Michael delivers a sermon on Matthew 5:1-12, defining the Beatitudes as blessings for ordinary citizens of Christ's kingdom rather than future dispensational promises. He argues that Jesus' arrival inaugurated this new realm, which, though spiritual like sunlight in a valley, will ultimately transform the physical world. Rejecting worldly values, Michael explains that virtues like meekness and purity stem from the Holy Spirit, not human effort. Addressing societal decay, he cites Jeremiah 17:9 to assert that impure hearts, not economic inequality, are the root of conflict. True peacemakers reconcile personal relationships through forgiveness, while those persecuted for righteousness' sake rejoice in eternal rewards as they uphold moral standards against a hostile world. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Statements of Blessing00:02:08
It's a pleasure to hear the word preached from Michael Belch.
So, if you would, welcome Michael with me this morning.
Good morning.
It's a great privilege and honor to open the word with you and for you this morning.
We're going to be continuing in our series in the book of Matthew.
So our scripture text today will be Matthew chapter 5, verses 1 through 12.
As you get that out, will you stand together and we'll read it together?
And as you're preparing that, as you're looking that up in your Bibles, let me just say one word by way of introduction here because I know I'll forget to say it later.
This passage in Matthew chapter 5 is commonly referred to as The Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes.
And so I just want to be clear on the front end.
The Beatitudes means statements of blessing.
Statements of blessing.
And it gets the title because all of the Beatitudes, all of these statements start with that word blessed.
That word blessed in the original language means happy, right?
Happy.
And so as we study this passage today, really when I refer to the Beatitudes, when commentators throughout history were talking about the blessed statements, the statements of why Christians. are blessed.
All right, once again, our passage this morning is going to be Matthew chapter 5, verses 1 through 12.
After I read it, please, if you would be willing to, I will say, this is the word of the Lord.
Please reply, thanks be to God.
Matthew 5, 1 through 12.
Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.
And he opened his mouth, and he taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed are the poor in heart, the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Establishing Kingdom Fundamentals00:10:18
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.
For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
This is the word of the Lord.
All right, you may be seated.
In a story that is probably familiar to some of you, sometime in the early 1900s, it is rumored that Edward Shackleton, who was assembling the first group of explorers to go and explore the South Pole, placed this advertisement in a London newspaper.
It said men wanted for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return, doubtful, honor and recognition in event of success.
This advertisement is one of the most famous in history.
It's frequently quoted as one of the best examples of copywriting and one of the best recruitment pitches.
It's been quoted many, many times, and the reality is when you are looking for a group of people to perform a particular task, the words that you use to explain what they're doing and who they should be are very important.
In many ways, Jesus was the king of these recruitment little pitches, these sales pitches, as it were.
He told the scribe, Foxes have holes, birds have their nests, but the Son of God has nowhere to lay his head.
Want to come along?
He told people who were thinking of being his disciples, If you want to be my disciple, you must deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.
Again, what does it mean to follow Christ?
And in a sense, the Beatitudes, which we're looking at today, is the greatest recruitment speech ever made.
In order to understand this text, it's absolutely critical.
That we understand it in the context of the book of Matthew.
As Pastor Joel said last week, Jesus' ministry, we saw this in Matthew 4, began when John the Baptist was arrested.
The reason for this is that John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way for Christ.
Now he, in a sense, has been moved off the chessboard, and Christ takes the stage and begins his ministry.
And it's absolutely critical that we see in the book of Matthew for the argument here that what Jesus does immediately, look at chapter 4, verse 17.
It says, from that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Then he called his first disciples and began to minister to the people in Galilee.
And again, verse 23 repeats this idea again.
It tells us what Jesus was doing.
It says, He went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming what?
The gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and affliction among the people.
He was proclaiming the gospel, not just the gospel, the gospel of the kingdom in the book of Matthew.
He was telling them that the kingdom of heaven is right on the verge.
It's at hand.
It's about to be here.
It's very near and almost established.
And in order to add validity to his claim, he performed miracles.
Now, it's interesting that these miracles were not just displays of power, he could have caused volcanoes to erupt in the middle of the fields.
Or tornadoes to come.
But no, he did not do that.
He demonstrated his power by healing them.
And in this way, the miracles did not only verify and prove his message and his authority, but they also showed that he loved them.
You see, even in the miracles, he was initiating the kingdom, he was rolling back the curse, he was healing their diseases and tending to the afflicted.
This is because even then, he was bringing the kingdom.
He was giving a foretaste of what it would be like to live in the final sense in the perfect, consummated, pure kingdom of Christ when he would finally wipe away every tear and heal every infirmity.
And so, to understand the book of Matthew, we need to realize that from this point forward, everything that Christ does and everything that Matthew records is to illustrate what is the kingdom of heaven.
As he preaches, great crowds come to him.
They come for the miracles.
He's healing, he's ministering to them, and they gather together.
But he did not come as a circus performer, he did not come as a social justice warrior.
And so, when the crowds gathered, he went up onto a mountain.
This is verse 1 of chapter 5.
He went up on the mountain and he sat down, and his disciples came to him, and he's opened his mouth and taught them.
He came to teach them.
We need to remember this.
We need to remember that we need to be taught by Christ.
We need to be taught what it is to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, to be a follower of Christ.
And we need to remember that what we are offering also is teaching to the world.
