How To Seek The Blessing of God (Part 1)

Matthew 5:1-2

Who does God bless? It seems to me that some people have God’s blessing and others don’t. Who are those people that seem to experience Gods divine favour? I grew up in the North of Ireland and a popular expression used about people who were living a Christian life was that they were “Good Living” or “clean living”. Whenever anyone was seen to have a settled maybe even prosperous life, it was said it was because they were “Good living”. Which usually meant they didn’t spend their time partying, drinking alcohol taking drugs or evening smoking. It got to the point that if someone’s son got a good exam result a school that was always put down to “clean living”. Anything good happened in life was down to, “clean living. Me and my friend used to joke about it blaming everything bad on “bad living” and anything good on clean living, even the most ridiculous unrelated things on. Car starts first time in the morning it was because you didn’t go out last night, “Good living”. Was it all just a big joke or was there even any part of it that was true.

Way back in the times of Christ there were group of people called Pharisees and that thought they had this all sussed and that they too were “good living”. They thought that because they were descendants of Abraham and because they kept the law, as they interpreted it, that they were blessed by God. They believed they were the ones that were going to be blessed in this life and when the Messiah came. 

So, what’s the real truth here, who gets blessed? Maybe we should also ask what we can do to get blessed by God and when will we receive this blessing. All of these are questions that I think we should grapple with and try and find an answer too, because to be frank, I would like to be blessed by God, wouldn’t you. Wouldn’t you perhaps more than anything else, just like to feel the hand of God upon your life and feel his face shine upon you? If that's what we want, then how do we get it? How do you get God to bless you? 

There is no better passage of scripture in all of the Bible to answer that question then what we are going to be looking at together over the next week or so and that is the passage popularly called “The Sermon on the Mount”, especially the introduction to it. Beginning in, Chapter 5 of Matthew through to the end of chapter 7 we have for us the only place in the Bible where The Sermon on the Mount is recorded for us in its entirety. Portions of this teaching appear in other places, but this is the longest complete sermon Jesus preached, as recorded in the New Testament. Now if you were to scan over the entire opening section you will see after a one verse introduction it lists out all the various ways God blesses people and which type of people he blesses. It then closes the opening passage with the rather salutary warning, 

For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

(Matthew 5: 20)

So, this passage has a lot to say about the blessing of God, but it also has a lot to say about righteousness. In fact, righteousness is the main subject of the sermon on the mount, and as we go through this sermon, you will see that coming out over and over again. Yet at the same time, there are several different kinds of righteousness. So what Jesus is really doing in this sermon is he is describing a particular kind of righteousness, and it is critical for us to understand what type of righteousness he is talking about. We will talk more about that later.

Before we start in the body of the text what I’d like to do is discuss a couple of preliminary things about this sermon that are expressed in verses one and two, before we begin to look at the various blessings, that follow on. The “Beatitudes”, as they’re called that begin this opening passage. So let me just deal with a couple of preliminary things before we launch off into the blessings of God. For example, verse one says. 

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them. He said:

(Matthew 5: 1-2)

This is called the Sermon on the. Mount because Jesus goes up in the foothills above the Sea of Galilee and teaches the people. In the Old Testament the people saw Moses go up onto a mountain top and bring down the law, and now Jesus goes to a mount and speaks about what true and real righteousness is really all about.  Maybe there’s a hint here that this is, a compare and contrast situation to that which Moses did on the mount. What is also significant is that he says he went up to the mountain and sat down to speak.  So, he delivered this sitting down, which is not the way I have ever seen it portrayed in any TV of movie format. This is significant in the context of the day, because Rabbis taught their disciples, and they sometimes did that as they were walking, but if they were going to give a formal. significant address they would signal that by sitting down.  In the context of Jesus’ day, this is significant. It’s also significant that it says that when they were seated, he began to speak. That’s another indication that this is a more formal kind of presentation. He opened his mouth; it actually says in the original text. Some suggest this indicates that is a way of indicating that this is going to be a more solemn and formal presentation of what he wants to say.

