The Beatitudes from Fifty Thousand Feet

Our God and our Father, we thank you this morning for the gift of this day and for the privilege that it is to be able to sit in the security and relative comfort of this place and think about how the words of the Lord Jesus Christ reverberate down through the corridors of time and have an impact on our lives. We pray that you will give to us ears that hear and hearts that are ready to receive and obey your truth. We thank you for one another and for the encouragement that we derive in each other’s company as we look to Christ together. And it’s in his name we pray. Amen.

The brief that has been given me for this morning is to fly over these twelve verses at fifty thousand feet. And I understand that. In others words, having introduced the theme, I think, last time—in fact, having had it introduced with a measure of erudition that I frankly can’t match. Mickey gave me his notes from last time. I was thoroughly impressed and at the same time a little discouraged, in that I don’t have anything like that for you. But this will be an encouragement to some of the rest of you, that we don’t all have to be that organized and good. But I am going to try and say one or two things in introducing it, and then run across the surface of these eight characteristics, and then put the landing gear down and stop.

We, I think, have already understood, haven’t we, in the material that we’ve looked at— and you have good material on your desks there, on your tables, and in the introduction that you’ve received—that Christ, as Luther says, is saying nothing in these verses about how we become Christians. Christ is saying nothing in these verses about how we become Christians but only about the works and the fruit that no one can do unless she already is a Christian and in a state of grace. That fundamental distinction, that point of departure is crucial. Because, as will be quickly apparent, it is possible for people to use the Beatitudes—and they do—as a sort of moralistic code, as a call to one another to say, “Come on. Wouldn’t you like to exchange one set of external circumstances for another set of external circumstances? Instead of spending your time in this way, why don’t you spend your time in this other way?”—as if somehow or another, we could attain to the level of righteousness that Jesus identifies in the sermon, and particularly in the Beatitudes, on our own strength. And, of course, the great door-closer on that is when he says to the folks in verse 20, “I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”[1]

Some of you perhaps listen to the classical music, guitar music, of Christopher Parkening. It was that verse—the twentieth verse of Matthew 5—that brought Parkening to faith in Jesus Christ. Sitting, listening to the sermon being proclaimed, being himself a highly disciplined individual—disciplined enough to be able to reach that level of expertise in the world of classical music—and also now interested in discovering what it would mean to know and follow God, when the pastor said from the twentieth verse, “Unless our righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you’ll never enter heaven,” Parkening said, “Then I’ll never enter heaven. There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this.” And then, when he realized that, then it turned him to Christ. And he realized that Christ kept all of the law in its perfection, that Christ died and paid the punishment that we deserve for our sin, and then he, resting in Christ’s mercy, discovering a new life in Jesus—then, with the power of the Holy Spirit within him, he went on, and has gone on in these last fifteen years, to display a whole new lifestyle. But not the kind of emergence of fruit, fake fruit, such as you get in bowls in your Aunt Jemima’s living room, where you go in there, and you say, “Oh, I’d love to have one of those apples. That banana looks… I’ve never seen such a wonderful, just perfect banana in all my life!” And, of course, it isn’t a perfect banana. It’s a fake banana. It’s a fake apple. And there is in the Beatitudes a tremendous opportunity for those of us who are very disciplined to fake it and to combine our own temperament with our own drive and initiative. And so Luther’s word is important.

Jesus, here in Matthew, is teaching the whole nature of the kingdom. In Matthew 4:17, I think it is, he says, “Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’” In verse 23, he’s going through Galilee, “teaching in their synagogues” and “preaching the good news of the kingdom.” And the Sermon on the Mount, these Beatitudes are a description of the lifestyle of those who belong to that kingdom. You don’t try and do the Beatitudes and at the end you get your grade, and if you get a good enough grade, you’re welcomed into the kingdom; but you read the Beatitudes, and you say, “I’ll never get in,” and the answer is “That’s right. Never on your own will you get in. That’s why Jesus came and lived as he lived and died as he died. Now, if you’ll entrust your life to Christ and he will regenerate you, make you new from the inside out, then you can come back up to the top of the page and discover what it means to be ‘poor in spirit’ and to mourn and to ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness.’”

What we have here is essentially a call to a Christian counterculture. That’s the title that was given to John Stott’s book, which I have in front of me here—it goes back to the ’70s, I think: the Christian Counter-Culture by John Stott. It’s tremendously helpful. And he says in just one brief paragraph,

The followers of Jesus are to be different—different from both the nominal church and the secular world, different from both the religious and the irreligious. The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete delineation anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian counter-culture. Here is a Christian value-system, ethical standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition, life-style and … relationships—all of which are totally at variance with those of the non-Christian world. And this Christian counter-culture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.[2]

In other words, when we begin to take seriously the words of Jesus here concerning these principal marks of Christian character and conduct, we declare our alien status. I had to, in May of last year, turn in my resident alien card, which I’d had since 1983. I was happy in one sense to give it away, but I was sad, too, because I wanted to keep it for posterity’s sake. But they wouldn’t even cut it or give me a piece of it. No, it was gone, and with it my resident alien status. No longer could I claim, “Well, I don’t belong here.” No longer could I say, “Well, you know, I don’t vote here.” I had all of that dragged out from underneath me, and I was right in it with everybody else.