We're not offering more compelling narratives, although the story of the Bible is the greatest story.
We're not merely offering grassroots political organization, although we must do that.
We're offering the teachings of Christ.
We've been commanded in the Great Commission go disciple the nations, teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded.
So Jesus stopped doing the miracles.
He goes up on the mountain, he sits down, and he begins to preach.
The next three chapters, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, are the text of this sermon.
We call it the Sermon on the Mount.
It's a bit confusing in Matthew 5 because if you read it a certain way, it could sound like he went up on the mountain and then his disciples, and we're used to just saying just the 12, or in this case it would be just the four, came to him and he preached.
And so we might be tempted to think that he left the crowds to do this teaching.
But no, if you look at the end of the sermon in Matthew 7, it says, when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, not as the scribes.
And so we see here the crowds came up on the mountain with him.
And heard.
This sermon was for them, not just for a select few.
This is a very important thing to notice, and we don't have time to unpack all of this today, but there is an idea that's less popular now, but has had popularity in modern evangelicalism, particularly in very dispensational camps.
That the Sermon on the Mount, the proper application, the proper audience for it, because it's talking about the kingdom of God, is not for modern day Christians.
It wasn't for the people who heard it then.
These theologians argue that the Sermon on the Mount properly belongs to those who will live in the millennial reign of Christ, because after all, that's when the kingdom is there.
So it's important to notice that it was the crowds that Jesus was speaking to.
The sermon was for them, for the people that were going to follow him, for the people that were going to join as citizens of the kingdom.
You see, the main thing that we need to see this morning is that the Sermon on the Mount and these Beatitudes especially, Describe life for the ordinary citizen of Christ's kingdom.
That is for you and for me and for every Christian throughout history.
This is really the point that I hope we pick up on today.
So, how do we arrive at that conclusion?
What's the connection?
Well, remember, I just said Matthew 4 17 says that Jesus began to preach, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
And then a few verses later in 4 23, Matthew says he began to preach the gospel of the kingdom.
It's no coincidence that we arrive at chapter.
Verse 3, which is only a few verses later.
And the first beatitude, the promise of it is, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And the second to last, but really the concluding beatitude in verse 9 is again, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew and Jesus are trying to point out that there is a way that citizens of the kingdom live, and we begin to live that way when we establish the fundamentals of the beatitudes.
You see, A follower of Jesus is not just to enter into a life of personal, individual obedience.
We are.
We are to obey Christ in all areas.
But it is to enter into his kingdom.
It is to be a citizen of the kingdom of Christ, a subject and a servant of the Lord Jesus.
And then it is to devote our lives to extending that kingdom in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our towns, in our nations.
The Beatitudes gives us the foundation for how true citizens of Christ's kingdom live, what they believe, what they love, what they do.
And so it's worth taking a few minutes, even though the Beatitudes is a massive passage and we could do weeks upon weeks, it is worth taking a few minutes to do a slight detour here to talk about the kingdom of Christ Jesus that he is bringing about.
What does this mean?
Well, the first thing to say is that it is really quite pointless. to try and parse out all the terms, kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God, gospel of the kingdom.
These are all referring to three different things, and the kingdom of heaven is one thing, and the gospel, no, it's the same thing.
It's Christ's kingdom that is being established here on the earth.
The second thing to notice, even from Jesus' own words, is that this kingdom that Jesus is announcing is, in a sense, a new thing.
The True King Arrives00:05:52
He says at that time, it is at hand, which means technically at that point, it was not even fully established.
It was imminent.
It was coming.
It was going to be there soon.
In the same way as when a woman goes into labor with her child, we could say the baby is at hand.
Yes, she was pregnant before that, but now it's imminent.
It's going to be any moment now.
This presents us with a bit of a paradox to say that the kingdom was new, at hand, had never been there before.
Because all over the Old Testament, and you'll find these in your notes, We see verses like Psalm 47, 2, which says, A psalm of the sons of Korah, Clap your hands, all peoples, shout to God with loud songs of joy, for the Lord the Most High is to be feared, a great king over all the earth.
The Old Testament says he is the king.
Psalm 95, 3, For the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods.
Psalm 47, 7, For God is king of all the earth.
What do we mean that the kingdom of God is new?
The kingdom of heaven is new.
God is the king, clearly, all throughout the Old Testament.
And yet, also, all over the Old Testament, we see promises of a coming king and a coming kingdom.
Zechariah 9 9 says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion.
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem.
Behold, your king is coming to you.
This is a prophecy.
Psalm 110, verse 1, which Hebrews 1 picks up on as well.
The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand.
Until I make your enemies a footstool.
Again, a prophecy of a coming king.
So, how can it be that God is the king and yet there's a new kingdom that's being established?
The answer is that while God has indeed always been the sovereign lord of all, the ruler of all creation and of all demonic forces and of all time and space, there is a sense in which Jesus, as the God man, had not yet been crowned as the perfect king of the world.
That had not happened yet.
When we think about the incarnation, something important to realize is that Christ represents humanity through the line of Adam and therefore has a rightful claim to the throne.
The earth and the world was given to Adam, to humans, to be God's representatives, to take dominion over it, to rule it.
And Adam abdicated that responsibility.
And since Adam, there has been no true rightful human king of the earth.
But Christ is.
But on the other hand, Christ also is the God-man.
He represents God as the creator, the sustainer, the owner of all things that have ever been created or will be.
