship after church. If you are interested in bringing a meal, there is a sign-up sheet at the back of the church.

· Wednesday Night [Remember] is our Bible Study Connect at 7:00 p.m. Please join us on Wednesday night to STUDY THE WORD OF GOD. We have excellent teachers. And we are studying the Book of Romans.

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

Let us pray together.

Father, it is with great joy that we have come to the conclusion of our sermon series titled “How To Be Truly Blessed.” We “Thank You” for taking us through this marvelous truth. We thank You, our Lord, for bringing us this far to [the place] where our hearts and minds were open and ready to receive Your Word. Father, we know that the reception is only for those who love the Lord Jesus Christ; only those who have to live within them the very life of God could see the blessedness of God. We pray that Your Holy Spirit will open our hearts to receive the power of this message in our lives and our world. We also pray for the collection of the tithes and offerings that will be used to advance Your work here on earth. We praise You in Christ’s name. Amen.

DECLARATION of FAITH in GOD

Let us stand and say the Declaration of Faith in God together.

SERMON INTRODUCTION

We all have the opportunity to go to the pharmacy, which usually means we fulfill a prescription request from a doctor designed to fix an alignment. The Beatitudes are antibiotics from God’s pharmacy intended to address a person looking for a blessing. The Beatitude is designed to fix that which keeps us from the fullness of the experience with God that many wish to have but few seem to locate. The Beatitudes are blessings that accrue to Kingdom’s people. Not to church folks but to Kingdom people. Kingdom people are men and women, boys and girls, who consciously flow under the rule and authority of God.

At the beginning of this sermon series, I told you that Jesus is in the business of providing people with happiness. Jesus is in the happiness business. Happiness is God’s concern for His people. Now, this is very evident to us because in the very first sermon ever recorded as having been preached by Jesus Christ, as we enter into the gospels, the first time we meet a sermon of our Lord Jesus, it is a sermon that begins with the constant ringing theme of happiness.

SERMON EXPOSITION

We have called this series, which we conclude today, ‘How to Be Truly Blessed.’ We included the word ‘truly’ in our sermon series title because we emphasized that you can have a lot of stuff and not be blessed. The Beatitudes have outlined the character of God’s kingdom people and the blessings that accumulate to those faithfully blessed by God and who use that blessing to bless other folks. When we ask God to bless us, [often] we forget the full definition of a blessing. We forget that God doesn’t want us to be cul-de-sac Christians where our blessings end with us. God wants us to be conduit Christians where our blessings extend and flow through us to others.

[For example] When God blessed Abraham in the Old Testament in Genesis 22:17-18, God said, “Indeed I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand, which is on the seashore; and your seed shall possess the gate of their enemies. And in your seed, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you have obeyed My voice.” At the end of verse 18, God provides us with a justification for why He blesses His people. [Key word ‘obey’]. The reason is obedience.

In our text for today, Jesus gathers His disciples for what is known as the “Sermon on the Mount,” He gives them eight blessings, using the word “blessed” nine different times to show them what it means to be truly blessed. Verses 1 to 6 express the blessedness of a person related to God, and verses 7 to 12 show the blessedness of a person who is related to people. In the most basic sense, blessed means “deep joy,” knowing that you have received divine favor from God. Jesus says you have to start [off] by declaring [your] spiritual bankruptcy in Verse 3. That is your inability to fix yourself because heaven will come to fix you. And Jesus says you have to be mournful over your sin so that God can comfort you with His forgiveness.

Then you must be meek or gentle, willing to submit yourself to God's will because God can trust you with His inheritance. Then you have to desire righteousness because that is the only hunger God is interested in satisfying your soul. And then, when God satisfies you, you have to be willing to come and meet somebody else. “Blessed are the merciful.”Don’t burn the bridge over you; you must cross because you will receive God’s mercy. “Blessed are those who are undefiled, undiluted, unmixed.” They have God’s view as a way of life [not the world’s view], [they are] pure in heart, because they are the ones who will see God intervene in their circumstances.

In other words, they will see God for themselves. They don’t have to piggyback on somebody else’s testimony. [And then] Finally, when you become this kind of person, you will experience resistance and rejection. You will be persecuted, insulted, and evil said about you. But that is okay because Jesus says, "Rejoice; twice, you are blessed." First, you are blessed on earth because what comes to you in history will be yours, and you will inherit it. And then you will be blessed in heaven. You will have dual blessings – blessing in history and blessing in heaven.

