Summer on the Mount: The Beatitudes | Matthew 5:1-12 | Jarryd Cole

Pastor Jarryd starts off our new series, Summer on the Mount, going through Jesus' upside down kingdom revealed in the Beatitudes.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Ambassador Church Podcast, a church in the city for the city, on Milwaukee's east side. We pray this message meets you where you are, challenges your faith, and draws you closer to Jesus.

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So, like I said, for the next 12 weeks, this is where we're gonna be unpacking the Sermon on the Mount. And the idea for this series, here's this, okay? Like we're not we're not trying to give you anything novel or anything new, nothing flashy or special. Uh, and I don't think there's any way that we can do that. Like, this is Jesus we're talking about, uh, the greatest sermon ever written by the greatest preacher ever written. We're not gonna give you anything novel today. But as we jump into the sermon on the mount, here's the idea: there's a tension that's going on here because a lot of people read the sermon on the mount, and what they do is they think it's like, hey, these are the things I have to do, like a checklist to kind of be a good, solid Christian. We look at like a like a religious checklist. We read the Beatitudes, yep, poor in spirit, yep, I'm mourned, yep, whatever, I'm humble. All this kind of stuff, right? And like that's not the point that Jesus is trying to get at, I think. Like you take things like, hey, blessed are the poor in spirit. And what we tend to do is be like, okay, if I'm doing that, then I'm really in on the Christian faith. And I'm not really in if I don't do these kind of things. Like if I'm not like soaking and pouting and being an Eeeor throughout my life, right, right, then I'm not really doing the Christian faith. You gotta be sad and more and all this kind of stuff. I don't think that's what Jesus is trying to say when he's talking about these beatitudes, right? By the way, if if your primary expression of the Christian faith in your life is lacking joy, I would say you're not doing it right. Like our Christian faith is one of joy. And maybe you come from an expression of the faith where it's it's like, man, you just gotta be somber all the time and be soaking and pouting. Like, like that's that's not what it means to love Jesus. Jesus came to give life abundantly and life to the full. Like life should be joyful for the Christians. Christians should be the most joyful people on the planet, amen. Like this is just what's true. If you're faith is lacking joy, I would say you're following Jesus wrong. And so if you look at the Beatitudes like a checklist, you're actually gonna miss it because there's not a lot of joy. Okay, that comes from we're gonna see a word blessed in there, like blessed, that lends itself to this word joy. But if you read it, you're gonna be honest to say that doesn't seem like a lot of joy. And so, what Jesus is doing is he's basically presenting the Sermon on the Mount as a type of impossibility. There's nothing in these chapters coming up through chapters five and chapter seven where anybody in this room, including myself, should be able to say, Yep, I got it. Yep, check, got it. That's me, all the time, always. Like that's true of nobody in this room. And we got to get this into our soul first before we understand what's happening in this text. Because we're gonna hear Jesus talk about a lot of controversial things like murder and adultery and and worry. Okay, and he's gonna talk about murder, and he's gonna say things like, Hey, you don't murder, great, good for you. But do you harbor hate in your heart? Because that's the same thing. Oh, you don't commit adultery, like that's not what you've done, you don't do that all the time. Like, okay, but have you ever lusted after someone? You ever looked at someone? Like how you you know you shouldn't look at them? You've you've done the same thing, and don't worry. How many of us have worries in our lives? I'll be the honest one in the room. I worry, and Jesus is gonna say, Don't worry, don't be anxious, cast your desires on me. How many of y'all are doing that well right now in the room? Not me. This isn't a checklist. Jesus is talking about this sermon, and the sermon on the mount is literally based on an impossibility. It's not a checklist. Here's what it is when we read the Sermon on the Mount, we get into the Beatitudes, the thing that we should be welling up in our heart the most is wow, I need Jesus. It's not, yep, this is me. I got it all figured out. Checklist, check, check, check. Nope, it's I have need. And I need Jesus. This is what should well up in our heart. But why would Jesus do this? Why wouldn't he just give us the key? Are you like me and just would rather have a key? Jesus, what is the key then? If it's not these things you're laying out, then what is it? Listen, Jesus doesn't give us the key. Here's why I believe this it's because the goal isn't to force you into a perfect life. Here's the goal that Jesus has it's to show us what life in the kingdom of God looks like. And the kingdom of God, here this isn't primarily about doing. The kingdom of God isn't about doing things all the time. Yes, like you will do things because you believe in Jesus, but the kingdom of God is not primarily about that. But what is it about? It's it's about becoming. And this is the theme for the entire series. And I pop up here on the screen. The theme for this series, that the kingdom life doesn't press you into harder religion, it presses you into deeper dependence. It doesn't press you in the heart of religion, it's not keeping tabs on how often you read your Bible or how much you pray or how not worried you are. It's Jesus isn't keeping tabs on you. Like if you believe in Jesus, he's already done the work fully and complete for your salvation. He's not keeping tabs, but he does want you to walk into flourishing life. And he wants us to have a key understanding of what that looks like. And it doesn't begin with you treating your religion and your faith and your Bible like a checklist of things to do, but it begins with you saying, I have a need and I need to fall dependent on Jesus. This is what the entire message of the Sermon on the Mount is about. Spans over three chapters in our Bible, Matthew 5 through 