"Blessed Are the Broken" Matthew 5:2-4 Sunday Morning Worship Service

It was 14 years ago, almost to the day that the American financial system turned upside down.

One of the largest banks, Lehman Brothers, was 25,000 employees declared bankruptcy.

It collapsed.

Explanations are complicated.

Books and movies have popularized what happens.

The one that I read that I found helpful was William Cohen's book called House of Cards, a tale of hubris and wretched excess on Wall Street.

So you know what perspective he's coming from with that subtitle.

He gives the explanation for what happened that I think is the easiest to understand and to relate, that the large banks in our country begin driving up the value of their investments by buying them with their own money.

You know, you recognize that something's value, especially in the stock market, is pegged to what people are willing to pay for it.

So if you have a printing press and you have your own money and you can sell it to yourself for whatever cost you want, you raise up the cost of it.

When you're paid commission on how high the sale is, it is to your benefit.

You get personally very rich, frankly, if you can make it infinitely expensive, which you can do because you can bid with an infinite amount of money on it.

That's a great system if you can get away with it for long.

Um there's a limit to it, apparently.

As houses begin to foreclose in 2008, uh the bank's house of cards begin to collapse, to borrow the title of the book.

Uh several big banks uh collapsed and were uh rescued.

Rescued is in quotes there by the government.

But Lehman Brothers was not.

President Bush drew the line with them.

They announced one day, September 10th, one day, September 10th, that they lost six billion dollars in one day.

And they appealed for the government to rescue them.

The government declined.

So the next day they announced their new plan.

They were gonna make a spin-off company and transfer all their debt to that new company.

So day number one, that new company would be$50 billion in debt.

The government, for some reason, said no.

So on September 15th, 2008, they declared bankruptcy.

At that moment, they had over$600 billion in supposed value, but much more than that in liabilities.

As I said earlier, 25,000 people lost their jobs, but of course the effect of that was bigger.

The stock market almost immediately lost 20% of its value the next day.

Uh within the next five months, the stock market had lost 54% of its value.

To put that in basic terms, about half of American wealth disappeared in six months.

Today, the U.S.

Treasury Department estimates that$19 trillion of value vanished from the American economy.

Well, what did that look like?

To the DC area, it's hard to describe.

The D.C.

area, it was sequestration, which meant that some of you had to shave 2% off your budgets and you walked around in sackcloth and ashes.

I was told after first hour not to say that second hour, but I ignored that.

But in the rest of the country, there was actual harm.

Over six million people had their homes foreclosed.

The homeless population exploded.

I was doing evangelism in Los Angeles at the time.

Within six months, the homeless population of Skid Row went from 2,000 to nearly 15,000.

People who had lived in houses for years suddenly owed more than their house was worth.

As homelessness skyrocketed, so did arrests in jails.

It was a phenomenon in LA County, at least as I'm sure it was across the country, but I was a chaplain with the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time, where many people refused parole.

They didn't have homes to go to.

It became common for parole officers to ask people on their way out of jail, do you even want it to be paroled?

Or are you just going to go out and get intentionally arrested tomorrow?

Most people chose to stay in jails.

Unemployment in the U.S.

skyrocketed, hitting over 10%.

You know, we lament unemployment today, it's 3.5%.

It was three times worse in 2008 than it is today.

Millions and millions of people declared bankruptcy.

The most lasting cultural effect, according to the book I mentioned earlier, but it's documented by many other economists, is that the millennial generation, for the first time since World War II, most of them will just simply never be able to afford a house.

Middle-aged income has dropped 35% between today and before 2008.

What happened?

You can't do that, but it revealed that what people valued didn't exist.

There was estimations of so much wealth, so much money, that within it's an exaggeration to say it was within 24 hours, but September 15th, 2008, within a few months, most of it had disappeared.

And it is not an exaggeration to say most of it.

What people thought had value did not exist.

All of the documents and deeds and trusts and mortgages that people ascribed worth to were worthless.

Some of you lived through that.

I'm sure, well, all of you lived through that, I'm sure, but some of you went through the effects of that.

But Jesus here in Matthew 5 is talking about a kind of poverty that is even more exaggerated than this.