Well, the fact of the matter is that we all carry a resident alien card. Christian women are resident aliens. And that ought to become apparent, because our world says to the Christian woman, “Assert yourself. Stand up for yourself. Be proud of yourself. Elevate yourself. Defend yourself. Avenge yourself. Serve yourself. Promote yourself.” And the Sermon on the Mount turns that whole thing on its head. In fact, when you look seriously at these eight characteristics, you could actually say that these are the marks of losers. The average gathering of women, who are responding to all of the pressures on them in relationship to marriage and everything else that goes along—if I understand the sort of contemporary noise that comes especially from the world of mainstream American femininity, then the kind of things I hear are addressed directly by these eight characteristics, eight expressions of conduct.

That’s what makes them so exciting, so challenging to study, and so revolutionary in their impact. Think about the impact of a group like this getting out into our communities, involved with other people, and challenging—not in a bombastic way but in a kindly way, and particularly by our lifestyle—the very principles, the MO of our friends and neighbors.

Now, the context into which this was written—I’ll say one more thing about context—the religious context was marked by four particular groups. I mention them to you not just for effect but because they relate to where we are. First of all, it was written in the first century into a context where the Pharisees were at the forefront of things. The Pharisees, remember, were traditionalists. They were always committed not only to the law of God but to a whole bunch of laws that they had added in order to make sure that people toed the line. Then part of the group that would have been on the receiving end of this gospel were Sadducees, and they were modernists. They were people who didn’t actually take seriously the idea of the supernatural, and they tried to combine their sort of contemporary views of the world with little bits and pieces of Scripture. A third group were the Zealots, who were political activists, they were fanatical nationalists, and they saw everything through the lens of their zeal for the nation. The fourth group were the Essenes. If you’ve been to Israel and you’ve gone down to the Dead Sea and then you’ve gone up onto the plateau at Masada and you’ve thought there of the community that lived there, then you were reflecting on the Essene community. They were separatists. They were, if you like—they were dropouts. They were concerned with contamination, and particularly the contamination of their bodies, so that they couldn’t allow their bodies to be, you know, in touch with any of these dreadfully bad people that were around there.

And Jesus challenged all of that in this little sermon. He challenges the Pharisees, who are committed to the externals, to recognize that true spirituality is internal; it’s not external. He challenges the Sadducees to realize that the only way to go is God’s way, not man’s way with a little touch of God’s. He challenges the Zealots to realize that God’s interest is not in some fierce form of nationalism, not in revolution, but in worship. And he challenges the hippies, the Essenes, with the fact that the matter is an affair of the heart and not an affair of the body: “Blessed are the pure in heart.” I mean, you can keep your bodies as far away from everything. You can be, you know, up on a high hill somewhere. But unless you have a pure heart, then, of course, you have no standing with God.

Now, you don’t have to be brilliant to realize that these four things that marked the first century are still present in the twenty-first century. Right now, this morning, in Parkside Church—at least in the concentric circles that represent Parkside Church as I observe it as a pastor—we have Pharisees. I know that because they write to me, and they tell me, say, “You know, there are not enough rules and regulations around here. We can’t possibly be doing anything properly. Why don’t we have forty rules at the back of the church covenant or whatever else it is? We’ve got to get some rules in here. That’s the key.”

Then we have the Sadducees, who really don’t believe very much about the Bible or about supernatural things. They might not believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus, but they like the idea. And so they come around, and they’re trying to combine a worldly perspective—a view of philosophy, a contemporary worldview—with little bits and pieces of Christianity which they kind of like. And they come around like birds and pick up little bits and pieces and add them into their box, and then they go away again.

You say, “Well, you’re not speaking very nicely about the congregation.” I’m not talking about the core of Parkside. I’m talking about the concentric circles that are represented in Parkside. There are four thousand people in here on a Sunday. We’ve got a core group of maybe twelve hundred, as I would guess it. That’s twenty-eight hundred people that you don’t really know who they are, where they are, what they’re doing. It’s a big responsibility.

And we have the Zealots, who are always telling me, “You know, you got to phone a 1-800 number. I mean, we’re not politically involved in this church. We’re going to have to get this done. If America goes down, the whole world’s going to pot. Don’t you understand? Come along, Pastor.” They’re challenged by the Beatitudes as well.