7. It's gonna take us 12 weeks to get through it, but probably took Jesus 10 to 15 minutes to give this message. And it's pointing us to this reality, y'all. And I don't want us to forget this. If you write anything down for this morning, for all the note takers, is this we need a deep dependence on God. So come from the message. Here's what I want to do. I just want to get us into the text. I want to break down the Beatitudes for us for a little bit, and then I want to do a little bit of application for our lives at the end. Does that sound good for you in the room? Let's do it. Let's jump in. From the Bible, Matthew chapter 5, verse 1. Here's what it says. It says, When he, Jesus, saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain. And after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Okay, I'm gonna pause right here for just a minute because I want to observe a couple things right here before we jump into the meat of this text. Um, and these are easy to look over, I think. As you read this first verse, like you see a couple things that stick out specifically about Jesus that Matthew was going to want his audience to kind of hear and understand. Audience, uh, Matthew's audience is the the Jewish people in front of him. And the main thing that he wants them to know is this that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. That Jesus Christ is the promised one from the Old Testament, from all the law and prophets, all the people talking about these things, Isaiah specifically prophesying about this new God that's gonna come, the Messiah. Uh, he's saying, Jesus is this guy. And the Messiah was prophesied to be like the the new Moses, the one that comes after Moses, the ones that come after all these gods, all these prophetic words. And so, what Matthew is doing is setting this up to let his hearers understand, hey, this is true. And you can see it as he says, Hey, Jesus went up to the mountain. You want to know what what's something cool about that statement? That statement appears only a handful of times in our text, and all of them except for this one refers to Moses in the book of Exodus in Deuteronomy. Moses goes up to the mountain. Moses goes up to the mountain. And so when he even says that, the audience's ears would perk up and they would be thinking, Yo, there's only one I know who's like this. But Matthew's saying, Hey, a new and better of that person has come. A new one better of Moses has come. And I love this reality in the text because it says the crowds are here too. You know the difference between Jesus and Moses? When Moses went up to the mountain, only Moses could go. Only he could be in the presence of God. But look at this. It says, Jesus goes up to the mountain and the crowds were here with him. And I love this because this means that now the glory of God not only falls on certain people in the life of this world, right? But it falls on everyone. Everyone can get near to the nearness of God when they have faith in Jesus, when they are with Jesus. But the second thing I want to see is like, who are these crowds? Jesus goes up to the mountain, there's crowds here, we see them. I love this detail in the text too, because uh the crowds are made up of a mixed group of people. In Matthew chapter 4, just a chapter before this at the very end, uh, we see the list of people that are in this crowd. Like you see Jesus doing his ministry, and it's detailing and it's saying all the people that he's seeing, all the things that he's doing. And what you see are some sick people, people who are suffering from illnesses and disease and intense pains. Uh you see the demon-possessed, they're coming to Jesus. You see the handicapped, epileptics, people with like brain issues and paralytics, people with body issues, bodies not functioning correctly. And you see these diverse crowds of even people, ethnic groups. In Matthew chapter 4, it says people from Galilee were gathering towards Jesus. People from the Decapolis was gathering towards Jesus, Jerusalem and Judea, and even beyond the Jordan. And this is significant because what this is showing us is that Jesus and who he is and what he's doing is not just for a select group of people, but it's for all people. Galilee was a place that was like a place that had uh a diverse background. Jews and Gentiles lived in Galilee. The Decapolis was a primarily Gentile region, Jerusalem and Judea, primarily Jewish regions. And here Jesus is going up to the mountain, about to begin the greatest sermon ever given, and he has this audience in front of him, and there's not one type of person that's not here. I love this about the text. And you're probably wondering what is the thing that Jesus is gonna say now to this crowd of people who have come to see him? People who've experienced his ministry, people who've been healed by him, touched by him, people who've seen him be around people that they think that he probably shouldn't be around. Here he is about to give his keynote address. And at this point, we got to know Jesus could have said anything. He's got the crowd, he's got all the people that he wants here, and he could have just said all the things that scratched their ear. He could have given them like the cotton candy version or like the nut the nerd's gummy clusters, if that's more your type, okay? Like he could have given that to the people that he's now talking to, but he doesn't do that. Like he doesn't start making a case for uh Israelite nationalism, he doesn't start passing the bucket and be like, hey, now it's time to support Jesus' ministries. The thing he says isn't, hey, you guys are good and fine people, and I really like you. He could have done this to get his ministry started off on the foot that he wanted to get it off on. He says, Yeah, I'm proud of you. Look at verse 2. It says that Jesus begins to teach them, and here's what he starts to say. He says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. He says, Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the humble, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Why? For they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. And blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. And blessed are those who persecuted, who are persecuted because of righteousness, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. And he ends by saying, You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. And here's the kicker, y'all. Look at this. Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. There it is. Jesus has the most prominent crowd I probably have in front of him in this moment. And he doesn't do the thing to shake their pockets, he doesn't do the thing to inflate their ego, but he shows them what life is like in the kingdom of God. And really quick, I want to point out the elephant in the room because you would read this list, you and I included, and we would say, any one of us in our right minds, this word blessed, there's nothing blessed about the things in this list. Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the people that mourn and cry, blessed are the humble, the the weak people. Like, what are you talking about? If if you're anybody in your right mind, you would think, Jesus, what in the world? What are you saying? Like you hear about the poor in spirit, the brokenhearted, the people who are on the verge of tears. Like, if somebody came up to you right now, off the street, say you didn't have this context, and people told you, hey, you want to know the greatest news ever told, you know the greatest story, you want to be in with the greatest person to ever live, you're blessed when you're poor in spirit, when you're broken down to your deepest spirit. Blessed are you when you shed tears all the time. If someone came up and said, You'd be like, You're crazy, get away from me. This is what we would respond. And you want to know what the people in the first century responded the exact same way. People back then thought Jesus was more crazy than not. You guys get that? Like, we tend to have this kind of rose-colored view of the Bible, and we're just like, Yeah, it's Jesus and all these people, and blah, blah, blah, and everything's fine. Dude, these are real people in real time, listening to really hard things to understand and comprehend in their mind. They're thinking, Jesus, you're wild, bro. You're crazy. This is what they were thinking. And so if you're thinking that, hey, you're in good company, but I want to unpack the beatitudes first, right? To have us have a better understanding of this. There's eight of them here in this text, and we see them all through verses three through ten. See, verse 11 is is even sometimes lumped in here to make non-beatitudes, but more likely, uh, most scholars are in concert saying, hey, there's there's really only eight. Number 11 is just a continuation of verse 10. But we have to know, okay, if you're if you're if you're thinking, okay, this isn't a checklist, but I kind of want to treat like a checklist because it looks like if I want to be blessed, then these things have to be true of me. Listen, these aren't eight separate circumstantial blessings. It's not like do this and you get that, or do that and you get this. That's not how it works. We'll unpack that here in just a little bit, but a couple more things about the Beatitudes we have to know is that they all start the same. They all start with blessed. It's blessed are the or blessed are those, but they have different endings. All of them are different except for two, right? That there's two that's book-ended. Blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed are those who are persecuted. What does Jesus say? He says, For theirs is the kingdom of God. And I think that's actually our clue. That is our hint to know that these aren't eight separate circumstantial blessings. It's not like do this and get that, and they're all separate, but I think they're all one, united together. And it's trying to show us what life in the kingdom looks like. They're one thought communicating the outcome of what it starts to look like when we grow in dependence on God. So blessed. What about this word? What does the word blessed mean in this context? A lot of um scholars translate this as happy. Happy is the word that they kind of get to when they talk about blessed. But I think it even goes a little bit deeper than that, right? It's more akin to joy. Because if you look at it on the surface, and it's like, hey, blessed of this, happy are you when you experience these things? Happy is based on our happenings. You guys understand that? But joy is based on what it's not fluctuating on our circumstances, it doesn't really depend on that. Happy does, joy does. So I think Jesus is getting to something a little bit deeper than that. Once one scholar translates it as congratulations. Congratulations, those who are poor in spirit, congratulations, those who mourn. I like that translation. Because, hey, this is good for you. This is good. It's not a matter of, hey, are you checking these things off? But it helps us have this reminder that when any of us enter into these places and we find ourselves poor in spirit, we find ourselves mourning stuff in our lives, what we tend to want to do is think that's not a blessed place to be. And how can I quickly get out of this emotion? How can I quickly get out of my life? But what Jesus wants to remind you is that no, no, no, no, no. When you experience that, even James would say, all types of trial, right? That's how James says it. We went through that series a couple weeks back. When you experience all kinds of trials, consider it joy, my brothers and sisters. Congratulations, those of you who experience these things. And so, with that in mind, for the rest of the time, I want to unpack the Beatitudes for us and apply something really quickly at the end, and then I'll be out of your hair. Is that sound good? Here we go. Glad you're in agreement with me. First, Jesus says, Blessed are the poor in spirit. He says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. If you want to know what being poor in spirit looks like, it means you're broken in your heart. Okay. The the heart in the Bible is like the seat of your emotion and mind and will. All right. And what this means is that hey, deep down in that space, down to the innermost of you, what should be true about you is that you are poor in space. It says, Blessed are you when you are there. And the audience would have known exactly what he was talking about here. I want to give you a kind of picture from a story in the Gospel of Luke, the prodigal son. You guys heard the prodigal son before? There's a story that Jesus tells about this son who lives