Imagine that instead of waking up to find your home gone, you woke up one day to find your eternal home gone.

Instead of seeing your 401k disappear within a few months, imagine seeing your eternal rewards dried up to nothing.

Bankruptcy is bad, but the bankruptcy that Jesus describes here, if it's not understood, can be tragic.

Jesus begins the sermon with an upside-down line.

He says, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

The sermon we talked about last week, it's the most famous sermon ever preached in the world.

Although a recent survey discovered that over 35% of Americans ascribed the Sermon on the Mount to Billy Graham.

At least they knew it was Christian.

Jesus preached this sermon after attracting the masses to him in the wilderness.

John the Baptist had preached along the Jordan.

More people came to see John the Baptist than had ever come to see any living person before.

Now, Jesus is not along the Jordan River.

Jesus is up at Galilee, and yet the masses still funnel to him.

The end of Matthew 4, verse 25 says the people came from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, beyond the Jordan.

Matthew 4:25

That's modern-day Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, obviously Israel and Jerusalem.

People funneled to him from everywhere.

And they didn't come to be entertained.

They came bringing the sick and the lame, the demon-possessed.

People were not just coming to him, but bringing him the afflicted, and he was healing them.

And it got to the point, according to Mark's gospel, where he was no longer even able to effectively teach because of how thick the crowds were.

And so he drew up onto a mountain.

If you've been to Galilee, you recognize it's not strictly speaking a mountain.

It is an elevated area around the kind of the north side of the lake, there, the northwest side of the lake.

It is an elevated area, but there are plains there.

And so Jesus went up to there.

Matthew calls it a mountain, Luke calls it the plains, and he he went there to speak to not just the crowds, but notice specifically, verse 1 says, he went there to speak to his disciples.

This is not merely those who brought the sick and afflicted to him.

These are the people that came to Jesus because they wanted to be taught.

That's what the word disciple means.

They wanted to be instructed by him.

They wanted to learn from his teaching what to think about God.

They wanted to learn from his teaching how to live their lives.

That's why they came to him and he took them up into the plains.

And then Jesus sat down and began to teach.

Now it's interesting that he opened his mouth and taught them, it says in verse 2, sat down as from verse 1, opened his mouth and taught them as from verse 2.

This is unlike how anybody else had ever taught them before.

All of the scribes, all of the prophets in the Old Testament, they didn't teach like this.

The scribes and the Old Testament prophets, they taught not by opening their mouth, if you recall, they taught by opening the scrolls.

The scribes and the prophets, they pointed back to Moses, not Jesus.

Jesus sat down, he didn't have a scroll with him.

He didn't say, This is what Deuteronomy says.

Instead, he said, This is what I say.

This truth didn't come from the Torah, it came from his own heart, it came from his own mouth.

He spoke to them not with the voice of the prophets, which pointed to the voice of Moses, which pointed to the law given by angels, which pointed to God's own character.

Jesus spoke directly to them, revealing God's own character.

If you flip over to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, chapter 7, verse 28, when Jesus finished speaking the Sermon on the Mount, the crowds were astonished at his teaching.

There's no healings in this sermon.

There's no deliverance from demons in this sermon.

This is merely teaching on the plains up there.

When he finished, they were astonished because he was teaching them as one who had authority and not as their scribes.

And I can't reiterate this enough.

When it says, Matthew says, they were astonished because he taught as one who had authority.

They're not talking about his posture.

I mean, his posture was sitting down.

They weren't talking about his clothes.

It's not like he was wearing a sharp Brooks Brothers jacket, and so they said, Oh, he's authoritative.

It wasn't his tone of voice.

He taught as one who had authority because he spoke to them directly from the heart of God.

His own mouth revealed the heart of God towards them.

They'd never seen anything like this.

That's the sermon we're looking at.

You can go back to Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

The sermon, the foundation of the sermon is the Beatitudes.

There's nine of them, and they form the entryway to the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.

I'll give you an outline this morning.

We're just going to look at verse 3.

We have lots of time.

If the Lord tarries, we have lots of time to go through the Sermon on the Mount.

So we'll just do one of them this morning.

I'm going to give you your outline, the Dorman's three conditions.