And then we have the Essenes, the dropouts, who think that the answer to the Christian life is going up a high hill somewhere and avoiding everybody that ever said damn or hell or swore or did anything at all, and the only thing we need to do is just completely remove ourselves from the culture, and if we’ll do that, then we’ll be fine.

And all four perspectives are here, and all four perspectives are challenged by these Beatitudes. And that’s what I want to show you in my fifty-thousand-feet flyby. What a wonderful thing this is! It provides, doesn’t it, immediately, God’s pattern for happiness, blessedness? If you want to know joy and peace and contentment—and the Christian life does involve that—then here, says Jesus, is the basis for it. The obedient life is the life that pleases God; therefore, be obedient. There’s a real parallel, isn’t there here, between Moses sitting with the Ten Commandments and Jesus up on a high hill on the mountainside here, proclaiming this principled ideal that directly relates, actually, to Jeremiah 31:33—you know, “On that day,” says the prophet, you know, “I will take my law, and I’ll write it in their hearts.”[3] And Jesus is saying, “This is the kind of thing you need to have written in your heart.”

The obedient life is the life that pleases God.

And here, in the embodiment of these things, is a tremendous opportunity for evangelism. Lives that are marked by these kind of characteristics are going to cut ice in every generation. I don’t know who it was—probably someone like Saint Francis of Assisi—who turned to a couple of his friends, and he says, “Let us go and proclaim the gospel. Speak if you must.” And here in these principal points of character we have this wonderful challenge.

Now, let me just go at them. And I’m not going to argue for my perspective on this. I haven’t looked in your booklet. I’m not sure that your booklet will agree entirely with me. I hope it will on the broadest of things. I hope there’s no glaring omissions. There may be, in which case the booklet’s probably right, and you can ignore this address.

So, first of all, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Is this a call to material poverty? Is this an indication that destitution is the key to usefulness. Is it? No, of course it isn’t. That’s why he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—those who recognize their spiritual poverty. There’s no surprise in the fact that this is, if you like, the gateway into the Beatitudes. Because humility, or poverty of spirit, is the soil in which all these other elements grow. And absent poverty of spirit, any endeavor at the rest of them will prove futile.

What does it mean to recognize spiritual poverty? Well, it means to see myself as I really am. Well, what am I? Well, I’m, by my nature, lost and hopeless and helpless, and I can’t believe that as much as I have sinned, that God could ever love me. And then at the same time, I can’t believe that God could ever love someone so much and has done so in the Lord Jesus Christ.

You see, the poor in spirit are those who come to recognize this. If you were to go on through the Gospels, you would come to that wonderful illustration, eventually, in Luke, where you have the story of the two men that Jesus told, going up to the temple to pray. And remember the one fellow, who was a Pharisee, prayed to himself, it says in Luke’s Gospel: “I thank you, God, that I’m not like other men and that I give my tithes, and I’m doing a very good job. And I’m certainly not like this tax collector here.” And then Jesus says, “But the tax collector refused to even lift up his face to heaven, but he prayed, ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.’”[4]

And the people are listening to Jesus, and they’re always waiting for the punch line. And what a punch line it is! Because, remember, the people are listening, and they’re assuming all the time that religious people tip the scales in their favor and will go to heaven. And bad people—sinners and tax collectors—are at the front of the parade, at least in their minds. Tax collectors don’t have a chance! And Jesus says, “Okay, you’ve got the picture of the two people praying. Now,” he says, “I want you to know that it was the tax collector that went home justified.”[5] “But that’s against everything that we believe. On what basis could he go justified?” On the basis of what Christ achieves, not on the basis of what he attains.

And that experience, that perspective, is not something we move on from in our Christian lives—not if we’re maturing. My experience of Christian maturity is hopefully that one may sin less, but one actually becomes more dreadfully aware of the enormity of the offense of our sin, even though we may be sinning less, and therefore becomes more grateful to God for the wonder of what he has done for us in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Calvin says, “She…” (I’m making it “she” here. He actually said “he,” but this is the women’s Bible study; I’m sure he would have changed it.) “[She] only who is reduced to nothing in [her]self…” “[She] only who is reduced to nothing in [her]self, and relies on the mercy of God, is poor in spirit.”[6] “[She] only who is reduced to nothing in [her]self, and relies on the mercy of God, is poor in spirit.” It’s interesting, when you think about it, that what was it that kept Augustine and Luther from the gospel? Augustine was a profligate. Augustine was a mess, wasn’t he? His mother was praying with tears constantly for her boy. And he was kept from the gospel. He didn’t trust in Christ. He wouldn’t trust in Christ. Luther was kept from the gospel. Luther was the antithesis of Augustine. Luther was a monk. Luther was zealous. Luther was consumed with a fastidious interest in religious affairs and righteousness. So, here we’ve got Augustine over here sleeping with anyone he can find. Here we’ve got Luther living as a monk. And they’re both kept from the gospel by what? Pride. Pride! “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Augustine had to recognize that his life was a wreck and a shambles, and he needed Christ. And Luther had to recognize that all of his religious zeal didn’t add up to anything, and he needed Christ.

