THE BLESSED LIFE (PART 1)

Introduction

-{Matthew 5}

-We often talk about people who claim to be Christian who have itching ears to hear from preachers what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. And, unfortunately, there are plenty of preachers out there who gladly tickle those itching ears with self-help ideology and pop psychology to try to ease a person’s discontented conscience rather than convict them of sin and point them to Jesus.

-Probably the biggest topic that such people want to hear is about having a happy life. They will try to hide their selfish intent by using seemingly biblical words. They won’t say they want a happy life, they’ll say that they want a blessed life. But we know under the facade there is the selfish motivation of wanting a life of ease, comfort, and riches.

-And the false teachers, who themselves have wrong motivations, will cast their bait to reel the people in, feeding the frenzy of this selfish ambition. You see, as long as you feed people’s selfish desires, the more they come and give you their money. So, these false teachers feed away.

-And so they will portray the blessed life in terms of worldly things like putting a focus on material gain. They claim that God wants His followers to be financially wealthy, and they claim that material possessions are a sign of a blessed life. So, if you don’t have all the stuff that you want, then you must not be blessed.

-They put a lot of emphasis on self-reliance and positive thinking. They teach that people can achieve the blessed life through positive affirmation, visualization of prosperity, or the work of personal willpower. They want you to think it, then speak it, and then somehow you can claim it. For them, true blessedness comes from getting all you can from this world and from this life.

-But the Bible gives us a completely different picture, because the Bible testifies that our happiness, our blessedness, cannot be found in this world. The Bible gives us a picture where true blessedness is found in being a part of God’s Kingdom and living according to its values. Last week I introduced the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous sermon that was ever preached. And I emphasized that the Sermon is for people who are a part of the Kingdom of heaven through Jesus Christ, teaching them what it means to live as someone who is a part of that Kingdom. And for those who are not a part of the Kingdom, it is an invitation to believe in Him and follow Him.

-And Jesus begins the sermon by telling people the values that lead to true blessedness--the real happiness and prosperity that God offers, not the snake oil peddled by the false teachers. True blessedness is to live in God’s favor and experience well-being from Him. What the Jews would call Shalom. But the values that entail such blessedness go against everything that the world offers and everything that our flesh desires. The values of true blessedness run counter to human logic and pretty much everything that advertising or social media tells you will make you happy. If you truly want to be blessed, then stop listening to internet influencers or the Hollywood elite. Instead, listen to Jesus; but don’t just listen, act and obey what He says.

-So, today we begin a several week study on what is commonly referred to as the Beatitudes. I know we like to get cutesy and say that they are the attitudes that you should be (which is true to a point). But the word Beatitudes comes from the Latin word meaning blessed. And here Jesus tells His disciples how to live in the privilege of divine favor as members of God’s Kingdom. And here is our lesson: A truly blessed life will live in light of God’s Kingdom values. I want to lead you today to change your mind about what you think a blessed/happy life entails, and instead find your blessedness/happiness according to God’s Kingdom values.

-Today will be a little different, as we look at each verse one at a time. And the first lesson that Jesus tells us about the blessed life is that we are to:

1) Admit our spiritual need (v. 3)

-We like to be told how good we are, how strong we are, how worthy we are, how special we are. We want to be rich in self-esteem and self-worth and any other “self” phrase you want to put out there. We think our happiness is wrapped up in the image that we have for ourselves. And instead, Jesus says this:

Matthew 5:3 LSB

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

-In a world that likes to feed our ego, making us think that we are good enough and strong enough all on our own to make things happen in this world, Jesus says NO, YOU AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH, YOU AREN’T STRONG ENOUGH. In a world where we want to prove more than anything else that we can do it all on our own, Jesus says YOU CAN’T DO IT. And you know what, that’s OK. Because He can.

-Someone who is poor is someone who is in need--they lack something and are in need of something from outside themselves, because if they had it in themselves they wouldn’t be poor. Jesus says blessed are the poor in spirit--that is, the people who recognize their spiritual need, their spiritual wantonness, their spiritual lack. They realize that there is something missing for which they cannot provide for themselves.

-So, the poor in spirit are those who realize their spiritual bankruptcy, and also realize there’s nothing they can do about it. This is the exact opposite of the prevailing idea of self-righteousness and self-importance that permeated the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. The majority of the Pharisees and Sadducees based their worldly identity and their spiritual security on how closely they thought that they followed God’s laws, especially as they codified it in their own manmade laws.

-And because they followed their own laws, they thought that God owed it to them to bring them to Paradise, and they thought that they were so much more holy and important than everybody else. They looked down their noses because no one could do it like they could do it, and they did it all themselves. So, their spiritual life (probably along with all their life) was about self-reliance.

-And as the Bible says, there’s nothing new under the sun, because this is the prevailing spirit of our age. The world cries out to you: YOU CAN DO IT YOURSELF. Or, as American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote over 100 years ago in a poem called Self-Reliance, he said:

Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. Discontent is the want of self-reliance. It is infirmity of will.