In other words, this is the conditions in verse 3.

You have to walk by these to get to the rest of the sermon.

If you want to lead a Christ-honoring life, if you want to embrace the gospel, this is the doorman you have to pass by.

And he's got three conditions to him.

I call him a dorman here yesterday.

My family went and visited a friend in DC, and to get into her apartment, we had to ring the buzzer, and then we had to get by the doorman.

We had to convince the doorman that we were allowed in.

And she would have bounced us.

If we failed the test, she looked intimidating.

I bet she could have done it.

This is the doorman for the Sermon on the Mount.

To get into this sermon, you have to pass by this century.

In the past few weeks, Pastor Alex preaching Psalm 2, Ryan on Psalm 1.

I did not have Ryan preach on Psalm 1 because he could sing it.

I asked Ryan to preach on Psalm 1 because it is the doorman to the Psalter.

Psalm 1 and Psalm 2.

You have to pass by them to get to the rest of the Psalms.

Psalm 1, you have to know the difference between the wicked and the righteous.

That is Jesus' mindset when he gets to the Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes, but to get into the Beatitudes, here's this first watchman, the first century, the first doorman.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

If you don't pass by this guy, you don't get in.

You won't be able to live the rest of the Psalm.

You won't be able to walk with your enemy two miles when he tells you to walk with him one unless you're you've gone through this first verse.

You won't be able to give your enemy your coat as long as as well as your jacket if you haven't first gone through this verse.

You won't be able to go to war against sin in your own life or store up treasure in heaven or build your house on the rock instead of on the sand unless you have gone through being poor in the spirit.

It is the rite of passage.

It is the doorman.

It checks your credentials.

You have to pass by this door, and people try to climb over the wall in other places.

They try to sneak in the back door, they try to neglect this watchman here.

They want anything other than wrestling with the command that they be poor in spirit.

We're gonna look at that this morning.

First, there's nine beatitudes, by the way.

The foundation of the Sermon on the Mount, there's nine of them.

Nine uh beatitudes, the word beatitude just means an attitude of happiness.

It's not a biblical word.

Beatitude is not found in the in the scripture.

It is a word that entered the English language in like the 1400s from the Latin, and it's just a phrase that means happiness, a happy attitude towards you.

These are called the Beatitudes because Jesus uses the word for blessed.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, etc.

There's nine of them.

Four of them, by the way, they're not random, they're in an order.

Four of them show your need.

Four of them show how poor you are, four of them show the absence of things that you would desire.

That's the first four.

You're poor, you mourn over your loss, you're meek, you're you're down low, you hunger for righteousness.

So the first four are things you do not have.

The next three show your response to your poverty.

The next three is how you live in light of the fact that you don't have anything.

You live a merciful life.

If you don't have anything, you're merciful.

You live a pure life.

You live a peacemaking life.

You don't want conflict, you don't want sin.

You don't want justice.

You want mercy, purity, and peace.

And the final one shows you how the world responds to people who live that way.

And the world responds to them poorly.

The world responds to them with persecution, with reviling them.

So those are the nine beatitudes.

Four about your poverty, three about your conduct in light of your poverty, and the final one about the final two about persecution.

Blessed are those when others revile you, rejoice and be glad.

Blessed are those when they are persecuted.

The final two are about persecution.

That brings you to nine.

We're gonna look at the first one this morning in three parts.

First, is blessed.

It begins with blessed.

Jesus starts his sermon.

He opens his mouth and he starts with a very important and significant word, blessed.

Blessed is not some trivial word.

Blessed doesn't mean you know, I hope you have a good day.

Blessed is an attitude of happiness.

It really does mean happy.

Oftentimes in English, and this goes back to Augustine's confessions.

Augustine tried to divide the difference between happiness and joy.

He tried to make a distinction, and Christians have joy, not happiness, Augustine argued.

And when you understand what he was arguing and and why he was writing it in Latin, then you you get the distinction he was going for.

But it is not strictly speaking a biblical distinction.

In the Bible, it is one word happiness, joy, blessing.

It's all one word.

And it's the word Jesus starts with.

It is one of the greatest human desires.

Our own country starts with it, doesn't it?