God is the proper sovereign of all.
And so when Jesus is saying that the kingdom is at hand, it is because he knows that he, the true representative of humanity and of God himself, is now there.
A kingdom, after all, is a place where a king rules.
And Jesus, the true king, had finally come.
All that needed to happen was that he needed to receive the title and the authority to rule from the Father.
Pastor Joel talked about this in the Temptations a few weeks ago.
Jesus was not content to receive that title from the devil, he knew he would be receiving it shortly from the Father himself.
And this is exactly what would happen.
A few short years later, he would indeed obey the Father and go to the cross and die.
And in doing so, he would crush the head of the serpent.
It's absolutely critical that we remember how this book, Matthew, ends after he resurrected and before going back to his Father, he said to his disciples in a verse that we all know All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me.
Go disciple the nations.
All authority has now been given to me in a way that it wasn't before.
Philippians 2 also points out that because Jesus obeyed the Father to the point of death, it says God has highly exalted him and given him what?
A name that is above every other name.
Christ now, for us, has received the title, the name, and the authority as the king.
And because a kingdom is where a king rules, the kingdom has been established.
And we are citizens of it.
Now, many Christians will object here by going to John 18, verse 36.
You remember this passage.
This is the passage where Jesus is brought before Pilate as he's being tried and eventually executed.
And Pilate asks him, Are you the king of the Jews?
And Jesus answers, My kingdom is not of this world.
If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting that I might not be delivered over to the Jews.
Many Christians look at this verse and they say, See, Jesus' kingdom is not of this world.
It's merely spiritual, or for some dispensationalists, it's actually only in the future.
We could do a whole series on just this question.
But just for today, consider one parallel text to help point out how absurd that statement is.
Light From Somewhere Else00:02:14
John chapter 1, I'll read verses 4 and then verses 9 through 10 straight together.
It says this In him, in Christ, was life, and that life was the light of men.
Okay, so Christ is the light.
The true light, this is verse 9 now, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.
And he was in the world.
It was coming into the world, and then suddenly Christ, he was in the world.
The world was made through him, and yet the world did not know him.
So there's a metaphor here.
Jesus is the light that is coming into the world, and then was in the world.
This would be, I don't know if any of you have ever lived in a place with long, cold, dark winters, but it can feel like basically four months of just darkness and cold and ice and snow.
It can be pretty miserable.
So I think of this verse in John like the first truly warm, brilliant sunrise after a long winter of cold and dark and ice.
When the dawn breaks, the light begins to come in.
Maybe there's a town in a valley.
The light begins to break in to fill the town slowly and then increasingly as the sun goes up.
Now, obviously, we would say the light did not originate on the earth.
It came from outside, from somewhere else.
The light is from somewhere else.
But it would be preposterous to say that because the light came from outside the planet, it was not in the planet now or did not have any effect on that town.
The sunlight illuminated the houses so that people could see and go about their business.
Furthermore, the light produced warmth finally after winter that melted the ice and the snow.
Maybe someone's car was buried out in their front yard in snow and you can see the car because the The snow is melting.
The flowers and the trees and the grass, they begin to grow under the warmth and the influence of the sunlight.
All because the light, which was not of the world, it came from the sun, was now in the world.
Receiving the Kingdom00:15:21
So when we say that because Jesus' kingdom is not of this world, it will not affect this world or even take over this world, it paints a very poor and small picture of the majesty and power of Christ's kingdom.
In fact, it is precisely because it is not of this world, but because it comes from the spiritual realm of the Father Himself, that it will utterly take over and control and dominate this world.
This world has no power against the spiritual world that the Father lives in and inhabits.
So, this is why Jesus says that the citizens of His kingdom ought to not look like the world.
Rather, He's giving a pitch.
You want to be a citizen of the kingdom?
This is how you look.
The Beatitudes.
That brings us back to where we started, which is that immediately upon saying that Jesus is preaching the gospel of the kingdom, that the kingdom of God is at hand, Matthew records the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes.
And he promises that the kingdom belongs to the people who demonstrate the characteristics of these eight or nine Beatitudes.
So we're going to look at the Beatitudes.
What does it mean to be a citizen of Christ's kingdom?
What does it mean to live the way he commands and to love the way that he commands?
Before we do, this will be helpful for today and also as you go study these on your own later on.
There are a few general principles that we need to know about the Beatitudes.
The first is that we cannot take them in isolation.
We can't take them in isolation from the rest of the text, which is what we've talked about.
And also, they're not really meant to be read in isolation one after the other.
It's good to focus on one.
I need to grow in being merciful, yes.
But also, they're a package, kind of the way the spiritual gifts are to always characterize themselves in the lives of all believers.
All of these beatitudes are to be present in our lives.
It's not that one person in Christ's kingdom is merciful, and I'm not that guy, so I don't have to be merciful.
I'm pure in heart.
No.
All of these are to be present in all of our lives.
The second thing to notice is that these are not natural abilities.
It's not that if my personality or my general way of being is kind of quiet and reserved, I am this spiritual virtue of meek.
Or that if I am timid naturally and lack courage, I am now demonstrating poor in spirit.
All of these virtues, or graces is a better word, in this passage, are only produced in the hearts of Christians when they come face to face with God.
And really, this is because Christ is the king.