in this house, wealthy house. He has a brother, older brother, he has a dad. And his dad has all the things, okay, mad wealthy. And what the young son does is he goes to his dad and he says, Hey, dad, I want my part of the estate right now. Would you give me my share of the inheritance right now? You know what that would have been like to the dad in that context? That would have been like a son going up to his dad and saying, Hey, I wish you were dead right now, so I can have what's due to me. This is what happens in this text. You know what would have happened if that was me and my dad back in, I don't know, 1995. That would have been like they don't do that nowadays, all right? I I I get it. We live in a new day. But that would have been what's true of me. This is how you notice it's Jesus story, because what happens is the dad gives him what he asked for. It's a Jesus story. The dad gives it to him, and what he does is he goes off and he squanders all of the things that he has, all of his money, all of his resources. He squanders it on women and food and activities, all this kind of stuff, whatever he's gonna do. And you want to know what ultimately ends up happening. Like it's it's so crazy because we think that like um we've got to somehow muster up something in ourselves to get us to go back towards the good graces of God. The son didn't really make up his mind to go and do that on his own. He had to experience complete loss, he had to experience a famine, couldn't be fed. And the the narrative even says nobody was even there to help him. He got to a place like that. And the text says, hey, when he came to his senses, when he came to his senses, that's in a nutshell what it means to be poor in spirit. When you come to your senses, when it begins to make sense in your mind, affection, and will that the thing that you're running after, the thing that you're trying to hold on with a white knuckle grip, like none of it's gonna give you the thing that you think it's gonna give you anyway. It's gonna run you ragged, it's gonna leave you empty. This is what it means to be poor in spirit. That the greatest thing you're latching on to isn't the things of this life and what you want to run after, but the greatest thing you're latching on to is that you have a need in your life, and your need is that you need to be dependent on the person, the thing that can uphold you the most. And it's not you, it's not anything you can have in this life, it is Jesus. The story of the prodigal son tells us that to be poor in spirit means that the greatest thing that you need to be in the good graces of God is need. You have to recognize that you actually have that. And here's the thing for many of us, it's hard for us to get there. It's hard for us to get there to be poor in spirit. Why? Because we're rich in everything else. What are we not rich in? Money, possessions, ideas, vacations, goals, all the things. We're so rich in so many different things that we can't even bother understanding what it means to not be without, so that we can actually receive the thing that we do need in being poor in spirit. So we have to know that Jesus is saying, No, no, no, it is actually better. You are blessed. Congratulations when you are poor in spirit, when you finally recognize that I am the thing that you have been looking for. And guess what, y'all? The rest of these beatitudes hinge off of this. These aren't eight separate things, but it begins with this. The beatitudes begins with poor spirit, because I think it hinges off of that. And the second one, as we get into it, is that it says, Blessed are those who mourn. It says, Blessed are the mourners. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are those who are filled with tears. Blessed are those who lose their emotion to the point of that, like, hey, they're their tears are spilling out in front of them. There's a lot of men in this room who are a little emotionally constipated, okay? I'm one of them. I can count on one hand how many times I've cried in, I don't know, my life. I could, I, I guess, I didn't, maybe not when I was a baby, okay, but my adult life. But Jesus is saying, Blessed are you when you mourn. The thing that many of us would try to sidestep the most in our lives, the pain, the things that cause us the greatest depth of pain. When we sidestep that, he's like, You're missing out, you're missing out on something. You're missing out on the comfort that I can give you. He's saying, Hey, the people who follow after me, the people who depend on me, the people who live the kingdom life, you mourn the things in your life. You mourn things like sin, you mourn things like death, you mourn things like the imperfections of life. Sin should be mourned from us. Now, you know, like, I know the world isn't how it should be. So many things happen in life. So many that happen. You turn on the news, it's easy to find. And you know what? Christians should be people who mourn those things. We should be mourned the evil things that happen in the world, that the righteous suffer, that the wicked people prosper, and that God has not yet fully righted the wrongs, the situations that we see. We should actually mourn that. But not only the sin out there, we should also mourn the sin in here. You should mourn the sin that you have in your life. Like we should be people who have tears, not because we got found out, but we should have tears because we're busted. Like, not because we got busted in our sin, but because we are busted internally. We should mourn that reality. There's no one here, no one's good, no one, no, not one is righteous. And that should well up tears and emotion in us to mourn that fact, to cry out to God. We should mourn sin. We should mourn death. Like death is a pain point for a lot of people in this room, including me. If you want to know what God thinks about death, death should have never been ushered into the world. Death was not God's idea. Death was man's idea. In the garden in the fall, death came ushered into the world. And we should mourn this. And I know this probably with the best of you in the room right now. In the last three years, um, I've lost both my parents, my mom, and my dad. Three years ago, I lost my mom. Just five months ago, uh, lost my dad. I said I'm a joke, right? I'm a little emotionally constipated as a man. But God has used