And that’s why, you see, at the cross, when we come from the variety of our backgrounds, we share together in the wonder of who Jesus is. Someone says, “You know, I was a horrible religious Pharisee, and I met Christ, and he’s changed me.” Someone else says, “You know, I was a party animal, and I met Christ, and he changed me.” What’s the unifying factor? We’re “poor in spirit.” We both know that we needed Christ, and we both rejoice in all that he is to us.

Secondly… And sorry; I spent longer on that, but I always do on the first one. You know that. But I’ll pick it up. Secondly, he says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”—or, if you like, “Happy are the sad.” “Happy are the sad.” This paradox here is addressing not the sorrow of bereavement, although there is a comfort for those who are bereaved; the Bible tells us that. But clearly, in the context, what is being referenced is, if you like, the sorrow of repentance: “Blessed are those who mourn over their sins, for they will be comforted.” In other words, only those who mourn over their sins will be happy. Why? Because only those who mourn over their sins are forgiven. So, we cry before we laugh. Again, quoting Luther, he said “the Christian’s entire life is a continuous act of repentance and contrition.”[7] “A continuous act of repentance and contrition.”

Sometimes, I think, in an environment like this, we’ve got the idea that repentance is a gateway into the Christian life, and this is something that we do: We turn around, and we walk in another direction, and we’ve done repentance; now we can move on to something else. But the fact of the matter is, repentance is a sixty-second-a-minute, sixty-minute-an-hour, twenty-four-hour-a-day process—turning from and turning to. And happiness, or blessedness, comes to sad people because their godly sadness leads to godly comfort.

And that’s why even things that confront us with our own finitude, with our own sinfulness, can be far more help to us than just a walk in the park. We tend to run away from trials because we feel that they would be unhelpful to us—especially those that would confront us with the fact that we’re not all that we might be. And there’s that little poem. It’s not a great poem, but it says something to the effect of

I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chattered all the way,
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But oh, the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me![8]

I’m increasingly afraid of an approach to the Christian life that is triumphalistic—that is, we represent to people that we are a company of the “together ladies,” you know; that anybody that came in here that was messed up, fouled up, backed up, and any other way, you know: “Hm, I don’t know if there’s anything for me in here. Apparently, these people are—they’re just, as far as I can tell, perfect. You know, they’re just wonderful!” And unless somebody gets on us and says, “You know, if I were to open my mind to you and tell you what I think—if you were ever to know the propensity of my heart for envy and for bitterness and for malice—I would be so ashamed.” The person says, “Well, surely not. After all, you’re my table leader. Surely not. You’re one of our pastors.” When I say to you, as I do every so often, “If you knew what I was really like, you wouldn’t listen to me preach,” I am not actually playing with your minds.

Brainerd, who dies as a young man—we have Brainerd’s diaries as a result of him hanging out with Jonathan Edwards for a little while—Brainerd, by any standards, as a missionary to the American Indians, was a paragon of virtue. I mean, the guy was literally killing himself in the cause of the gospel. He slept very little. He was up. He was moving. He’s on his horse. He’s everywhere, extending himself in the cause of Christ. Any one of us, if we stood next to him, we would almost be embarrassed even to stand in his company, except that we would share in his reflected glory inasmuch as he lived so close to Christ. And yet he writes in his diary, October 18, 1740, “In my morning devotions, my soul was exceedingly melted …, and bitterly [moved] over, my exceeding sinfulness and vileness.”[9] “Oh, surely not! You’re David Brainerd!” Well, you think he was writing that for effect? No, he was writing honestly. He was mourning over his sin.

Thirdly, “Blessed are the meek.” “Blessed are the meek.” Who are meek people? Well, they’re folks with a gentle spirit, tenderhearted. It’s meekness; it’s not weakness. It is, if you like, power under control and the opposite of violence and vengeance. It’s embodied in the Lord Jesus. “Take my yoke upon you,” he says in Matthew 11, doesn’t he? “Take my yoke upon you, and learn [from] me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and [you will] find rest [for] your souls.”[10]

Now, when we get to this, it’s possible that we get messed up, because temperamentally, some of us are more tenderhearted than others. Some of us would, you know, hit a fly on a windshield, you know, without even giving it a thought, and others of us are taking it to a habitat in the Flats, you know, and everything. Just temperamentally, we’re different. And so we tend to say, “Oh, you know, that is meekness,” as if it were a natural commodity. But none of these are natural commodities. None of these are, if you like, Christmas tree ornaments, where we go in the box and we bring out poverty of spirit, and then we hang that on the tree of our lives; and then we bring out another one, which is repentance over sin, and we hang that over our lives; and then we go in, and we get meekness out, and we hang that on our lives as well. No. This is a supernatural process where the Lord Jesus, by his Spirit, is producing this in us, and hopefully in increasing measure.