And when we see the king and when we submit to the king, we put aside all prerogatives, all claims to authority, all claims to knowing our own good and right, all claims to our own strength.
We put those aside and we must.
And then the Holy Spirit begins to give us this kind of heart that honors above all things Christ and his kingdom.
Summarizing these two points, Martin Lloyd-Jones, who wrote an entire book on the Sermon on the Mount, Said this helpfully, the Beatitudes are a complete whole, and you cannot divide them.
So that whereas one of them may be more manifest perhaps in one person than in another, all of them are there.
The relative proportions may vary, but they are all present, and they are all meant to be present at the same time.
None of these descriptions refers to what we may call a natural tendency.
Each of them is wholly a disposition which is produced by grace alone and the operation of the Holy Spirit upon us.
The third thing to notice about the Beatitudes, the third principle to keep in mind, is that all of them follow a formula.
And if we're not careful, we end up reversing the formula and developing a works based gospel, a works based salvation.
For instance, the first Beatitude says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Many social justice advocates, many Roman Catholic theologians over the time had reversed the order.
And they have said this if you are poor in spirit, Then, because of that, God will grant you the kingdom of heaven.
If you are pure in heart, then as a response to that, God will make you a son of God.
Or you will see God.
But that's not it at all.
The Beatitudes are a list of Holy Spirit created activities and behaviors that run counter to what the world loves.
It's not just that theologically this is backwards, it is, but it's also impossible because these cannot be produced in the heart of an unbeliever.
Only the Holy Spirit can give these true expressions of the Beatitudes.
So the formula is this Jesus lists a virtue.
He says, You're blessed if, and then he lists a virtue that runs completely opposite to our flesh.
So know this as we go into these, some of these will sting because they run completely opposite to your flesh.
The natural man does not love these things, they run opposite the world.
He then says that the person who has that virtue is blessed.
Which means happy, because these virtues can only be produced by the Holy Spirit in the heart of someone who has believed in Christ.
And that because it's a Holy Spirit given gift, there is a great reward that God graciously gives to his children.
It's not that the particular virtue produces the reward, all the rewards in this passage are for all of God's children.
It's not that some of us are going to get to heaven and you'll say, well, you're a son of God, but you don't get the earth.
Yours is the kingdom of heaven, but I'm not going to comfort you.
You didn't hunger and thirst for righteousness.
You're not going to be satisfied.
No, all of the rewards are for God's children.
But Matthew and Jesus connect the virtue to the reward in a way that helps us understand why the virtue is so important.
And so, with that in mind, let us now begin.
We'll spend the rest of the time going through these Beatitudes.
And some of them will do a little slower, and some of them will move quite quickly through.
So, first of all, blessed are the poor in spirit.
Remember, these are all things that are produced through faith.
This is, after all, the gospel of the kingdom, not the grassroots movement of the kingdom.
It's still the gospel.
It's by grace through faith.
They're produced through faith when one comes face to face with the living God, when we see the true King Jesus Christ.
We will either reject or God will soften our hearts and we will have these results.
The poor in spirit are not those who are timid or shy.
Or who go to great lengths to always put themselves down with this false humility of, oh, I'm just nothing, I'm not important.
This is a false humility.
It's also not the materially poor, no matter what the Catholic theologians have said over the years.
The person who is poor in spirit does not have the Eeyore attitude, woe is me.
In fact, that sort of perspective, that false humility, often is very impressive to the world, right?
It can get you points in the eyes of the world.
Rather, the poor in spirit is the one who has the idea of Isaiah 57 15, which says this For thus says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy.
This is what God Himself says I dwell in the high and holy place, and then I also dwell, and also with Him who gets to dwell with God, Him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit.
Like Isaiah, when we are poor in spirit, When we come face to face with God, we are poor in spirit when we come face to face with God, and we realize that compared to the God of the universe, we have nothing to offer.
We have no power and no might in comparison to this God, this King.
Not only that, but we are wretched and sinful and vile.
And thus, the poor in spirit are those who realize when they meet God, when they come face to face with God, that they in themselves have nothing.
They can offer nothing, they can do nothing on their own.
It's interesting.
Though Jesus was not sinful, he demonstrated this in a way.
John 14:10.
Jesus says to the disciples, Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does this work.
Even Jesus knew that the Father was the one doing the work through him.
Helpfully, here again, Martin Lloyd Jones says, That to be poor in spirit means a complete absence of pride, a complete absence of self assurance, and of self reliance.
It means a consciousness that we are nothing in the presence of God.
It is nothing then that we can produce, it is nothing that we can do in ourselves.
It is just this tremendous awareness of our utter nothingness as we come face to face with God.
Are you utterly convinced that your own reason, your own efforts, your own abilities will do nothing on your own?
To advance God's kingdom, to parent your children well, or to honor God.
If we haven't started from there, then we're going to get off on the wrong foot from the beginning.
And yet, surely some of you will say, well, Michael, didn't you say at the beginning that this is a job description for people who are going to go out and expand the kingdom of God?
Like, aren't we supposed to actually go do things?
Yes.
But notice that this list, the Beatitudes, is a list of the kind of people who Christ will use to expand his kingdom.
Not the kind of people who on their own will go out and do this.
This is what the Apostle Paul knew, who was very active.
We couldn't say he just sat around and waited.
No, he went out.
And yet in 2 Corinthians 12 19, Jesus told him, My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.