The God created people for life, liberty, and the pursuit of oh, what great citizens you are.

The pursuit of happiness.

It's the highest thing a person can reach for.

People just want to be happy.

So much so that our country frames itself around that desire.

It is virtuous.

A country is virtuous, our own country would say it's virtuous as long as it facilitates your own pursuit of happiness in whatever way you want to pursue it.

That's even what how some people would define freedom.

The government can't tell you what can make you happy.

You can go after it your own way.

And there is, of course, blessings in freedom.

Often those blessings are turned into curses because people pursue happiness through the very means that are guaranteed to produce dissatisfaction.

People pursue happiness in a way that will only produce misery.

But the word itself is not to blame.

The concept of happiness is not to blame for the fact that people fail to achieve it.

The word itself implies prosperity, not material prosperity, but just like a personal, spiritual, emotional prosperity.

You're happy, not when you have a bunch of stuff, but it's an internal attitude inside your heart.

That's the fact, that's what the word I mentioned earlier, beatitude means.

The word beatitude means a state of happiness.

And that's how Jesus begins his sermon.

You can be happy.

You can be happy.

All of these beatitudes are conditioned on this point.

All nine of them begin with that same word blessed, blessed, blessed, and blessed, times nine.

The word beatitude, I could say it this way, this is kind of cheesy, but work with me.

The word beatitude is an attitude that you need to be to have happiness.

Just lean into it and embrace it.

It's an attitude that you gotta be.

That's what Jesus is presenting to you.

Now, people in the world pursue happiness in so many vile ways that always produce suffering.

You know, that you think the car will make you happy, and so you overextend yourself and buy yourself a car, and now you gotta pay for the car, and now the car breaks down, and you make sacrifices in other places of your life to pay for the car, and the car was supposed to make you happy, but now it's just it's just hurting you and bugging you.

You think you'll be happier if you get the bigger house with the bigger porch and the bigger yard and the bigger neighborhood or whatever, and so you overextend yourself to get that, and now you're paying a mortgage the rest of your life, and you know it vexes you, and the thing that you thought would bring you happiness ends up running your life for you.

People pursue happiness through sin.

They think if they can, you know, be with this person or that person, then they would be happy.

And of course, that kind of immorality leads to personal suffering in a very profound way.

Paul says it this way that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

You think that if you possess things, it will make you happy.

And of course, it produces, Paul says, in 1 Timothy 5, pangs of great suffering and guilt.

Jesus is offering a different way to be happy, but that's nevertheless what he's offering.

The state of happiness.

It can be yours, he says.

That's where the beatitudes begin with the word blessed, personal joy.

It's the offer that Jesus gives you.

The second component of this beatitude, or the second condition of this dormen, is that you be bankrupt.

You be blessed, you be happy, and the happiness comes through bankruptcy.

And this is where the Sermon on the Mount gets crazy.

It's the second word.

Jesus doesn't waste time with a long, boring introduction.

He goes right for the heart of it.

You can be happy when you are bankrupt, when you don't have anything.

This is upside-down world right here, because the basic logic of our world is that your happiness is dictated by things outside of you.

Do you understand that?

That's how most of the world functions.

You think if you have that car or you have that house, you'll be happy.

If you have that promotion, you'll be happy.

If you have those things, you'll be happy.

Now, obviously, that doesn't work.

Some of you, I know what some of you are thinking, Pastor Jesse, I'm way too spiritually mature to be that materialistic.

I would never say I'd be happy if I had a bigger house or a better car or a faster car or whatever.

I would never say that.

Of course not.

For me, I'm more spiritual, so I would say my happiness comes from the friends I make along the way.

My happiness comes from family and those kind of personal relationships.

But do you see that's still the same flawed logic?

That's pointing towards things outside of you to give you happiness.

The single person might say, I'd be happy if I was married.

The married person might say, I'd be happy if I have kids.

The parent might say, I'd be happy if I could sleep through the night.

The parent might I'd be happy if I had grandkids, and the grandparents might say, I'd be happy if my grandkids called me.

Like it's it's it's this never-ending chase for something outside of you to make you happy.

But do you notice where Jesus goes?

He doesn't go outside of himself.