So when we see this word “meek,” we’re not talking about somebody who lacks conviction. We’re not talking about an individual who just is, generally speaking, a nice person. We’re not talking about a personality thing. This actually combines courage and strength and conviction, and it comes from the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, how does it work itself out? Well, meek people are gentle in their dealings with others. And indeed, when God finally destroys all who in their arrogance resist his will, then, he says, only the meek will be left to inherit the earth.

Meek people are gentle in their dealings with others.

I don’t want to embarrass anyone here, but there is a lady sitting here this morning who confronted me with one of the harder questions a few months ago and came up to me and said, “I got a question for you.” And I said, “Good.” And she said, “Moses was apparently the meekest man who ever lived.”[11] Well, I think I’d remembered reading that, and I said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And she said, “But didn’t Moses himself write that?” And I said, “Yeah.” So she said, “Well, how does that work? I mean, how can you say, ‘I’m the meekest man that ever lived’? I mean, isn’t that a little arrogant or whatever?” I said, “I don’t know!” I said, “I never thought about it in my life, you know? I thought I’d had every question in thirty years. Now you give me a new one—and please go away.” And she was gone. I thought she was gone for good until, Monday, she reappeared. And the opening gambit was “You haven’t answered my question.”

Well, I didn’t remember the question, so she asked it again. I didn’t know the answer on Monday any more than I knew it then, except to say that he was being honest; except to say that also “his face shone,”[12] and he didn’t know; except to acknowledge that the Scriptures have a dual authorship—that God the Holy Spirit is ordering the writing, albeit Moses writing within the framework of his own personality and so on. But it is a good question. And it reminds us of the fact that any of these characteristics, when produced within us, we ought to be surprised that people even see them.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones said this: “[The woman] who is truly meek is the one who is [truly] amazed that God and [others] can think of [her] as well as they do.”[13] And that’s a very helpful insight: “[The woman] who is truly meek is the one who is [completely] amazed that God and [others] can think of [her] as well as they do.” In other words, when we receive encouragements in a note or whatever else it is, we realize how perverse our hearts are when we start saying to ourselves, “Well, she really has got me, doesn’t she? I mean, I’m so delighted she realizes what a wonderful person I really am. What a terrific note! And what a bright lady she was to write that to me!” No, the meek person says, “I don’t think she actually knows me. I don’t think she knows me.”

Just a tangential thought about humility for a moment: I think it’s Chesterton who on one occasion in his writings makes the distinction, and this is the distinction: He said, “It used to be that a man or a woman understood the importance of being humble in relationship to themselves but being forceful in relationship and unbending in relationship to truth. But now,” he said in his generation, “this has completely reversed: People are forceful and unbending in relationship to themselves and have a false humility as it relates to truth.”[14] So, we combine self-assertiveness with a loss of conviction, courage, boldness in relationship to the truth of Scripture.

I only watch American Idol for the first couple of nights, to get all the crazy people off the street. And I can only watch it for so long. And I don’t know how much of it now is totally staged, and, you know, it’s hard for me to tell what’s going on. But if it is not staged, then the one overwhelming characteristic of people is arrogance and a complete lack of perception of what they’re really like and what they’re really worth. I mean, I have yet to see somebody walk in, and the person says, “Well, why are you here?” “Well, frankly, I can’t believe they picked me out of the crowd. You know, it was my uncle who said, ‘You know, you could try this. You’ve got not a bad voice.’ And I’m here to give it shot.” As opposed to “Well, I’m here because I’m going to win this. I’m here because I’m the great…” You know, it’s phenomenal. Meekness. You talk about an evangelistic potential! People may not be able to identify it. We may not even be on the right track to call it meekness, but something of this: “Blessed are the meek. They will inherit the earth.”

Sorry. I’ve got to get the plane back up, fifty thousand feet.

Next: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Happy are the hungry. Happy are the hungry. A hunger for righteousness is an evidence, again, of the fact that we’re in the kingdom. No hunger or thirst for righteousness, we call in question whether we’re actually in the kingdom at all. And the hunger and thirst here is intense. “As the deer pants for water, so my soul longs after you,”[15] says the psalmist. Thomas Watson, the Puritan, says, “[She] has most need of righteousness that least wants it.”[16] “[She] has most need of righteousness that least wants it.” “Blessed,” happy, “are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” who are committed to depending on the righteousness of Christ in terms of it viewed objectively and who are committed to righteousness in terms of it understood subjectively as a commitment to doing the right thing—so that we say to one another, “The very important question that all we must ask of every decision is ‘What is the right thing to do?’”