The first and the deepest impulse of the Christian is to empty himself when he comes face to face with God, because we are utterly convinced.
That we can offer nothing to God that he doesn't already have.
It is good to be active for the kingdom of God.
It is good to train and teach our children.
It is good to memorize scripture and to work on our personal obedience.
It is good to preach in the public square and to advocate for good laws and justice in society.
But these are fruits, they are secondary.
The citizen of the kingdom of God starts from a point that on my own, I am nothing.
How do we achieve this mindset?
Because if we don't have it, We don't have the kingdom.
It's not by beating ourselves up.
It's not by reveling in our sin.
It's by looking at Christ.
The clearer Christ is and the more convinced we are of his power, the more we realize, I just need less of me.
Because the less of me there is, the more Christ will fill me and use me.
So when we see the king, this empties us.
Notice there's a promise there.
The poor in spirit receive the kingdom.
You see, the temptation is that we will earn the kingdom or even bring about the kingdom through our own wisdom.
Jesus is saying, no, the kingdom is coming.
It's at hand.
There's no way to stop it.
It's growing now.
Not through your efforts, but through your emptiness.
And Christ will fill you.
Remember at the beginning we talked about how Beatitudes means blessed.
This is not hashtag blessed when an athlete signs a new contract and gets a new Ferrari.
That's not what we're talking about here.
To be blessed is to be truly happy.
That is what the word means.
To be joyful and filled with the best that God has to offer to humanity.
Brothers and sisters, God gives gifts to all of us.
He causes the rain to fall and the righteous and the unjust.
But his best gifts, he only gives to the citizens of his kingdom, to his children.
We will receive the kingdom of heaven.
And so to be blessed as citizens of Christ's kingdom should cause us to be the most joyful people in the world, even as we empty ourselves and deny ourselves.
The next blessing, then, or the next beatitude: blessed are those who mourn.
If you are poor in spirit, you have come to realize that you have nothing to offer God.
And if you are the one who mourns, you will be comforted.
Again, this does not mean natural mourning.
It is good and appropriate to mourn and to weep for certain things, calamity, the death of a loved one.
But this is a natural affection.
This is a natural thing.
It's not a Holy Spirit produced type of mourning.
So, what is this kind of mourning, this weeping, this crying, this sadness that Jesus is talking about?
Well, in Psalm 119, 136, the writer, I think David, says, My eyes shed streams of tears because your law is not obeyed.
Again, those in the kingdom of Christ have come face to face with a holy, righteous king.
As God, the Lord Jesus is holy, holy, holy, and when he reveals his holiness to us, it immediately exposes his.
How sinful we are.
This is like the process of kids who are sleeping in the living room, maybe.
They build a fort in the living room, and dad turns out the light, go to bed now.
They start to have a pillow fight.
They're throwing pillows around, and it knocks over a lamp.
And then one of them finds that there was a bowl of popcorn left on the coffee table, begins to throw the popcorn at his siblings.
Another one finds a half empty bag of chips from the snacks that they had, starts throwing the chips.
Lamps have fallen, pillows all over the place, food is all over the living room.
Dad comes in.
Turns on the light.
Immediately, what was dark and hard to see becomes clear, and the living room is in chaos.
See, to see God, to come face to face with God, is also at the same time to come face to face with your own sin.
Mourning for Sin00:05:19
And so we weep for sin, we mourn for sin.
And there's a sense where this happens before salvation and even after salvation.
Before salvation, there's three Things that we weep for.
We weep because we realize that we are lost.
We are hopeless.
We are damned.
In the comparison to the light of the holiness of God, we are utterly and totally lost, and we weep.
But a better reason to weep is because we realize that actually we start to see that there's a standard.
God has a standard, and we have violated it.
So now it's just not fear for our own doom, but also a sense of, I dishonor the king.
This is why it's only Holy Spirit produced.
And then, third, once we have realized this, we weep because we realize that we are actually utterly incapable of honoring God in any spiritual sense.
Because we're poor in spirit, we now know that we can offer nothing to God to appease his anger and his wrath.
And yet, the promise is that those who mourn over their sin are actually the ones who are blessed.
Why?
Because they shall be comforted.
These are not those who see their sin and then push it aside.
It is those who mourn over their sin.
This is because we are dealing with the gospel of grace.
Only those who see God and react with mourning and despair at their sin will be saved.
And so we repent, and God, how does He comfort us?
He comforts us by clothing us with Christ's righteousness.
He comforts us by removing our afflictions from us.
But even now, as Christians, we continue to mourn when we see how our flesh loves sin.
Always, this should cause us, like, the apostle Paul to cry out, oh wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death?
But notice Paul doesn't stay there.
He does mourn, but immediately, Romans 8, 1 is the next verse, therefore there is now no condemnation for those in Christ.
And the promise and the beatitude must be our next thought when we mourn for our sin, we will be comforted.
We must remember, Christ will comfort me.
He will comfort me.
He will not leave me in my sin.
He will finish the work that he began.
He will forgive me.
1 John 1, 9.
It's easy to plateau, right, as Christians.
Maybe when you were saved, you didn't grow up in a Christian family and you were saved out of some very obviously destructive things.
And God removes those and sanctifies those.
And as we go through our life, it's easy to plateau and think, yeah, I do sin.
Of course, I'll acknowledge that.
But they're not that big of a deal.
And there's a sense where that's true, right?