That is the essence of the “blessed life,” reflecting Christ’s character manifested in and through a believer's life. It is one thing to hear sermons about the blessed life. But it is also one thing to feel good because of it; it is another thing to have it. Pursuing the Blessed Life. Over and over again, Jesus says blessed. ‘Blessed’ has become a popular word today. Everybody is looking for their blessing. But the question on the floor today is, how do you get what God has with your name written on it?

Blessing is the inner well-being of character that overflows into the external stuff we wish to enjoy. Paul says in Romans 14, verse 17, that what God is offering in His kingdom “… is peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Many of you know people who have a house but don’t have much of a home. Many of us know people who have a lot of money who are unhappy. Let me put it this way: It is like building a playground in your heart. Paul says the kingdom of God in Romans 14:17 is not eating and drinking. It is not the stuff out here that you put in here. In other words, you don’t get to be truly blessed by trying to make the external help the internal. Paul says the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit blesses you.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION 1

When you take kids to McDonald’s, you take them for eating and drinking. McDonald’s has the famous Happy Meal. You can take your kids to McDonald's for eating and drinking, but when we take our kids to McDonald’s, we look for a McDonald’s with a playground, which makes going to McDonald’s more than [just] eating and drinking. We enjoy the environment even if we are not eating and drinking because there is a playground. McDonald’s has built something more than just eating and drinking. McDonald’s built a place of joy for the family. For us Christians, God says that when it comes to being blessed, don’t just be satisfied with the stuff you put in here, such as eating and drinking. God says, make sure that you have a playground in your soul. So, when you are not eating and drinking, you are still having fun because what is attached to eating and drinking is [something much] bigger. It has to do with inner well-being, which overflows.

SERMON EXPLANATION 1

That is why 1 Peter 1:8 “… calls it joy inexpressible.” God is interested in a playground in the soul of a believer, not simply the external stuff you pick up along the way. It is a very unfortunate emphasis in our day with this concept of prosperity theology, where you say God, bless me with a new car. Bless me with a new house, bless me with more money, bless me with a better job, bless me, and all that is okay. John would say in 3 John Verse 2, “… may you prosper in every way”, but then he says, “Even as your soul prospers.” Another version put it this way, “Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.” You see, God wants the outside of a believer to be better, but He also wants to keep up with your soul.

In other words, [Watch This] God wants the inside smoking, infiltrating all the [other] areas that you are prospering in. God wants your soul to be His focus, even though He does not discount it. The problem today is that folks want external stuff and don’t care about internal stuff. As long as I get the stuff, I have been blessed [by God].

Let me give you a scenario from the Old Testament. During the exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land, the people of Israel got tired of manna, the food from heaven that God had rained down to feed His people. They were very ungrateful because they wanted meat instead of manna. Manna are cornflakes. They wanted Quail instead of manna from heaven. They complained to God, and so God blessed them with quail. And quail started flying and dropping from the sky. Birds would fly over and fall to the ground. They had external blessings, but they experienced the emptiness of the soul. Guess what happened? They had so many quail, the Bible says, that they could not keep up with it. They could not eat it all, so the quail began to decay. What was a blessing; they thought whined-up [being] a curse. And I am sure that there are people here [today] who can testify that what they thought was a blessing from God turned out to be a curse because the soul could not keep up with it.

Jesus made a staggering statement in John 10:10. “I have come to give you life. He says the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. But I have come to give you life. And then He says to give it to you more abundantly.” God’s goal for the believer is abundant life, which refers to the eternal life God deposits in every believer at the point of salvation. The Greek word for ‘abundant’ describes something far beyond what is necessary. It goes beyond the [normal] expectation. It refers to an overflow. Jesus says, "I have come to give you life, and I have come to give you an overflowing life."

Jesus did not save you to give you life so you can make it. Jesus did not save you to give you life so you can get by. Jesus says I have come to give you an overflowing life.

2 Corinthians Chapter 9 talks about abundance. Verse 8 says, “And God [is able to] make all grace overflow to you, so that, always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed.” Remember abundant life—abundance for every good deed. Paul says, ‘all grace.’ I love the word “grace” because this word separates the Christian faith from every other religion. So, what is grace? Grace is all that God is free to do for you because of what Christ has done on the cross. Grace is the inexhaustible supply of God’s goodness, doing for His people what they could never do for themselves.