this season in my life to bring me to my knees more than I could bear. Three years losing my mom. I think about this church, and she was a prayer warrior. She loved Jesus. And there's nobody I know who prayed more for ambassador church, who would have loved nothing more than being right here in this room eight months ago when we launched this church back in October. She would have loved to be right here. She's gone now. My dad, we didn't have the best relationship growing up. Okay, I wasn't the best son to him. He wasn't the best dad to me. But in the later years of his life, he and I got to be able to reconcile a relationship to a place where he lived in Philadelphia, but I would make trips to go and see him. God did a miraculous work in that. And I love the place that God has brought me in my life, and even brought him in his life before he passed to a place where he was at peace with who he was and at peace with God. And now I have this kind of supernatural peace in me, even as I think about my mom and my dad as well. But it's okay to be people who mourn that. Maybe you need to hear that today. Even Jesus wept. You guys know that story? Jesus lost a good friend Lazarus. And you think about Jesus being this guy who can do anything he wants, he can speak, and the wind and the waves obey him. And here he is weeping with tears, probably crying harder than the hired mourners that were at the tomb. Here's Jesus weeping. And there's a lot of reasons why scholars say he weeps for his friend here. I think part of it is just because he simply lost a friend. He loved Lazarus, he loved his sisters, Mary and Martha. He's experiencing the effect of sin. Do something that he had never intended it to do, take someone's life. Jesus even mourns. But we can also mourn the imperfections of life, that life deals unexpected and disappointed hands. It deals us broken relationships, it deals us job loss, it deals us economic instability. So many different things happen. And Jesus wants you to know that if you're in a place like that, where you're mourning, you're right where you need to be. Congratulations. Blessed are you in this place. There's a lot to mourn in this life. And Jesus says it's okay to mourn. You should mourn because that's where you'll get the greatest comfort. And so thirdly, he says, Blessed are the humble. Blessed are the humble. In a lot of translations, it says, Blessed are the meek. Okay. And I'm a guy, and all the guys in here, like we read humble, we read words like meek, and we're just like, that sounds a little too close, like weak. Okay. That ain't me. I'm not a weak dude. And then listen, man, I don't want you to be weak, okay? This isn't what this is. When Jesus is saying meek here, when he's saying humble, what he means is more like a like a bridled horse. You understand that? Imagine a wild horse that gets broken and they have a bit in their mouth, and now they're kind of bridled, and now they're kind of at the mercy of a rider. You know what horseback riders tend to say? That a horse actually gains strength when it becomes broken like that. Like the horse isn't now just automatically weak now, but it's strength under control. This is what it means to be humble. This is what it means to be meek, not weak, but full of strength. But it's strength under control. In a word, it can be called like righteous restraint. This is what being humble means, what it being means to be to be meek. So to the parents in the room, I want to ask you like which one of these requires more strength? To let loose on your kids when they're disrespectful to you and they disobey, or to lovingly correct and show mercy to them when they do the same. Wives in the room, is it easier to respect your husbands when it's difficult? Or to shirk your marriage responsibility when it gets like that? Or husbands, is it easier to sacrificially love your wives when it's difficult, or to shirk your responsible responsibility in marriage when it comes to that teenagers in the room? Listen, I'm not picking on you. Okay, I used to be a teenager at one point too. But listen, is it easy or harder to obey your parents or act like you have it all figured out? Listen, it takes humility or meekness to kind of live this life that Jesus has called us to, and living that life, hear me, we don't understand. This isn't weakness, but it's meekness, it is humility, and it doesn't take away your strength. It actually takes great strength to do these things. Those are rhetorical questions, by the way. I know the answers to those, and so do you. It is harder, harder, harder always to do the former. And you know what hard things take? They take strength. And what Jesus is saying, when we operate in that way, when we are humble, when we are meek, he's saying, Hey, you are full of strength, bridled, not weak. And it is these people who choose the harder thing and strength. Jesus says, Hey, something's coming for you. You will inherit the earth. That's even a nod to a prophecy in the Old Testament. He's saying, Blessed are the humble. But fourthly, he says, Blessed are the spiritually hungry. He says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Listen, we hunger and thirst for a lot of different things in this life, don't we? What Jesus saying, when we hunger for righteousness, he's saying, um, um, we tend to think righteousness is kind of right activity, right? Doing the right things, reading my Bible, praying, all these different kind of things. Those are good and right things to do. But the word that Jesus is getting at here isn't necessarily right activity, but it's right standing. It's this right standing with God. It's this being justified, this made right with God. He's saying that, hey, blessed are you when the thing that you desire most is not to be filled with the things of this world, but to be filled with understanding, hey, you are right before a holy and just God who has the right to exercise, yes, his mercy, love, and compassion, but also his justice on you. He's saying, Blessed are you when you hunger for righteousness, right standing with the Almighty. And y'all, part of my burden as a pastor is to help you understand this reality. That the greatest thing I have for you in this life of this church isn't to grow this building. The greatest thing I have for the life of this church isn't to see a certain number of people baptized, although