You're not out murdering people.
That's a good thing.
Your sins are more private, anger, impatience, things like this.
And yet we must resist the idea that because they're smaller, more private sins that we shouldn't mourn over them.
We must resist that impulse.
It doesn't mean that every time you sin you have to have a three-hour grief session in your closet.
It's not what I'm saying.
That's destructive in its own way.
But it does mean that when you sin and when the Holy Spirit prompts you, you have that twinge of, Lord, I'm really sorry.
Like, I really, I really am sad that I did that.
I really am sad that I treated him that way or her that way or that I did that.
If it becomes easy to blow off our sin, if there's no twinge of mourning, that actually is a sign that your spiritual condition needs some help.
If you can blow it off easily and just move on and not have a sense of mourning, even if it's short and small, then you need to come back to Christ and see his holiness.
And I'm sure all of us know the news about Steve Lawson.
Pastor up here in Texas who has been removed from his ministry because of various immoralities.
I don't know all the details there, but I guarantee you at one point there was a time where he stopped mourning over his sin.
Yeah, it's not that big of a deal.
Next day, doesn't even register, and pretty soon he does it and doesn't even prick his conscience.
That's how it goes, brothers and sisters.
So we must labor to keep our conscience tender.
So that we grieve even our private sins.
But at the same time, we must labor to keep our faith strong so that when we are grieved for our sin, we continue to believe that Christ comforts those with forgiveness who confess.
Connor mentioned this earlier, so I'm not going to mention it too much.
But there's a sense, too, where we mourn public sin in our land.
Right?
And I just want to say this is good.
We should weep for the sin in our land.
We should mourn.
For the sin in our land, and this even can lead to indignation.
So, those who are truly happy, those who are true subjects of the king, are those who recognize that they have nothing of their own to offer and who grieve over their sin.
Meekness and Justice00:15:05
This leads to the third beatitude.
This one is very humbling, it's very difficult.
We live in a time of entitlement and victimhood where we have all been convinced that we are owed certain things, that we deserve certain things.
And so we reject this almost out of hand in the age that we live.
Now, when we say, blessed are the meek, there is a sense, I'm sure all of you have heard the phrase, meekness is power under control.
And this has been an attempt to recapture the doctrine of a strong and lordly Christ, because for many decades he was painted as this weak, effeminate, unthreatening type of savior.
And so we are trying to recapture the doctrine that he is not weak.
Or effeminate, but that he is lordly, strong, and holy.
And so we have often said, and it's not wrong, but it's just not complete, that to be meek is to have power under control.
But the question is, what kind of power?
See, meekness is the ability to control your instinct to get what you think you deserve.
In other words, meekness is about controlling your impulse to take vengeance.
Okay?
It is, you think that you should be able to reach out and grab and claim and take aggressively what you think you are owed.
Meekness resists that.
This follows the example of Christ, who we know, 1 Peter 2 says, when he was reviled, he did not revile in turn.
When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.
You see, when we understand God's power and his holiness, we can be meek because it's not saying I don't matter or rights don't matter or righteousness doesn't matter, but rather I commit myself to God who will take care of it.
What then is meekness?
It's not laziness, it's not passivity, it's not being a doormat, just going along to get along.
No, that's not what it is.
Lloyd Jones says meekness is essentially a true view of oneself, expressing itself in attitude and conduct with respect to others.
It is therefore two things it is my attitude towards myself, and it is an expression of that in my relationship to others.
We are to leave everything of ourselves, of our rights, our cause, our whole future in the hands of God, and especially so if we feel that we are suffering unjustly.
John Gill also agrees.
He says, we are not easily provoked to anger.
The meek patiently bear and put up with injuries and affronts.
They carry themselves courteously and affably to all.
Here, meekness is to be considered not as a moral virtue, but as a Christian grace, a fruit of the Spirit of God, which was eminently in Christ and is very ornamental to believers.
Now, of course, we have to be careful here.
We do fight for justice.
We do fight for proper order in our families.
Fathers, you don't just say, well, I don't actually deserve that my children would obey me.
So when they disobey, eh, I'm not going to consider my own rights.
Go ahead, children.
Continue to disobey.
We have to be careful.
Let's not be silly here.
We fight for justice in our society.
We fight for proper ordering in our families.
We're trying to spread God's law.
But here's the point.
We don't spread it in a way that is motivated by our own rage or our own vengeance or our own grievance.
And so, fathers, maybe your children don't listen to you and this enrages you in the moment.
You do need to deal with that disobedience, but not out of a motive of, I should be obeyed.
You put it aside, you wait, and you come back when you're meek.
Because when you're meek, you're not enforcing your own rights, you're enforcing what God has given to your family as a proper structure and the proper order.
You're entrusting your own, yep, that was offensive to me.
I'm going to give that to God, and I'm going to wait until what I'm enforcing in my family is proper ordering.
If you're fired for standing up for biblical sexuality, yes, that should be dealt with justly.
Maybe a lawsuit is in order, but it doesn't come out of a sense of, I am owed more than that.
I'm better than that, right?
No.
It comes out of a desire to see justice and righteousness enforced.
We're not pushing ourselves when we do that.
We're pushing Christ's order and his justice.
And when that's our goal, it's very good to insist on righteousness.
We need to be honest because sometimes our goal is just I want to be vindicated.
I want to be right.