You're happy when you are, and we'll skip the word bankrupt for a second, but in spirit, he goes inside of you.

The root of happiness, he says, is going to be found internal, not external.

It's all a shell game outside of you.

It's all paper money outside of you.

This job or that family relationship or this, you know, my family treats me that way or remembers this or my job treats me this way or this money or this car.

That's all external.

And Jesus says, no, there is a happiness that is inside of you.

But notice everything in the world, it's by addition.

If I gained that job, if I gained that family member, if I gained that relationship, if I gained that money.

Even at dinner the other night with my family, our kids went around the table and they all talked about what they would do if they got two million dollars.

A fun little dinner time conversation.

It's a fun conversation.

But notice, even kids understand it.

You can be happy if you get something outside of yourself.

That's the way people think.

But Jesus goes inside and he doesn't go by addition.

That's the crazy thing about what he says here.

He starts his sermon not with an addition problem, but a subtraction problem.

He doesn't say you can be happy if you gain.

He says you can be happy if you lose, if you are bankrupt, if you don't have anything.

He's not extolling physical poverty, of course.

He says, poor in spirit.

He's not talking about the person with too many possessions can't be happy.

He is talking about the person who in their heart, in their spirit, inside of themselves, has no value.

That's what bankrupt means.

That's what poor means.

You don't have anything that values inside of you where it counts the most.

That's not this word.

This is the specific Greek word for the kind of beggar that won't make eye contact with you, that cowers and hides, but with their hand out, they're too ashamed of their condition to even look at you when they ask you for money.

That's this word.

And Jesus says that happy are you when you are that way inside with what matters the most.

You are spiritually bankrupt.

It's a statement of poverty.

You don't have what you need.

You go to buy the house and you don't have proof of income.

You go to buy the house, you don't have a paycheck.

You don't have the capacity to take out the mortgage.

You're at the store, you filled up your grocery cart with groceries, and you're at the checkout line, but you don't have your wallet.

You don't have any cash.

You don't have any friends in the store, and the phone doesn't sync with the cash register.

You're out of luck.

You have what you need right there, but it's not available to you.

That's this word.

You show up to class for a test.

You didn't know there was a test.

You walk into class and the teacher's handing out tests.

You forgot what class it was.

You didn't do the reading.

You don't, you don't even know what you don't know that you don't know.

You don't have any knowledge that would help you.

That's this word.

You're a beggar.

But you're ashamed to be a beggar.

You don't have a leg to stand on spiritually.

Now, what is the currency here that we're trading as we talk about bankruptcy and poverty?

What's the currency we're trading?

The currency, of course, is righteousness.

That's going to come out through the rest of the Sermon on the Mountain.

It's going to be very clear just within a few weeks.

But take my word for it now.

The currency that Jesus is extolling, that we're talking about here, that we're trading here is righteousness.

Now, you are a beggar, you are poor because you don't have any.

So God demands righteousness from you.

Your pockets are empty.

But Jesus says, your happiness is holes in your spiritual pocket.

You recognize you're spiritually destitute before God.

Martin Lloyd-Jones renders this beatitude this way: quote, the recognition that you are nothing without God.

There's nothing in you worthy of salvation.

God will judge you and you will fail.

This is so opposite.

How is that lead to happiness?

It doesn't make any sense.

But this is the doorkeeper.

You have to recognize that there's nothing in you that makes you spiritually valuable before God.

You're spiritually poor.

Let me ask you some questions.

Have you ever lived your life as if you're in charge of your life?

That is idolatry.

But it's okay for a child because she's in the image of her parents.

Have you ever coveted something that's not yours?

That's theft.

Have you ever gotten angry with someone that you call them a fool?

That's murder, Jesus.

This is all I'm drawing from the Sermon on the Mount here.

You get that, right?

If you looked at a woman with lust, that's adultery.

So we're idol worshiping, stealing, adultering, thieves.

That's who we are.

Now ask yourself this question.

Why are you that way?

Why do you lie?

Why do you covet things that aren't yours?

Why do you look at someone with lust?

Why do you look at someone with anger and call them a fool?

Why do you do those things?