I hope God gives us a lot. Hundreds, thousands, maybe. I don't know, okay. But it's so that you know where you stand with Jesus. So that at the end of your life, you don't live your life thinking this is all that there is, but no, you enter into eternity with Jesus, life to the full, as it has always designed to be. This is my greatest desire that you hunger and thirst for righteousness more than anything, not just right activity, but right standing with God. Fifthly, Jesus says, Blessed are the merciful. This is blessed the merciful because they will be shown mercy. And this even further lets us know hey, these aren't, I've said this before, these aren't conditional blessings. These aren't eight separate conditional blessings. It's not like, hey, you do these things and then you get that, right? No, no, no. This this comes from a dependence on Jesus. Because how many of us would raise our hands right now and be like, hey, yeah, I'm I'm nailing it on being merciful? Like the greatest thing I desire in my life is to be merciful to the people around me. You easily turn the other cheek. You guys know what being merciful means? Merciful means that you show forgiveness and compassion to those in need of forgiveness and compassion from you. And I know as I say this, this is one of the hardest things for us to do in the Christian life. The one of the hardest things to do, okay. Top one and two, I think. Okay, one is to receive the grace of God. I think that's really hard to do. The second one is to forgive the people in your life who have wronged you. But Jesus says, Hey, this is what mercy is, and blessed are you. Congratulations when you show mercy. Forgiveness is showing mercy. And we'll talk about this more when we get to chapter six in the Lord's Prayer. Those of you who know this, we know the Lord's prayer, the the Lord's prayer, our Father who in heaven, your name be honored as holy, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and and do what? Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors. Mercy is forgiveness. And I love the connected promise to this, that you be merciful. It says that, hey, bless your blessed, those who are merciful, and they will be shown mercy. And here's what's true for the Christian in the room. I want you to hear this that not only will you be shown mercy, but you have already been shown mercy. Like if you're a Christian in the room, you are saved by the radical act of God's mercy. Ephesians chapter 2 lets us know this. It says, But God who was rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, he made us alive with Christ, even though we were dead in our trespasses. You are saved by grace. The grace that you receive and the thing that you hold on to, to claim your faith and salvation in Jesus, was all done because of a merciful God. Nothing you've done, but mercy. You are saved by mercy. And so Jesus, hey, blessed are you when you actually have to extend mercy. Mercy has been shown to you. Six, he says, Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessing the pure in heart, for they will see God. Okay, like merciful. This helps us understand these aren't circumstantial blessings because none of us will be able to say, Yep, nailing it in pure in heart. This is me. I'm completely purified, I'm completely refined. All of my desires, everything I have, yep. Oh God. None of us can say that. You're a person marked by transparency. People can see through you like a glass window. You have an uncompromising desire to please God in all the things that you do. Ambassador Church, how are you doing on that? How are you doing in being pure in heart? Again, this is how you know these aren't circumstantial blessings because you can't muster up purity of heart inside yourself. You can't grit your teeth and make this happen for you. You know how you get purity of heart, you only get it by the refining fire of giving your life to Jesus. Jesus purifies your heart. And here's good news: like, pure in heart is the state of the heart of a person who already believes in Jesus. That justification word I talked about, like this is already true of you. When God looks at you, he doesn't see you anymore, he sees his son, Jesus. And so that's really good news for you. Like there's good news for the believer. You're already pure in heart. But here's what's also true because you still live on this side of eternity, you're still being refined and transformed. What's most true about the Christian life is it's already not yet reality that yes, we are fully saved, fully alive right now, fully justified before God, but we're also being rightfully transformed in this life. And what's true about you is that God wants to refine your heart, to help you become pure in heart. And this happens as you depend on Jesus. Seventh, he says, Blessed are the peacemakers. Why? For they will be called sons of God. I love this term here, peacemakers. It has this connotation of actively pursuing peace. Another word we can put here is reconcilers. Those of you who know us, ambassador church, we get our name from this uh passage in 2 Corinthians 5, uh, verse 20. But that entire passage, if you ever read that, it talks about this reality right here. The apostle Paul talking to this church in Corinth. And I love what he says here. Here's what it says in verse 18 through 21. If you're quick with your fingers, you can get there, 2 Corinthians 5, 18 through 21. It's not going to pop up here on the screen. But here's what Paul says he says, Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. I love that. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting the trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us. Therefore, hear this: we are ambassadors for Christ. Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. And I love how it ends in verse 21. For he made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us. Why? So that we might become the righteousness of God. What Paul is saying that the heart of the believers that we are peacemakers, we are unifiers, we are reconcilers. And this is hard for us in the room because if we're honest, most of us in our flesh, we don't desire unity. We lean more towards division. We don't desire reconciliation, we lean more towards division, we avoid peace, not pursue it. We tend to want to slander and complain and gossip and do things that tear apart, not bring together. We run away from the tension instead of running towards the tension. And we live in a world in the day and age right now where honestly, you could find people who would say, I don't blame you. I don't blame you for that being the way that you are. But Jesus has something else to say. He says, When you stand in the gap, he says, Blessed are you. He says, Happy are you, joyful are you? Congratulations to you who are peacemakers, who withstand being trampled on. Like a lot of us, we tend to not want to be that. We tend to say things like, Man, I need a backbone and I need to do this and that, and I don't want to be walked over and all this kind of stuff. You you want to know who is walked over? The savior that you say you follow. The ultimate peacemaker, the ultimate reconciler. And he says, Hey, blessed are you when you experience this. Blessed are you when you depend on me. And this happens to be the place that you find yourself. Why? Because peacemakers are inheritors. Peacemakers are inheritors of the kingdom of God. And lastly, he says, Blessed are the persecuted. This one's gonna hit the hardest. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. He says, You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. But be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven, for that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. We don't have a compartment in our American minds for this reality. We just don't. For what it means to be persecuted, to live a life that's not catered towards us. I spent five years in France playing basketball. Um the phrase is commonly true in America, the opposite over in France. Okay, this isn't like a France and Kingdom of God analogy, okay. It's not like that, but but here's the reality: in America, we tend to say the customer is always right. In France, I learned quickly, the customer is always wrong. And that's actually more true of what it means to be in Christ. Like you're not right, you're actually wrong. We don't have a compartment in our minds for the persecution of our faith. We think that persecution here in America is the month we just stepped in right now, 30 days of LGBTQ Pride Month. We think this is persecution. Oh, my my thoughts, my ideas, that they're being they're being trampled on. Persecution. We think persecution is we can't bring our Bibles into public schools. We think that's persecution. I'm not that old, but I've been alive enough to know that this is the narrative of the Christian faith, and that we tend to find all the boogeymans in our the most comfortable place it is to be a Christian and be like, persecution. Are you kidding me? We don't know persecution in America. We don't know it here. These things, yes. I would be fine with the Bibles in public schools. I am fine, comfortable with calling things outside of God's perfect design for sexuality and holiness. I'm fine calling that sin. And we will, we'll talk about that a little bit later in a couple weeks coming up. But this isn't persecution, y'all. We have to know this, and yet we are the loudest and most offended by these things like this, and even lesser things than these. And even if it was persecution, here's the thing: you you you read the text with me, Jesus says, rejoice here, for you have a greater reward in heaven waiting for you. But not only that, like the Bible has a pattern around persecution. We should rejoice and be grateful for the persecution. We don't like we don't have to like welcome it and pursue it, but we can rejoice and be grateful. Why? Because the kingdom of God has advanced more on persecution than it has on comfort. The kingdom of God moves when he is being opposed. This is what happens. And we want to sit here in our comfortable boxes and think like, man, nope, armchair Christianity. Sit in our lazy boys, comfortable chairs and think like, nope, I want my Christianity to look like this, check this, check that, da da da da. My society is like this, my neighborhood, my schools, my kids, my family, whatever. Just like this. Armchair Christianity. Here's the paradox of the Christian faith, y'all. In some of the places where Christianity is persecuted the most, it is actually growing the most. And in some of the places where Christianity is persecuted the least, including here in America, it's growing the least. And here's why I believe that this is true, because those of us who are in less persecuted places, we don't see the kingdom of God clearly. Our values represent more us than they represent God. And the only way to get a clear picture of the kingdom of God, I truly believe this down to my heart, is that our values have to represent Him more than they represent us. We have to get closer to Jesus. Like the Beatitudes want us to know that dependence on God is how we get this blessed life that Jesus is talking about. And when we get closer to God, what ends up happening is our values get shifted over. And when we hear things like blessed are those who are poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed those who are humble and meek, blessed are those who are persecuted, we no longer shudder and step back and think about what we can do to figure this out. But we know we we press in with heart, knowing that God is faithful and He's gonna get accomplished when He's gonna get accomplished, and honestly, because history tells a story, he would get accomplished better than if we were to sit back in our own comfort. This is what the Beatitudes are trying to tell us. Here's the key takeaway for this morning. It says that the kingdom of God becomes real in your life when Jesus flips your values upside down. I want to be a church that lives for the kingdom of God and have Jesus' values, but we desire more than our own values. And remember, y'all, this list of eight isn't a checklist. You don't have to go pursuing these things, they will actually come and find you. The Beatitudes are a picture of who you naturally become or who you start becoming when the grace of God digs its roots in and becomes the most evident thing in your life. And here's the most powerful part like you're not left alone by this. Your Savior, Jesus Christ, modeled this for you in the life that he lived, in the death that he died, in the resurrection that he rose. Jesus is literally the beatitudes represented. He was the one who was truly poor in