The meek person does not act out of that motivation, but out of a motivation to see Christ be shown as right.
This is because his greatest desire is found in the next Beatitude.
A Christian's greatest desire is not for himself to be great or himself to be right, but to be righteous.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
The Christian, the citizen of Christ's kingdom, understands that he is broken and sinful.
And so he hungers and thirsts for righteousness.
When we see God, we realize, I am not righteous, but there's a promise.
He will be satisfied.
He will be justified.
Initially, before someone is a Christian, he hungers and thirsts for righteousness, and God applies the righteousness of Christ to him.
He receives that satisfaction.
I want to be holy.
Boom.
The gift of God is that he is made holy.
But also, the process of sanctification is evident here.
We have been forgiven.
We have been made righteous.
But also, we long to continue to grow in our obedience.
We long to be more righteous in our actions, in our thoughts, in our desires.
And even as we long for this, the promise still applies.
You, as you desire, you long to grow in Christ, you will be satisfied here and in the future.
Philippians says that he who began the good work in you will carry it out, will bring it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
And obviously, when we see Christ, we will be like him.
For we will see him as he is.
And also, we long that this land, this earth, would be righteous.
I skipped over the promise of the Beatitude just preceding this one.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Saved it for here.
There's a sense that because we're part of the royal family, we have even now inherited the earth.
It belongs to the citizens of Christ's kingdom.
And yet, in God's providence, He's waiting for the final redemption of the earth.
And so the earth still rebels.
And it's good for us to look at the world and say, we want righteousness in the world.
We long for this.
We long to apply God's law to our land.
After all, this is what the Great Commission tells us to do.
We must teach our nation to obey all the commands of Christ.
But again, this is not personal preference.
This is not, I like guns.
I want to have guns.
But this is not just because I want to have guns.
We apply righteousness meekly because we long for God's standards and God's honor and God's glory to become evident more and more in our nation.
And as we do this, we need to remember the next beatitude Blessed are the merciful.
Those who have been made citizens of the kingdom are those who are merciful.
There's a true sense where we look at our society and our world now.
And people are giving themselves over to sin and reaping, as Romans 1 says, the due consequences for that sin in themselves.
There's a true sense where they are absolutely destroying themselves, and there does need to be a side of us where the message is that's what happens when you sin.
Let that serve as a warning to everyone else.
Also, we need to remember spheres.
The government is not a minister of mercy, right?
So even a man, if he's a judge, is not called to exercise mercy in that moment.
He's called to execute justice.
But citizens of Christ's kingdom here are called to be merciful.
Because, why?
Because they themselves have been shown abundant mercy by Christ.
And let us not forget that.
Here, Lloyd Jones again helpfully says, Grace is especially associated with men in their sins.
Mercy is especially associated with men in their misery.
So we preach the gospel, yes, but brothers and sisters, the merciful also have compassion on the consequences of people who have given themselves over to sin.
And yes, I know we do not cast our pearls to swine, but sometimes as we're exercising mercy, it can take a little while.
To realize if we're dealing with a pig who's going to trample on God's grace or with a sheep whose heart is being softened by our mercy.
As we extend Christ's kingdom throughout all the land, we must remember we are merciful.
Quickly now, the pure in heart.
This one we've already talked about a little bit, but it reminds us where the source of our trouble is.
Many in our society and our time think that what's wrong with the world is lack of equality.
Income or lack of access to education or lack of access to health color or skin color, and Christ says, No, the problem is that you don't have pure hearts.
Jeremiah 17 9 says, The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.
And who can understand it?
The heart is the center of one's being, one's entire being, affections, actions, will, motivation.
And apart from Christ, we are not pure in heart, there is none righteous, no one is pure in heart, which means.
As Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
From our heart, we produce all sorts of quarrels and conflicts and violence.
So even though we long for righteousness in our land and we want good and proper laws that honor Christ, we need to remember, and I'm thankful this is not a rebuke or an exhortation.
We know this already in this church.
But we bring the gospel along with it because the real problem is the hearts are not pure.
Hearts are not pure.
Our heart was not pure.
Christ has made it pure.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
They shall be called sons of God.
This second to last one wants us to remember well, the second to last is the peacemakers.
They are blessed because they shall be called sons of God.
This one is particularly challenging, I think.
It's true that there's a spiritual sense where Christians are peacemakers because they're bringing the gospel to the world.
They're seeking to make peace between God and man.
But I was surprised, that's been kind of how I've always heard this applied in my life as I grew up in the church.
But I was surprised to read commentators who said that actually, probably, this more has to do with those who bring peace into personal relationships.
John Gill, Martin Lloyd Jones, and others agree that what is primarily in mind here is that the citizens of Christ's kingdom.
Work to bring peace to their relationships.
And this is necessary because we often think that a peaceful person is passive.
He's an appeaser.
I will do whatever it takes to get along.
But really, the peacemakers apply the righteousness that they long for to interpersonal situations.
They work to bring God's good principles to bear where it matters, close to home, with the people that they know.
It's one thing, and this is good, I'm not criticizing, it's one thing to fight for laws in Washington, D.C., it's another thing to fight for peace in my family.
So, the citizens of the kingdom of God are peacemakers.
And this starts first of all, and this is why it's hard.
We must be meek.
We must consider ourselves as nothing by confessing our sins and asking for forgiveness.