Now, if you think about it for 10 seconds, your answer is probably going to be outside of yourself again.

You'll probably say, Oh, you don't realize how dumb that person actually is.

Or you don't realize how happy that thing would actually make me.

What's outside of you?

If you think about it for another 15 seconds, you might say, Oh, I'm that way because everybody is that way.

The whole world is that way.

It's Adam and Eve's fault.

Again, outside of you.

You're pushing it back outside of you.

But if you think about it for 30 seconds, and we really don't like to think about it for 30 seconds.

But if you think about it for 30 seconds, you'll probably arrive at the right answer.

You are that way because you are not a good person.

And you might say, Oh, but there are people worse than me.

Again, outside of you, there are people worse than me.

Not really.

You know, you might see something and covet it but not steal it because you don't want to go to jail.

You might see somebody and lust after them, but you don't actually act on it because you want to keep your own family together.

You might be angry at somebody and think the world would be better off without them, but you're not going to actually kill them because you don't want to be a murderer and you don't want to go to jail again and all that.

You want to keep your family together, all those reasons.

But that those are all external reasons.

That says nothing about you.

Inside of you.

So you see the person that does go to jail for those things.

They just went to jail because they weren't restrained by external conditions like you are.

It's not the heart that's different.

You have to get to that point spiritually to move past the starting line in Christianity.

That's the entry fee to realize you don't have it.

That you're not a good person.

If you say, when I die, I'm gonna stand before God and He's gonna let me into heaven because I have tried my hardest, that's not poverty.

Poverty is not not trying hard enough.

When Jesus says, blessed are the poor in spirit, he's not talking about people that just need to try a little bit harder.

Again, we live in a world and culture that completely rejects this first beatitude.

We live in a pop psychology self-esteem culture.

You know, if a public school counselor heard this kind of talk to kids, they'd turn you in for child abuse.

We live in a culture that esteems self-esteem.

Whereas Jesus esteemes low esteem.

Poor in spirit is a beatitude.

Self-esteem is a bad attitude.

But that's what Jesus declares.

And what do you do with this verse?

You can't have any view of works righteousness when you encounter this verse.

That's why the Catholic Church looks at this verse and says it's talking about physical poverty.

Because in their minds, you can still do functions, and it can be even virtuous to have less things, but anybody somebody with lots of things has has more to give, and it's a works righteousness kind of system, and so blessed are the poor in spirit.

In other words, God will energize their acts at whatever socioeconomic status they're at.

But it's not about physical poverty.

It's not that a person has too many possessions to be happy, it's that the one possession they need, namely righteousness, is what they don't have.

It's not that you don't try enough, it's that you're not good enough.

That's why when Isaiah saw the vision of Yahweh, he burned his tongue and confessed his own sin.

When he encountered God, he went from, oh, yay, I'm a prophet.

There's the Lord in his temple.

This is delightful, to woe is me, I'm a sinner, I'm undone, I have unclean lips, people have unclean lips, scar my tongue.

This is Peter fishing with Jesus.

Remember, Jesus says, Why don't you fish over there?

And Peter said, Look, I grew up on this lake.

You don't even have a fishing license.

Who are you?

Jesus tells him, Do it.

He does it, casts his net that side, pulls up a catch of fish, just almost sinks the boat.

Do you remember what Peter said?

Woe is me.

Depart from me, Lord.

I am a sinner.

That's what happens when you encounter the living God.

This dictates the rest of the sermon.

Unless you've gotten to this point, you will not be able to engage with, interact, live out anything in the rest of the sermon.

Unless you realize that if God would ask you, do you have what it takes to be a Christian?

Your answer should be, no, I do not.

It's not in me.

It's not in me.

You try to slide into the kingdom of heaven, and the watchman at the door says, Do you have what it takes to be here?

I do not.

I do not.

First is the promise of happiness, blessed.

The second is the promise of emptiness, bankrupt.

Third, promise of holiness or heaven, born again, born again.

Jesus ends his first beatitude with saying, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Now all nine beatitudes work in a pair.

There's the entry, promise of promise of happiness, the middle condition, in this one it's spiritual poverty, and then the conclusion is the reward for those things.

And they all correspond.