-He says the infirmity of the world is the lack of self-reliance. And that is where the charge of Christianity being a crutch comes from. You hold to your Christian faith because you can’t make it on your own. You need a crutch. And Jesus says--that’s exactly right. You do need a crutch, and that crutch is Me because you cannot rely on yourself or anything else. You fall short. You miss the mark. And that is poverty of spirit--I can’t rely on myself, I need Jesus.

-The Puritan Thomas Watson said:

The Beatitudes: An Exposition of Matthew 5:1–12 The Meaning of ‘Poor in Spirit’

‘Poor in spirit, then signifies those who are brought to the sense of their sins, and seeing no goodness in themselves, despair in themselves and sue wholly to the mercy of God in Christ.

-Watson would then give three reasons why such poverty of spirit is so important:

Unless you are poor in spirit you are not capable of receiving grace.

Unless you are poor in spirit Christ is never precious to you.

Unless you are poor in spirit you cannot go to heaven.

-Without being poor in spirit you won’t heed Christ’s call to repent, believe in Him, and be part of the Kingdom. You won’t think you need to repent. If you are sitting there and thinking you have nothing to repent of, then you need to come to the altar and repent because you’re thinking way too highly of yourself and your spirituality. You cannot go to heaven and be part of the Kingdom when you are self-righteous and self-reliant. And if you are a Christian, you cannot be blessed and at the same time be self-righteous and self-reliant. You need to recognize your spiritual poverty and look to Jesus for everything.

-Thus, those who are poor in spirit, Jesus says that theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. They know their need of a Savior, they run to the Savior, and through the Savior become part of God’s Kingdom. This proper attitude should be that of the third verse of the hymn Rock of Ages. Now, I know as Baptists we might not be familiar with that verse because we are adverse to singing the third verse. But this is what it says:

Nothing in my hands I bring,

Simply to Thy cross I cling;

Naked, come to Thee for dress,

Helpless, look to Thee for grace:

Foul, I to the fountain fly,

Wash me, Savior, or I die.

-You are spiritually poor. That does not mean that you don’t try to follow Christ and the Word and God’s moral precepts, but you realize that you are powerless to follow them perfectly. But because you want to, but you can’t, this leads to the second Beatitude, the second moral precept of Kingdom blessedness, and it is that you:

2) Agonize over sin’s effects (v. 4)

-What sin has done to you and the world causes you grief. Jesus put it this way in the second Beatitude, the second value of Kingdom blessedness:

Matthew 5:4 LSB

4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

-This world is full of various trials and tribulations, and it leads to so much mourning and sorrow. All of us in some way have mourned over something. The Bible talks about the various types of sorrow and mourning we will experience.

-There the mourning over the loss of a loved one:

Genesis 23:2 LSB

2 Sarah died in Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.

-There is the mourning over a longing in your spirit (like Paul for the growth of the Ephesian church):

Acts 20:31 LSB

31 “Therefore be watchful, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.

-There is the mourning over discouragement in life like Timothy encountered:

2 Timothy 1:3–4 LSB

3... I unceasingly remember you in my prayers night and day, 4 longing to see you, having remembered your tears...

-There is the mourning that comes with personal suffering, as Job experienced and said:

Job 16:20 LSB

20 “My friends are my scoffers; My eye weeps to God.

-And there’s probably hundreds of other examples we could find, but there is the shedding of tears because there is so much sorrow and mourning that this wicked world brings. And so, you notice then what it is that brings mourning: it is the effects of sin that caused this world to be fallen and cursed, and we suffer through it.

-Sin brings mourning. Just think of the heavy heart you have when you hear tragic stories on the news or off the internet or from social media. You hear of the tragedy of a plane crashing into a helicopter in DC and all the lives lost from such a terrible accident. And then you think of the families who were left behind to grieve. And your heart mourns for them. You read of those killed in tornadoes across the south, and your heart is sorrowful. Or you read of a family killed in a murder-suicide, and your spirit is in agony.

-It was sin that brought death and tragedy and trials into this world. Sin that cursed the earth so that it rages in natural disasters. Sin that corrupted the human heart so that they commit atrocities. We mourn because sin has messed everything up.

-But where our deepest mourning ought to find itself is in the mourning over our own sin--how it corrupts us and hurts those around us. As much as sin in general causes us to mourn, the sin that is within ourselves ought to grieve us more than anything else. As one author stated it:

It is one thing to be spiritually poor and acknowledge it; it is another to grieve and to mourn over it.

-Jesus grieved over sin and the result of sin. He wept over the city of Israel and its hard heart that kept it in the bondage of sin. He wept for the death of His friend, the natural consequence of sin. If sin so grieves our perfect, sinless Savior, how much should it grieve us since we are the one’s grieving the heart of the Son of God.

-And yet, Jesus says that those who mourn over sin and its effects will be comforted. We can be comforted to know that the deadly effects of sin will not be forever. Yes, God offers some comfort now, but we are comforted knowing that there will be a day, when Christ returns, that the old heaven and earth will burn up in fire, and a new heaven and earth will be established. In this new heaven and earth, there will be no mourning over loss because life will be eternal. There will be no mourning over longing, because we will have perfect harmony with God at all times. There will be no grief over discouragement because we will know no lack. We will not sorrow over suffering because every tear will be wiped away.