The peacemaker, first of all, initiates and says, I was wrong.
I caused this conflict.
Secondly, the peacemaker, when someone apologizes to us, puts aside rights of retribution and says, I do forgive you.
I do forgive you.
So it becomes obvious that the peacemaker is poor in spirit because he does not seek his own glory.
It becomes obvious that he longs for righteousness because he is willing to apply himself.
The righteousness to the people around him.
It's interesting that the blessing for this beatitude is they will be called sons of God.
How do you know someone is someone's son?
Well, Pastor Joel says this all the time.
He looks like him.
How do we know that we are sons of God?
How will the world know if we are sons of God?
If we're peacemakers.
That's astonishing to me that this is the one that Christ says the sons of God will be known because they are peacemakers.
Robert Barnes, who was a pastor in England many, many, many years ago, centuries ago, said this Those who strive to prevent contention, strife, and war, who use their influence to reconcile opposing parties and to prevent lawsuits and hostilities in families and neighborhoods, are peacemakers.
Every man may do something of this.
Every man can make peace.
And listen here.
And no man is more like God than he who does it.
Astonishing.
The most Christ like thing that we can do, Robert Barnes says.
How you know you're a son of God is if you are a peacemaker.
Hebrews 12 14 says, Pursue peace with all men and the righteousness without which none will see the Lord.
Are you a person known for bringing peace?
Not just turning the blind eye, not for just stirring up the pot for no reason, but patiently seeking that Christians and even non Christians in your sphere would live at peace with one another.
Persecution for Righteousness00:05:51
Lastly, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.
This last beatitude comes in two parts and it perfectly concludes what it means to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus knows that as his people live as true citizens of his kingdom and as they work to spread the kingdom across the earth, they will be persecuted.
I think it's quite important to notice that verse 10 and 11 have a similar phrase.
And they equate.
They equate, blessed are you when you're persecuted for righteousness' sake, and blessed are you when you are persecuted for my name's sake.
Brothers and sisters, it's the same thing.
To be persecuted for Christ is to be persecuted for righteousness.
There's no sense where we can't be expected to push righteousness out into society because we just want to be faithful to the name of Christ.
It's the same.
We are blessed when we are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for the sake of Christ's name.
Now, it's true that sometimes just the act of living holy and righteously offends people.
If you're saved in a family that does not honor Christ, when you change your habits and customs or your friends, they're going to be offended that you no longer do the things that you used to do.
It will convict them.
It will cause them to speak poorly of you.
That's true.
So, there is a sense where just being personally holy.
Living like the Beatitudes will offend them.
But it's also true that if we live holy lives in the privacy of our own homes, for merely pietistic personally, this will not really offend all that many people.
Will not cause them to persecute us nearly as much as if we preach righteousness.
You see, as we're moving out of the Beatitudes, we're now moving into the next passage, which is the mission.
You are salt, you are light, you're supposed to have an influence in the world.
And when our influence is preaching Christ, the King who is just and righteous and holy, and when we tell people you must be righteous, and without that you are going to hell and our nation will be destroyed.
We will be persecuted.
The world will hate that.
They will not hate a hidden, camouflaged Christianity.
They will not hate mild tempered, passive Christians.
They will hate those who extend the expectations of King Jesus to all people.
And Jesus says, I'm looking for that kind of person who will expect this.
Not only who will expect it, but who will rejoice and be exceedingly glad when this happens.
For your reward is great in heaven.
As much as we long to build an inheritance for our children, and amen to that, as much as we long to build a society that honors God, and amen to that, remember, brothers and sisters, that we're also building up an eternal reward.
And God sees your efforts, and He sees the way that you don't compromise, and He sees when you're mistreated for that, and He promises to reward you.
So we should not be surprised when we get fired, or persecuted, or slandered, or backstabbed for the name of Christ.
But because we have come to know the risen King, because we have emptied ourselves, because we are poor in spirit, because we mourn for our sin and we love righteousness more than our own name, we will preach Christ and we will rejoice that we are considered worthy to suffer along with the prophets and along with Christ himself.
And in that, we are truly blessed.
And brothers and sisters, ours is a church that believes that we need to be public about our faith.
I'm so thankful that I've grown so much in understanding that since being here.
We believe that our families and our cities and our nations must honor God, and we're committing to spreading his kingdom as we preach the gospel and as we work for a society that upholds God's moral standards.
But let us never forget that the activity of building Christ's kingdom starts when we embody the virtues and the spirit of the Beatitudes, when we empty ourselves.
when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we extend mercy when it's not deserved, when we forgive and make peace.
And really, all of those things, if you just read them, they sound like Jesus Christ.
And so, we remember that the citizens of Christ's kingdom that in that time was about to come and in our time is here and is growing, the citizens of the kingdom of Christ are to live and look like the Lord and Savior himself, like Jesus Christ.
Let's pray.
Father, this passage is beyond us.
It's humbling, it's challenging, and really we've scratched the surface only.
Lord, none of us can do this on our own.
It's not like we can just produce a sense of being poor in spirit that runs counter to our flesh.
We can't just love mercy and love righteousness on our own.
We can't just try harder.
Lord, we do want to be effective tools in your hand for your honor and your glory and your kingdom in our families, with our children.
Our spouses, in our neighborhoods, in our nation.
But Lord, we don't want that to replace that.
We are first and foremost to obey you and love you and serve you.