spirit. He was the one who was truly humble, gave up everything in heaven to come here to be a part of us. He was the one who really mourned, mourned the Sinful state of this world. He was the one that's merciful, extending grace and grace and grace to you and me. He's the one who truly hungered for righteousness, wants nothing more than to do the will of his father. He's the one that's truly pure in heart. There's no division within his soul. He is the peacemaker, bridging the gap between man and man, and man and God, all in his own person. And he is the one who was truly persecuted, ultimately persecuted by dying a bloody death, even the bloody death on the cross, one he did not deserve, an innocent man slayed for you. Jesus models this. In the Beatitudes, what Jesus is saying by his life, death, and resurrection is that the most blessed life is the life that he has modeled for us. And the fight that we have to fight on this side of the cross in this day and age isn't to grit our teeth and make sure that the Beatitudes are true of us, but it is simply to believe that this is true and to lean into Jesus, depending on him, trusting that when we experience these things, that it is a true blessing. Joy, congratulations to you for experiencing these things. So, what's the application for a text like this this morning? Here's the application I want to give us really quickly. It's simply this be prepared when the kingdom of this world wages war on you, a citizen of the kingdom of God. Be prepared. When the kingdom of this world wages war on you, a citizen of the kingdom of God. Because the war against your faith, we tend to want to think these things are all the big scary things out there. But we want to know, and I want to let you know, that the war against your faith is not always the restless and sleepless nights that you have, the things that keep you up in your sleep. It's not the crazy dreams that you're having, it's not the bills that are piling up on your kitchen counter, it's not the dead-end relationship that you're continually coming into. It's not always the threat of your so highly valued, treasured, cherished cultural values. That is not the war against your faith. Oftentimes the war against your faith looks like trying to convince you that God's kingdom is right side up when it's really upside down. This is the war against your faith. It looks like the enemy trying to convince you that their greatness isn't found in serving, that true wealth isn't found in giving, that the way up isn't down, it is, and that true freedom isn't found in obeying Jesus. This is the war against your faith. And these are the things that we're gonna hear for the next 11 weeks that because of Jesus, the Christian begins to view things not like how we want to view them. We die to our values and come aligned to come alive to Jesus' values, and we start to view hate differently and how we treat our neighbors, we start to view sex differently, relationships, including marriage and divorce, we view those differently, money, our possessions, judging others, what we do with the worry and anxiety that we experience, how we experience all of that, we're gonna learn what it looks like to die to our values and come alive to Jesus' values so that we can be citizens of the kingdom of heaven, understanding that when we experience the beatitudes, poor in spirit, things that make us mourn, humility, persecution, all the way down, that you're that you're the main thing you hunger for is righteousness, right standing with God. When that becomes the key ache of your heart, and you know that there's nothing else that can fulfill it, and you know it's only God. That's where I want us to be as we look at the Sermon on the Mount this summer. We're gonna be confronted and challenged, many of us in different ways than others, and I hope you're here for it all. And at the end of the series, not to get ahead of myself, uh, the last message is gonna be about building your life on the firm foundation. Spoiler alert, the book is 2,000 years old, so whatever. The firm foundation is Jesus Christ. And I want ambassador church to be a people full of people who are building our lives on the firm foundation that is worth it. And I know sometimes it doesn't feel like it, and I know sometimes when you're experiencing the things like the Beatitudes in this room, and I know you are because I am and I have to. It's easy to want to shirk and scoop back and pray and beg God for it not to be. But no, we'll be people who lean in and say, Thank you, God. I am blessed. Joy in whatever circumstance, and receive the congratulations from your heavenly father that this might be what's true of you, and it all begins with your submission to Jesus. You love him and follow him, and you become more like him by the power of his Holy Spirit. Would you pray with me? Father, we love you. We're grateful for this morning. We're honored here at Ambassador Church to go through your word and hear what you have to say. We're thankful for Jesus. The greatest sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount and what it means for our lives. And so we beg you, we plead with you, would you help us align our values with yours? Will we continue to be people who die to ourselves and not want to hold our lives with a white knuckle grip, but understand that, hey, whatever come, whatever may, God, whatever you have for us, will we be people who receive it? The things that feel like blessings and the things that don't feel like blessings, will we see them all the same? And will we even receive the things that don't feel like blessings all the more because we know that in the end game, we're the ones that win. The ones who are poor in spirit, the ones who mourn, the ones that are humble, the ones that are merciful, the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the ones who are peacemakers, the ones who are persecuted. Blessed are you. Congratulations. We receive that. Father, we love you. We thank you. We pray this in your son Jesus' name. Amen and amen.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Thanks for listening to the Ambassador Church Podcast. To learn more, visit ambassadormke.org or follow us on Instagram at Ambassador MKE. And if you're in the Milwaukee area, we'd love to see you this Sunday at 9 or 11 a.m. at 2308 East Bellevue Place. Grace and peace.