You know, for example, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, merciful will receive mercy.

So they all correspond with each other.

This first one, blessed are the poor in spirit, those who have nothing spiritually, who are cowering spiritually, for they will receive the kingdom of heaven.

So that's the big delta there, the big gap there between what you have, which is nothing, and what you get, which is everything.

There's nothing higher than the kingdom of heaven.

I call it be born again because I read this Beatitude, and immediately my mind connects to John 3, which is a conversation that chronologically already happened by the Sermon on the Mount.

Nicodemus and Jesus encounter each other.

Nicodemus calls Jesus a good teacher, flatters him.

Jesus responds with, unless you are born again, you cannot even see the kingdom of heaven.

Forget about going there.

You won't even see it, my friends.

Nicodemus is appalled.

How can this be?

He's a Pharisee.

And Jesus tells him, How can this be?

How can it be that you're a teacher of Israel and you don't know that basic spiritual truth?

So when you see this, blessed is the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus is talking about being born again.

You die to yourself.

You look at your own life and you realize my own life, spiritually speaking, doesn't have anything of value, so I need a new birth.

I'm dead.

I need a new life.

I've died in Adam and Eve, I need a new life.

You know, the kingdom of heaven practices what's called birthright citizenship.

You're born into it, you're a citizen of it.

And it doesn't mean if you're born into a Christian family, you inherit the kingdom of heaven.

Oh no, that's your first birth, my friend, not your second.

You need a spiritual birth.

You cannot see the kingdom of heaven unless you are born again.

But you cannot be born again if you approach God as if you have spiritual resources of your own.

You have to approach God saying, I don't have what it takes.

I don't have anything spiritually of value.

I'm bankrupt, I'm poor, I'm cowering.

This is so opposite of the kingdoms of the world.

Kingdoms of the world don't talk like this.

In our own country.

Imagine a politician.

He says, I want to be the leader of this country.

You should vote for me because I don't have anything of value.

I have nothing to offer this country, I have no good ideas, no value or virtue of my own.

Vote for me.

You know, a CEO makes a pitch to investors.

Hey, gather around, check out my my newest idea.

Now, the first thing you need to know is that I'm really bad at this.

I don't have any good ideas.

I have no actual skills, marketable skills in any way, shape, or form.

You'd be crazy if you followed me, but go ahead and invest your money with me.

The kingdoms of the world do not operate that way.

But Jesus does.

You show up to him and you say, I don't have anything that you want.

I don't have any spiritual value of worth of my own.

It's so different in the kingdoms of this world.

But that's good because Jesus is not building the kingdoms of this world.

He's building his own kingdom.

And he's doing it one person at a time.

When people give their lives to Christ through faith, they become citizens, subjects, and co-regents in his kingdom.

You're beyond just a citizen.

When you're born again, you're born again as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, but you're more than a citizen.

You're a co-regent.

This is Revelation 1, verse 6.

Revelation 1:6

He has made us kings and priests in his kingdom, it says.

When you're in the kingdom of God, you're not merely the subject of Christ, you co-reign with him in his kingdom.

The kingdom is future, of course.

He's going to return and establish his kingdom on the earth in a physical sense in the future.

But in the meantime, he still is our king and we are his subjects.

We are his citizens, and we long for that day.

When Jesus is saying the kingdom of your heaven is yours if you are born again, he's an offer at that moment.

You can be born again and in that sense inherit the kingdom and be a kingdom citizen, live a kingdom life in a kingdom world, even though the kingdom itself will not come until the future.

And I harp on that for a second because I see a rise, this is a little pastoral warning for you here, I see a rise in what's called postmillennialism, and especially in American Christianity right now.

Postmillennialism is the idea that if the church, that the church has the capacity to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.

The church can establish, and our country was founded in a large part by postmillennials who thought they were building the kingdom of God here in this country.

Postmillennialism basically went away after World War II.

It's kind of hard to maintain after the Holocaust.

But it's making a return right now, and it's making a return with lots of people who are upset at the way our country is going.

They're upset with it being a post-Christian country.

And they don't want it to be a post-Christian country.

And so they want the church to be more aggressive in establishing an earthly kingdom.