And this is one of the distinguishing characteristics of a Christian. It’s not unique. There are very moral people in the world that don’t trust in Christ. But the Christian of all people should be asking that question. And when we fail to ask that question—when we fail to ask the integrity question and think in terms of expediency or whatever else it might be—then we’re often on a slippy slope. And we know the perversity of the human heart, which can say, “You know, I know that God’s Word says this, but I feel comfortable to disobey it, because I know that God will forgive me, and then I’ll come out on the other side of it, even though I flat-out disobeyed God, and I’ll be fine. He’ll just give me a pat on the back, and I can keep going.” That is absolutely perverse! And there’s no confidence in that person that they are actually in Christ at all.

So, for example, the fellow falls in love with a lady at the office—is enamored by her, decides that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her and not with his wife, professes to be a Christian, tells his wife, “You know, I believe God has brought this woman into my life.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I believe he’s brought her into my life.”

“Well, you can’t do that, because God’s Word says you can’t.”

“Yes, I know. But God is a forgiving God. So I’m going to do it, and he’ll forgive me. And then after he’s forgiven me, I can move on again.”

Now, my answer to that man is “You have one foot on a banana skin, and your other foot is teetering on the brink of hell. And what you’re telling me right now is that you’re probably not a Christian.” The person says, “I can’t believe you would say that to me!” You know what? I’ll say anything to you, scare the bejabbers out of you, use any biblical methodology I can find in order to prevent you from such abject foolishness and devastation.

And I mention it in this arena because it happens in this arena all the time. I can turn it around the other way and then listen to the lady. She comes in: “You know, my husband’s a nice man, he’s provided for me, but there’s no fun in it anymore. There’s no thrill in it anymore. I remember when we used to go to the high school games. It was great back then. But I met, you know, Jeremy, and Jeremy has put the thrill back. And after all, you know, I’ve bred my children. I’ve done the thing. I’ve done the lunches. I’ve done the meals. Surely it’s time for me.”

“No.”

“Surely it’s time for me. I mean, all the magazines say, ‘Assert yourself. Avenge yourself. Be yourself. Enjoy yourself. Please yourself. Get your stuff.’”

Well, what’s the answer? The answer is: Do you have a hunger and a thirst for righteousness? And what you’re telling me is you don’t! And if you don’t desire the pure milk of the Word in the way that a baby gravitates to its mother’s breast,[17] then either there’s at least something wrong with your feeding mechanism, or it may be that you were stillborn and that there is no hunger and thirst because there is no life. You see how quickly we go to people and say, “Oh, no, you’re a Christian. Of course you’re a Christian! I know you don’t hunger and thirst for righteousness, but that’s okay. That’s not an issue.” Half the time we ought to start with the possibility the person is not a believer at all and lead them to Christ. Phew! There you go.

“Blessed are the merciful.” See the wonderful balance? Happy are the hungry. “Blessed are the merciful, for they[’ll] be shown mercy.” In other words, those who are conscious of being the unworthy recipients of God’s mercy will reflect that in their dealings with others. The meek person says, “You know, I know I’m a sinner.” The merciful person says, “And I’m showing compassion, ’cause I know you’re a sinner too.” And the more we show mercy, the more we are the recipients and the discoverers of God’s mercy.

There was a Roman philosopher in the first century who called mercy “the disease of the soul”: “Don’t be showing mercy. Get him! Pay him back! Get her back! Let’s litigate this! Let’s get our rights!” Well, there’s Jesus here, who, when he was reviled, did not revile in return but committed his cause to him who judges justly.[18] “You mean, like, commit it to God?” Yeah! “You mean be merciful?” Yeah! “But I can’t be sure what’ll happen.” You can’t be sure what’ll happen either way. Go God’s way. Trust God!

The more we show mercy, the more we are the recipients and the discoverers of God’s mercy.

Of course, you’ve got the wonderful picture of mercy, don’t you, in the story of the Good Samaritan? “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” who “fell among thieves,” and they “stripped him of his raiment” and “departed, leaving him half dead”[19]—King James Version. And then we have the story of the two jokers showing up down the road. One has a little look. One comes over and has a closer look. Nothing much is going on. Incidentally, Jesus begins to tell this parable in response to a character who tries to justify himself by creating an exclusive realm for neighborhood involvement. Jesus has already said, “I want you to love your neighbor as yourself,” and the guy, seeking to justify himself, said, “Who’s my neighbor?”[20] In other words, “Tell me who the ten people are I’m supposed to do this for—you know, as long as I can get a small group. Don’t make me love people I don’t like. I mean, give me just a group at my table that I can handle. I don’t want to go to another table. I don’t like table 4, and certainly I’m not going over there by the door where she is. So let me know who my neighbor is so that I can love my neighbor.” And Jesus in response to that tells him a story where the Samaritan is the guy who comes out the winner, absolutely turning everything on its head and making these self-limiting people realize that the extent of God’s mercy is vast. “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy that is wider than the sea.” There’s a something in his something that “is more than liberty,” the hymn writer says. It’s the same hymn that has the verse