The good news about grace is that God has already pre-qualified you. When you get a credit card, the credit company pre-qualifies you. When you accepted Jesus Christ, you got pre-qualified. That is why you don’t even technically have to ask God to bless you. According to Ephesians Chapter 1, Verse 3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has already blessed us with all spiritual blessing in heavenly places.” Translation, everything God is ever going to do for you, God has already done it for you. So, it is not that you have to ask God to bless you because you have already been pre-qualified. God already blessed you. Everything that is part of your inheritance in history that God plans to do for you, He has already deposited it into your account.

What is missing is not the possession of God’s grace. What is missing is the flow of grace. The Bible says that you can have the grace of God in vain, according to 2 Corinthians 6:1. That means you have the grace of God, but it is [no of] benefit to you. But you have it. Some of us have treadmills in our homes, but we don’t use the treadmill. The provision has been made, but it is not being used. In other words, we block the flow of God’s grace in our lives. Every home has access to more than enough water. There is water for everyone. The water department has made available an abundance of water. But you must turn on the nozzle to access the water. The water is available, but you must access it so it can benefit you. God has made available all grace, but all grace can be in vain. There is enough grace for everybody in the church today. Everyone has access to grace if you belong to Jesus Christ.

We have the grace needed for abundant life, but many of us are not experiencing God's blessing because we are not starting in the right place. We are not allowing God’s grace to flow through us. And so, that raises the question: How do I grab God’s grace so that I am transformed? God’s grace brings about transformation in a person’s life. Let’s do some Bible Study.

Turn your Bible to the Book of James. I want to show you two verses. They both use the word blessed. Verse 12: “Blessed is a man who preservers under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love Him. Here is a blessing for a person persevering under a difficult set of circumstances called a trial. Verse 25 says, “.… But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man shall be blessed in what he does.” James says two things must happen. First, you must benefit from your tough situation, which is [called] a ‘trial.’ Second, you must utilize the perfect law of liberty to be truly blessed. James says in verse 2 of James Chapter 1, “.… count it all joy when you fall into various trials.” Not many people do that because trials are negative feelings or situations. Let’s go back and let me illustrate this principle using an Old Testament illustration. God delivered Israel from Egypt. They were trapped, and God set them free. Supernaturally, we are told God opened up the Red Sea.

What was God doing for His people? He took them to a destiny called Canaan, the Promised Land. They were delivered from Egypt to a destiny called the Promised Land. That was the whole point. God delivered them so He could bless them. You were saved and delivered from sin and Satan for a destiny. Your destiny: not your heavenly destiny. I am talking about your historical destiny. Your destiny is God’s purpose for you on earth. God has a destiny in history for you. You were delivered not just for heaven but for history to serve the purposes of God here on earth. To get from deliverance to destiny, the people of God had to go through a piece of land called ‘Canaan’ for their development. It was called the wilderness. God did not take the people of Israel from deliverance to destiny. He took them from deliverance through development to destiny.

Folks come to church because they want to go from deliverance to destiny and skip development. You can’t go from deliverance to destiny without making it through the wilderness. The design of the wilderness, [Watch This], is to develop you for destiny. [Because] If you are not developed for destiny, you are going to mess up at the place of destiny because you are not ready for destiny because there has been no development in the wilderness. The wilderness is a dry place. It is hot in the wilderness. There is no water in the wilderness. There wasn’t enough food in the wilderness; in other words, the wilderness was a place of trial and difficulty. Some of us here today are satisfied to come to church every Sunday, looking for destiny, [looking for a breakthrough], but we don’t want God messing with us Monday through Saturday for development. And if God can’t bring development, He has to delay your arrival at destiny by taking you through detours.

I know some of you here have been in difficult situations for a while now. And you are wondering if 2025 is going to be better than 2024. We want God to release us when we are not yet ready. And God is saying, “I have to keep you here because you are not ready.” God is developing and cooking you so that you can bless somebody else who needs to eat. God wants you to be a blessing when you are developed and cooked. And God knows how to keep us in the oven until we are ready. God is not trying to be mean. God is taking you through this situation as an opportunity to drive you both to Him and His Word so you can apply whatever the principles are so that you don’t become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer so that you can be blessed.