But that is not what Jesus is talking about because that kind of kingdom cannot be established this way.

Do you remember what Jesus told Pilate?

If my kingdom was of this world, I'd have soldiers that would fight for it.

You see any soldiers around?

He told the high priest, as Jesus was being condemned to die, he said, Listen, I'm going to come in the clouds with angels and great glory.

You will see the Son of Man coming.

He's going to come in judgment first, and then he will establish his kingdom.

His kingdom is not of this world.

And here's a test to see if you're getting kind of snookered into post-millennialism.

If you hear lines or you say lines like this, if only the church did this, then our country would go this way.

That's postmillennialism.

Be very wary of that kind of talk.

You're not going to build an effective kingdom on earth with this kind of poverty-laden language, are you?

You're not going to build a kingdom on earth if your approach shoot is walk with your enemy twice as far as you want you to, give him twice as much as he asks for.

When you think like that, you're not building a kingdom on this earth.

2 Timothy 2, verse 22 kind of frames how our life will be in this kingdom mindset.

2 Timothy 2:22

If we suffer with him, we will reign with him.

For now, if you're a kingdom citizen, you will suffer in this world.

The earthly kings do not mesh well with citizens of heaven.

And so the Beatitudes end with this point in this world, you will suffer.

Blessed are those who are persecuted, blessed are those who are reviled.

But the Beatitudes all maintain this promise that when you live like this, you will reign for Him.

This kingdom is coming.

And if you're in a relationship with Jesus now, you are living out these kind of kingdom ethics here and now.

But the first of those ethics, there are more to come.

There's eight more to come, but the first of those ethics is spiritual brokenness, unworthiness.

Everyone realizing that the foot of the cross, they are bankrupt.

And so this is the vital question: to what kingdom do you belong?

Do you belong to the kingdom of heaven or earth?

The kingdom of heaven views spiritual bankruptcy as a blessing.

And you might say, how is it possible that spiritual bankruptcy is a blessing?

Well, the answer, because it's the only road to eternal happiness.

Does I've got nothing of spiritual value feel like it can't possibly produce happiness?

If you value the kingdom of heaven, you recognize the I have nothing of value puts the focus on Christ pushes everything to Christ.

Everything that's of value in the kingdom of heaven comes from Christ.

I'm so scared that people have skipped this beatitude.

They've skipped this doorman.

They've climbed into the church over another fence, snuck in the fire escape.

For you to be a Christian, a born-again believer, you have to have had this experience.

You have to have gotten to the point where you have said, I am not a good person.

I cannot earn my way to heaven, not because I don't try hard enough, but because I don't have the capacity.

I don't have the moral compass.

I don't have positive virtue.

Whatever language you use, I don't have anything spiritually of value before God.

The whole gospel is not in verse 3.

There's lots of other components of the gospel.

Namely the death and resurrection of Christ.

That Jesus, when he dies, dies for those who are unworthy.

He dies for sinners.

He rises from the grave so that his life can become ours and our sin became his.

For you to make that exchange, you have to approach Jesus with the attitude of I don't have what it takes.

There has to be an emptying before there can be a filling.

There has to be a recognition that you're broke before you can be repaired.

There has to be bankruptcy before there can be forgiveness of your sins.

There has to be death before there can be resurrection.

You have to confess your sins and your own unworthiness before you can get to the rest.

Even the rest of the Beatitudes.

God, we're thankful that you have given us such a clear call through your word to be broken and to confess our sins.

Lord, we know that there is in terms of virtue, nothing good in us that is our own.

Everything we have of value is in relationship back to you.

We are in your image, of course, that points to you.

We have your righteousness through the death and resurrection of Christ, that's yours that you gave us.

We have friendships with other brothers and sisters in the Lord, they too belong to you.

So what is good and noble and pure and true and holy is all yours.

What we bring to this is poverty, bankruptcy.

But God, we know that you hear us in our bankruptcy.

It's the beggars who are fed.

And so we are here with open hands, Lord, confessing, as we sang earlier, we confess our unworthiness to you, knowing that Christ died to pay the penalty for our sin.

He is our only hope of righteousness.

It's the righteousness that he gives us and is not of our own.

And so it is in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.