But the love of God is broader
Than the measure of man’s mind,
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.[21]

See, the intervention that I was referencing under the previous point, in terms of going and grabbing someone and arresting them—in first blush, that doesn’t sound very merciful, does it? Well, where is this person? This person is walking up the freeway with a large trailer going eighty miles an hour towards them. Mercy rugby-tackles them and throws them onto the ground at the side of the freeway—and then doesn’t say, “You” this, that, the next thing, but says, “I jumped in front of this truck because I care about you and because I know that what you’re doing I am capable of. And I could in thirty seconds be in your position. And it is only the keeping mercy of Christ that has me where I am, and I want to tell you of his mercy.” But it is not a mercy that winks at sin. It is

With mercy and with judgment
My web of time he wove,
And aye the dews of sorrow
[Are] lustered [by] his love.[22]

That’s the hymn “The Sands of Time Are Sinking.” “O trysting place where heaven’s love and heaven’s justice meet!”[23]

See, we make the mistake of thinking that when we’re going in there and take action, that somehow or another, that would be antithetical to meekness and that merciful would be expressed in saying, “Well, who am I to say anything? I mean, who am I to do anything?” That’s a cop-out. That’s a pagan cop-out. That’s why we can’t get a conviction on the basis of right and wrong with 90 percent of the juries in the country. Because that’s the way their minds work: “Well, who am I to say? I mean, I could have killed somebody.” That’s not the point at the moment, Mrs. Samuelson. The point is: You’ve had the evidence presented. The law says this. Now execute a judgment. And when you do, go back in the room and weep!

See, mercy says, I do nothing; I dissolve into futility. No, it’s not! God showed mercy at great expense and went to a phenomenal extent to do so.

Happy are the holy. (Our time’s gone.) Happy are the holy: “Blessed are the pure in heart,” the control center of our lives—pure katharoi (from which we get our Greek word catharsis), those who are free from the tyranny of a divided self. “For a heart to praise my God, a heart from sin set free.”[24] How can I develop this kind of heart? Stay in the Word of God, walk in the Spirit with God, and come consistently and continually to God in prayer. And what we discover is that purity of heart actually cleanses the eyes of our souls, and God becomes visible to us. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Peacemaking is a hallmark of God’s children.

And then, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God.” What makes a peacemaker? Well, first of all, they’ve discovered peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. They seek to lead others to peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. They seek to operate in circumstances that are uproarious in a way that makes peace with others. And when there is conflict and animosity, they are the kind of individuals who are trying to find the point of agreement. They’re the kind of folks who can be contending without being contentious, who can disagree without being disagreeable. And it’s not peace at any price, but peacemaking is a hallmark of God’s children.

And then, finally, the eighth characteristic. The way it’s written down, you may think there are nine, but I think it’s the same thing from 10 and 11: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for doing the right thing; theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” Thomas Watson, again, says, “The way to heaven is [the] way of thorns and blood. … Set it down as a maxim, if you will follow Christ, you must see … swords and staves.”[25] In other words, there is a blessing that attends those who suffer solely because they uphold God’s standard and because they refuse to compromise.

One of the things that we’re unable to go to in America when we travel the country and go from sea to shining sea: We’re unable to go to any martyrs’ monuments, as best I know. I’m not sure that there has ever been a time in these fair shores when people have died for their commitment to the Scriptures and their commitment to Christ. In other words, you can’t go somewhere in Boston and say, “And you’ll see that this monument here is for those who, because of their undying commitment to the Bible, were burned at the stake,” in the way that you can in Oxford. You say, “This is where Latimer and Ridley died, and they were burned for refusing to recant their convictions regarding Christ and the gospel.”

You think of the mother and her two daughters in that Day of Discovery movie that I think is still in the bookstore (I don’t know)—but that classic picture of a mother and two daughters tied to stakes in the Solway Firth, I think it was, with the tide out, and their persecutors wanted the mother and her daughters to recant their conviction regarding Christ and the Scriptures. And they gave them time because the tide was out, but as the tide began to come in, it eventually got to their feet and to their ankles and came up to their waist, and they called again and again on the woman, “You don’t have to do this. You can turn away from this.” And then they tried to play the emotional game with the girls: “You know, your mother’s crazy, but you don’t have to be crazy. You have all of your lives in front of you.” And as they continued to taunt and to shout and to abuse, eventually, the waters came up and engulfed all three women and took them into eternity.