SERMON ILLUSTRATION 2

I am reminded of the story of the dog that inadvertently fell into the well. A very deep well. It was wet under the bottom of the well. The dog’s owner decided not to spend all his time and energy trying to save the old dog. So, he decided to bury the dog at the bottom of the well by digging dirt and pouring the dirt into the well to bury the dog. The dog was terrified because the dog knew what was going on. The dog was getting buried at the bottom of the well.

The dog is nervous and afraid because it is in a bad situation. The [dog] sees hopelessness and death at the door. As the dirt starts piling in, the dog comes up with a brilliant idea. When the dirt came into the well, the dog would shake it and then take a step. And then shake it, and then take a step. Every time the dirt was thrown into the well, the dog would shake [the dirt] and then take a step until it walked out of the deep well.

When circumstances pile on you, and God is testing you, shake it off and take a step until you walk into your Promised Land, your place of blessing, your place of destiny. The Bible says that when the perfect law of liberty hits. When you go to the calculator to calculate one plus one equals two, the manufacturer has already designed that calculator to resolve your problem. The calculator is already set up inside, which is your solution. You bring the problem. Let the inside come up with the answer. Let the inside come up with the solution. The perfect law of liberty in James 1:25 has already been designed to address your problem. It has already been designed to turn that around for you.

FAITH APPEAL, CALL to ACTION and ALTAR CALL

In closing, you have to decide, we have to decide as a church, and I have to [decide if] I want to be a ship or a submarine. Do you know what a ship is? A ship is always on top of the water. And as long as the waters are calm, the ship is [calm]. But when turbulence hits the water, the ship will be rocking because of Mother Nature. When Mother Nature sends a storm, the ship will bounce everywhere and become unstable because circumstances are everywhere. Because happiness is based on what happens, so if circumstances are smooth, I am sailing smoothly. When times get rough, I get bouncy. A submarine can come to the surface. A submarine can ride at smooth times. However, a submarine is not limited to the surface because a submarine can change its direction. And the submarine can dive down deeper when things get bad on the surface.

No matter how bad the weather gets on the scene in the ocean, it can only affect the water twenty-five feet down. No matter how bad things get up here, it can only go down twenty-five feet. A submarine can go down twenty-six feet or a hundred and twenty-six feet. A submarine is not worried when stuff out here is chaos because it doesn’t live up there; it can dive down here. It can go deeper when things up here are not looking good. For Christians, God doesn’t want you to be a ship, just bouncing everywhere – bouncing on water when things get shaky and when there is a storm. God wants you to be a submarine, so when stuff gets crazy [up] here, you can say that is okay. Let me dive down [let me go deeper] because I have something on the inside that doesn’t depend on what things are like on the outside. How To be truly blessed? You pursue the blessed life by applying the perfect law of liberty to your difficult situations until the Lord Jesus says, “Well done so that He can take you to the place He saved you to get to. That is how you are truly blessed.” God bless you.

If you are here today and you don’t know Jesus, you only have two options to get to heaven. The first way is to be as good as God, and that is perfect. God is perfect, and He only accepts perfection. But if He can’t do it that way, He has another way. And that is grace. God will give you salvation free of charge by accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Savior. God will give you perfection and credit it to you.

BENEDICTION

Let us pray.

Our Father, again, today has been a rich and wonderful day, and we thank you so much for it. Certainly, Your Word has penetrated our hearts [individually and collectively] and opened us up again to a fresh and new understanding of Your mind, character, will, and way, which calls us to live obediently and submissively to that revelation. We have received much and are accountable for responding in obedience. We thank You for the Word, the promise that You have come to bring happiness, blessedness, bliss, and joy, but that it comes in the most unlikely matrix of brokenness, mourning, meekness, hunger, and thirst for righteousness, that it is out of that brokenness and repentance effected in our hearts by the wondrous sovereign working of the Holy Spirit that we come to the place of repentance and embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ and enter the Kingdom of God and thereby are blessed. We thank You for that permanent [state of] true happiness deep within us because we share Your divine nature. We can, with Paul, say, “Rejoice always, and again I say rejoice,” because our joy is not connected to any passing emotion or changing circumstance but an abiding and eternal relationship which You have determined to engage with us by Your sufficient grace and mercy. We thank You for that, and we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

God bless you. We will see you next week at 10:30 a.m.