-But that is not the only comfort. We will be comforted even in the midst of our own sin because Jesus Christ is the cure for sin. Through Jesus Christ we are told:

1 John 1:7 LSB

... the blood of Jesus [God’s] Son cleanses us from all sin.

-The mourning of the blessed life leads us to seek Christ. As Paul said:

2 Corinthians 7:10 LSB

10 For godly sorrow produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world brings about death.

-God, through Jesus Christ forgives us of our sin and erases the stain of sin, and gives us power to get out from under sin. And as a few verses from another famous hymn reminds us:

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,

Lose all their guilty stains...

Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood

Shall never lose its power,

Till all the ransomed ones of God

Be saved, to sin no more...

-Blessed are those who mourn, because they will be comforted. And there is one final value for the blessed life that we will look at today, and that is to:

3) Abide in quiet humility (v. 5)

-In a world of self-promotion and arrogance, Jesus calls us to something completely different. He says:

Matthew 5:5 LSB

5 Blessed are the lowly, for they shall inherit the earth.

-Other translations will say: Blessed are the meek/gentle/humble. The word means to not be overly impressed by your sense of your own self-importance. It’s having a humble and gentle attitude, especially toward other people, because you have a proper assessment of yourself. You are able to put up with people because you realize how difficult it is for people to put up with you.

-Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones described it this way, saying:

Meekness is essentially a true view of oneself, expressing itself in attitude and conduct with respect to others.… The man who is truly meek is the one who is truly amazed that God and man can think of him as well as they do and treat him as well as they do.

-Meekness or lowliness in Jesus’ day, I guess just as it is in our day, was looked upon as weakness and was not a virtue that was celebrated. The Greeks sought might and wisdom. The Jews sought happiness in materialistic ways and was looking for a militaristic kingdom to beat the Romans. There was no room for weakness.

-However, they may have misunderstood what meekness truly was. We have to understand that Jesus described Himself as meek and lowly:

Matthew 11:29 LSB

29 “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

-Jesus wasn’t weak by any stretch of the imagination. So, the idea of lowliness and meekness has been described as power under control. Even the philosopher Aristotle understood what true lowliness and humility was when he described the meek man as one:

who is angry on the right occasion and with the right people and a the right moment and for the right length of time.

-As Pastor Stephen Davey said:

Meekness is not weakness. The truth is, the biblical idea for meekness is power under control; it is strength contained. Meekness is having the ability to strike back but resisting the urge to get even. It is the power of Jesus Christ cleansing the temple with a whip to defend the honor of His father. It is the silence of Christ before Pilate, unwilling to defend Himself. If is not being defiant about yourself. It is not standing up for yourself. It is not defending yourself. One author wrote, “Meekness is being done {or finished] with me.” Meekness is dying to me. It is replacing the spirit of Me-attitudes with the principle of the Beatitudes.

-Davies then gives a bit of a test of your humility and lowliness. How do you react when confronted with the truth--defensive or do you receive with meekness the implanted Word of God? How do you react when your faith is challenged--again, defensive or angry or argumentative, or do you give a defense of the faith with gentleness and respect? How do you react when others are caught in sin--do you gloat or become prideful, or do you try to restore such a one with the spirit of meekness? So, let me ask you, how is your level of humility and meekness and gentleness today?

-Jesus says that the lowly will inherit the earth--or maybe better translated land. It is actually an allusion to psalm 37 where David says:

Psalm 37:10–11 LSB

10 Yet a little while and the wicked man will be no more; You will look carefully at his place, and he will not be there. 11 But the lowly will inherit the land And will delight themselves in abundant peace.

-David compares the pride and arrogance of the wicked against the humility of the godly, where (as one author points out) the lowly are those who trust in the Lord, who delight themselves in the Lord, who commit their way to the Lord, who rest in the Lord. They are the ones who will inherit the new heaven and the new earth. Not the prideful. Not the boastful. Not the arrogant who think they have it all under control because they have power and might. Nope, it is the lowly who inherit the earth.

Conclusion

-When expectations are subverted, it comes as a complete shock. That happens so much in fiction. I think of the old murder mystery by Agatha Christie called THE MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS as detective Hercule Poirot tries to find the killer from his pool of suspects, only to come to the conclusion that is confirmed (and here’s a spoiler alert) that all of the suspects had a part in the murder. A complete shock to the reader.

-There is a common theme in the Bible of God subverting expectations. The world thinks one way, but God twists everything on its head. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the lowly. This completely subverts all expectations of the world, of the unbeliever, of the selfish.

-I pray that God would shut down all ministries that try to tell people that true blessing, true Shalom, comes from getting all you can from the world. No--blessing comes from a poor spirit, mourning over sins, and gentleness of heart.

-If you are looking for a church home that will teach the truth of the Word and not tickle ears, come join our church family.

-Christian, have you searched for earthly blessing or worldly blessing? I pray you come to the altar and get your values straight.

-If you are not a part of the Kingdom, you’ve never believed in Jesus, then you will never truly be blessed. Find forgiveness and peace in Jesus.