And today in mainland China, there are people who are in prison for their faith. In Egypt, they’re in prison for their faith—in Nepal. There are forty countries in the world right now that are experiencing religious persecution. And to them, in a peculiar way and in a particular way, this word in this beatitude comes home, surely, with great conviction. And through their tears and through their loss and their sadness, they’re trying to hold on to what Jesus is saying. There is actually a happiness that attaches to this.

We were reading in Romans 5 in our team prayer time this morning and were reminded of the fact that if we try and question whether God loves us by looking at our circumstances, we will always get it wrong. We’ll always get it wrong: “Well, it’s sunny, and we’re fine, and we’re going on vacation. God must really love us.” “It’s miserable. It’s snowing. I don’t have enough money for a tank of gas. Therefore, God must really not love me,” or whatever it is. Now, when we use that as a quantifier, we’ll always get it wrong. And the way in which Paul addresses it in Romans 5 is he says, “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God,”[26] “We rejoice, actually, in our sufferings, because we know that in this God does this,”[27] and ultimately, he says, “We … rejoice in God.”[28]

Well, let me give you all of this by way of summary. (I tried to write it down as a summary.) What about this blessed person, this individual? The blessed person… (Don’t try and write this down; it’s just a ramble, and it’s not that good.) The blessed person recognizes her own emptiness and doesn’t rejoice in self-sufficiency. She’s not confident of her own ability but keenly aware of her inability. She’s not assertive about her accomplishments but is learning to be saddened by her sin. She’s not self-serving, but she’s self-sacrificing. She’s gentle, merciful, pure, peaceful, and knows what it is to endure hardship. She is, from the perspective of the average tennis tournament or bridge club or local wine bar, a flat-out loser.

That’s the challenge. That’s the challenge. And you see how we’ve got the message of the gospel kind of the wrong way round? Because we got a message that’s for winners. We’ve got a message that’s for cheerleaders. We’ve got a message that’s for high school quarterbacks. We’ve got a message that’s for the CEOs. Jesus had a message for the poor, the brokenhearted, the blind, the lame, the last, and the left out. Jesus’ whole ministry was to those who, irrespective of what they did sportswise, businesswise, anywise, had been brought to the place where they realized that the gateway was poverty of spirit and, indeed, that the continuance along the journey was in the cultivating of that perspective.

Father, I pray that you will help us in the coming weeks as we try and work through these things, first of all to get clarity where there is an absence of it. I pray that you will be pleased to use this time to bring some to faith in the Lord Jesus, especially any of us who are tempted to just put off one set of externals for a new kind, whereas we used to go somewhere, and now we go here; we used to read this, and now we read that—as if simply by changing the framework, we ourselves will be changed. I pray, Lord, that you will quickly show us that that won’t happen but that, instead of hanging ornaments on, that we need Christ to come and to forgive and to save and to produce the reality of a new lifestyle because of a new life.

Thank you for this time and for each other. I pray that you will continue to use all of our church family, and not least of all this group, as a means for presenting in a lovely way and in a winsome way the transforming power of the gospel. And to this end we seek your help. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

[1] Matthew 5:20 (NIV 1984).

[2] John R. W. Stott, Christian Counter-Culture: The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity, 1978), 19.

[3] Jeremiah 31:33 (paraphrased).

[4] Luke 18:11–13 (paraphrased).

[5] Luke 18:14 (paraphrased).

[6] John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 1:261.

[7] John F. MacArthur, Matthew 1–7, The MacArthur New Testament Commentary (Chicago: Moody, 1985), 161.

[8] Robert Browning Hamilton, “Along the Road.”

[9] David Brainerd, quoted in John Styles, The Life of David Brainerd, Missionary to the Indians; with an Abridgement of His Diary and Journal (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1812), 28.

[10] Matthew 11:29 (KJV).

[11] See Numbers 12:3.

[12] Exodus 34:29 (KJV).

[13] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 69.

[14] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), chap. 3. Paraphrased.

[15] Psalm 42:1 (paraphrased).

[16] Thomas Watson, quoted in MacArthur, Matthew 1–7, 184.

[17] See 1 Peter 2:2.

[18] See 1 Peter 2:23.

[19] Luke 10:30 (KJV).

[20] Luke 10:27, 29 (paraphrased).

[21] Frederick William Faber, “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” (1854). Lyrics lightly altered.

[22] Anne Ross Cousin, “The Sands of Time Are Sinking” (1857).

[23] Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (1868).

[24] Charles Wesley, “O for a Heart to Praise My God” (1742).

[25] Thomas Watson, The Beatitudes (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1971), 259–60, quoted in MacArthur, Matthew 1–7, 221.

[26] Romans 5:2 (NIV 1984).

[27] Romans 5:3 (paraphrased).

[28] Romans 5:11 (NIV 1984).