The Beatitudes in Matthew 5

the Beatitudes of Jesus issues to start the Sermon on the Mount are pronouncements of blessing on those waiting for God's messianic activity but there are also pronouncements of condemnation on the religious establishment who have attempted to secure God's blessing through their own efforts at the same time these Beatitudes are instructions for Jesus disciples about the life that is truly blessed from God's perspective at first glance that after years of wrestling with these Beatitudes many people great unto them because they can seem so foreign to our ideas of human aspiration who really wants to be poor to mourn to be meek in my teens I renounced my Christian identity and church because of this I remember sitting in youth group meetings where the characteristics of the Beatitudes were held up as ideals for us to emulate I remembered snickering in the back row with my buddies as the youth leaders preached at us to cease being cocky cease being macho cease being all of these characteristics and instead become meek and mild the picture of the Christian life that was held up for us from the Beatitudes seemed lamely pathetic as I think back our youthful cockiness and machismo probably were just as pathetic but the Christian life painted by that church had nothing to offer us as a viable robust alternative but not too many years after ruling out the Beatitudes for real life I sat under the brilliant stars in a jungle in Vietnam and their significance overwhelmed me I was a member of a very cocky airborne infantry combat Brigade we were a well-trained exceedingly efficient war machine but after one especially ravaging battle night as I sat on guard duty in the jungle I experienced the reality of what Jesus addressed in the Beatitudes I had killed young men that day and I had done so smugly I had ripped their lives out from these young men without a twinge of conscience I saw the bodies of my 19 year old squad members ravaged by the young men that were our hated enemies yet probably none of us on either side could really offer any adequate explanation for our animosity I was actually proud of myself for killing people that I didn't even know that night I experienced brokenness I became poor in spirit as I recognized the depth of my depravity and shuddered as I considered the possibility of my fate before God if he existed I didn't believe in him but I mourned at the evil in me and in the evil that I saw emerged so quickly for the first time in my young life I understood that I was not this invincible captain of my ship of fate I could be killed at any moment so from that very night I began to realize that there was indeed a very different way to live life I couldn't articulate at that night in these words but meekness righteousness mercy purity and peacemaking all became so much more clearly preferable than the way that I had been pursuing significance and success I now realize that I was experiencing the beginnings of the pronouncement aspects of the Beatitudes I saw for the first time the horror of my life as a human apart from God I desperately needed something but what it was I had no clue I experienced condemnation of my old cockiness my old self-sufficiency and above all the condemnation of my arrogant abusive people in my quest to satisfy my own stuff this transition of my life readied me and enabled me to accept Jesus invitation to the life of the kingdom of heaven two years later great day the Beatitudes are neither means of entering the kingdom nor means of advancing in the kingdom they are expressions of Spirit produced Kingdom life revealing to the entire world that God is advancing as he has begun a transformation in Jesus disciples that is why we are blessed

Channel: zondervan

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Id: _CndYU609zw

Length: 5min 20sec (320 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020