Another preliminary issue has to do with who heard this message. Matthew, chapter five, verse one, tells us that Jesus, “seeing the crowds (multitudes), went up to the mountain and when he was seated his disciples came to him”. Interesting, that seems to indicate that there are at least two different types of people present. One is the crowd in general and alongside them are his actual disciples. Now, this is important because if you’re going to understand the sermon on the Mount, you got to know who the audience is he is speaking to. You’ve got to know who he's addressing. For one thing, the sermon is delivered to the disciples but at the same time there are other people present. So, we need to make a little distinction here. The crowd undoubtedly included believers and unbelievers.Surprisingly, this means that Jesus’ audience has almost the exact same makeup of any large church service congregation today, a group of committed followers and a large number of people that haven’t committed yet, but are interested enough to be there and listen Some of the people listening to him, we’re not what we would call today saved people. Matter of fact, if you look at the end of the Sermon on the Mount and it covers chapters 5-6 and 7, you’ll see that the last thing that it says in verse 28 of Chapter 7 is;

When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching.

So, there were definitely unbelievers present, people who were shocked at what he had to say, but at the same time, the bulk of the message is directed toward those who are believers, disciples if you will and as you know, the word disciple means learner. So, these were people who had trusted him, they knew he was the Messiah, and they were wanting to learn from him. A lot of what is said in this sermon is directed toward believers. For example, he teaches us in this passage how to pray again the point being is that the bulk of this sermon is delivered to believers, but there are also some unbelievers present. When we get to Chapter 7, we will see thatthat becomes significant. 

One other thing, and this is important is that he will begin by introducing each phrase with the term “blessed”. Verse four, blessed, verse five blessed all the way through to verse 10. These are what are called the “Beatitudes”. So, we have to pause for a second and ask the question, what does the word blessed mean? Well, it’s a little bit of a problem because the Greek word can mean happy, or it can mean blessed in the sense of being blessed in the manner of experiencing divine favour. So, the question is, which is it here? Should we come to this passage to find the secret of being happy or should we expect something more than that. One very well-known writer recently published a book and tried to make all these statements fit to a plan on how to live a happy life. Is that what’s going on here? Well I respectfully say, I think not. This is not talking about how to be happy. It’s talking about how to be blessed by God. And how do you know that? Well, look at the words Christ speaks. Each utterance makes a proposition about a type of blessed person and then explains to you why they are blessed. Throughout this whole passage, these beatitudes are explaining what the blessedness the person receives is. So, this is not just about you being happy, it’s much more than that. Now if you get blessed, I guess you might be happy but these are the actual spiritual blessings he’s going to give us which may result in a number of things for us only one of which might be being happy. 

We will get to these phrases in a little bit, but the point I want to make at this juncture is that blessed here is about being blessed by God, and that’s radically different from just being happy. As a matter of fact the word happy comes from the route word happenings, meaning events. So happiness is often just about happenstance or good fortune or lucky events coming your way.  In the scripture, blessings come from the creator, not chance, Blessing are from the Lord, not from luck. The western concept of happiness has to do with happenings, and the idea is if all of your happenings are in your favour, then you will be happy. Bt the other side of that coin is if they’re not and things don’t line up for you then you are miserable. I think that is the exact opposite of what the New Testament has in mind, blessing in the New Testament is not external, it's internal, its also not transient its eternal.. 

The word that’s translated blessed, is actually the word which he Greeks used to describe the Island of Cypress. They called it, The Blessed Isle, because it was so fertile that, according to them, it contained all you need to live a good life. It contained all the flowers and the fruit and had the ideal climate to live a  blessed life. From a biblical point of view, happiness is not based on externals, it’s based on internals. And in this case, God is blessing you and that starts with internal, while obviously it includes some external things. So blessed here is the correct translation, not happy as it appears in some modern translations.

So, this is how to be blessed by God. Alright, enough of the preliminaries. You ready? Want to be blessed? I’m going to give you various attributes and if you develop these attributes, the promise of scripture, in fact the promise of Jesus himself is that you will be blessed. As we go through them, I’ll try explain what they are and I’ll do my best to try and explain what the blessing you are going to get by developing them.