The Beatitudes - Part 4

And let me again pray for us before we listen to God's word.

A prayer taken from Psalm 19.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight.

O Lord, our rock, and our Redeemer.

In the name of Christ.

Amen.

So Matthew, Matthew 5, starting at verse 2.

We're going to read a little bit further this time.

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you, when others revile you and persecute you, and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

You are the salt of the earth.

But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?

It's no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.

You are the light of the world.

A city sat on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a sand, and it gives light to all in the house.

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, and give glory to your Father, who is in heaven.

Back in the killing days, they were called, in the times of the Covenanters up in Scotland, the 1660s to 1680s, when King Charles had returned to the throne after the Civil War and was cracking down on the Puritan descent, and particularly Puritan attempts to reform the Church of England, the days were worse in Scotland, where some of the covenanters, as they were called, still holding on to the solemn league and covenant that had been signed during the Civil War, were attempting to continue doing that.

And under very fierce persecution from King Charles and Archbishop Sharp, many of them died.

James Guthrie was a beloved minister in those days, and he looked at the scene in Scotland, and he looked at the scene in England, and very bravely he wrote a book which analysed the situation of the nation and declared that England and Scotland were under God's judgment for the things that were happening.

King Charles was not impressed by the book and brought James Guthrie to trial, where he was sentenced to be hanged and his head and hands cut off and his head paled on a pike and put above one of the docks in Edinburgh for all to see for months on end.

On the day James Guthrie was set to be executed, he rose at four in the morning for his devotions to worship the Lord.

And one of his cellmates said to him, James, how you know.

And he said, This is the day that the Lord has made.

And let us rejoice and be glad in it.

A little later, before he was let out, they brought him his children.

Sophia, William, just five years old.

And he took a five-year-old William on his knee and said to him, Willie, the day will come and they will cast up to you that your father was hanged, and they'll mock you for it.

But do not thou be ashamed, lad.

It is in a good cause.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And really, what I want to do for us this morning in this final session is just help us feel, and I guess kind of rub in a little bit into our paws, into our bones, maybe, that this is a blessing.

Probably obvious.

Even more than bless are those who mourn.

It's the one that we might be most tempted to run from.

Just a couple of sort of observations about where it lies.

I said that verse 4 is sort of the hinge in the Beatitudes.

You have this giving up on yourself in the first three, and then this desire for righteousness, which are then filled in the rest of the Beatitudes.

In a similar way, I think, this last one operates as a hinge between the Beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.

If you notice what I was uh what I went on to read up until verse 16, the Beatitudes are, in a sense, entirely almost within the Christian world, within even the individual Christian heart.

The last one picks up how the world will respond to you.

How do you interact with the world as a believer?

And then that's what Jesus goes on to talk about.

He expounds on the Beatitude of verses 11 and 12, we'll look at that in a second, and then goes on to talk more generally about the distinctiveness of Christians in the world.

You are the salt of the world, you are the light of the world.

Let your light shine before men.

And this last Beatitude here, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

It's leading us into that, which we'll only consider quite briefly this morning.

Notice as well, it does flow on from the previous seven.

Those who live in the way of the previous seven will find themselves persecuted for this righteousness.

Perhaps in particular, I read a commentary which was suggesting, it might in particular flow on from just the previous one.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they'll be called sons of God.

It might seem like a strange thing that being a peacemaker should land you in hot water, but actually we find in history and in experience that that does happen quite easily and quickly.

Psalm 120 has a very sort of crisp expression of this.

Too long have I lived, mourns the psalmist, among those who hate peace.

I am for peace, but when I speak they are for war.

Historically, there's an illustration of this in World War II in Japan.

You might know that there were plenty of people in Japan, very high up, who were quite keen for peace towards the end of the war.

Why did it take two atomic bombs falling when it was so clear that they'd already lost?

Because many of the Japanese politicians, many of the Japanese generals, knew that if they came out publicly in favor of surrender, in favor of peace, there were plenty of Japanese who would assassinate them.

And that was not something they took lightly, and so the war continued.

Those who make peace often find themselves persecuted, and those who make peace in the biggest war of all between God and man will find themselves persecuted most heavily.

A few things to say, just sort of by way of observation about what Jesus means here.

First of all, let me uh highlight a little kind of limitation on what on this blessing.

I don't want to say it's sort of constrained, but uh, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, which means you don't get to claim this blessing if you're being told off for doing something wrong.

Um the Apostle Peter in 1 Peter 3 uh highlights this where he goes, if you suffer for doing wrong, then that's just what you deserved.

And that's kind of the end of that story.

Uh if you suffer for doing right, suffer for righteousness' sake, that is a precious thing in the eyes of God.

So you don't get to go and be incredibly obnoxious and kind of do all sorts of horrible things, people, and then say, Well, it was all for Jesus' sake, and now you're persecuting me, so you know I'm very blessed.

So don't do that.

Um but really that's not much of a limitation, is it?

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Notice as well how Jesus expands that in the following verses.

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Notice the way that the parallel to for righteousness' sake is on my account.

Jesus thinks that basically righteousness means him.

Following him, serving him.

It's one of these places in the Sermon on the Mount which highlights his very high understanding of his own role in salvation.

And just that's worth mentioning because if you do find people who think who think you know Jesus is just a good teacher, and he's not particularly sort of setting up himself as a head of a religious movement or anything, he's just teaching sort of pure religion as they conceive it.

Perhaps you might find this in kind of syncretists, Hindus, maybe agnostics who want to respect Jesus.

Often the Sermon on the Mount is one of the bits where they'll go, Oh, yeah, that's kind of you know nice, pure kind of ethical teaching.

And it's well worth knowing just a few bits in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus highlights himself as of massive importance.

For example, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, when he says that everyone in the world will one day face him on the throne, and whether he says, I know you or I don't know you will determine their eternal destiny.

When he says, whether you are building on sand or building on rock is whether you're building on my words.

Here, where he associates righteousness with just following him.

He has no, there's no question, as Jesus preaches this great sermon, that he is presenting himself to his hearers as Lord and God.

That's by way of an aside.

Notice as well from verse 11 the nature of persecution.

What does it mean to be persecuted?

Well, it might mean, James 2, 3, your head gets cut off and stuck on a spike.

That is a sort of fairly extreme form of persecution.

And Jesus does not limit the blessing to that, do you see?

Verse 11 bless are you and others revile you.

That's mockery.

It's contempt from the world.

Persecute you is uh literally that's pursue.

Uh, when they are kind of in some way putting pressure on you for righteousness because of the righteousness which you want to pursue, when they utter all kinds of evil against you falsely, on my account, when you are lied about, in order to make others feel better about you and the way that you are living, uh, when they try and get you through that.

I think, I hope it's obvious that although we, I think, need to rightly say in the UK in 2026, we are not persecuted in the way that much of the church has been persecuted through the ages, and much of the church even around the world is persecuted today, yet this blessing can still apply to us, can't it?

These are things that we do face in society and that you might yourself uh be able to think of just in the last week, even, uh as happening happening around you, happening uh to you.

Let me just pause to address something which might be in your minds.

It may be that some of you now or at various stages in your life find yourself asking the question I don't feel like I am being persecuted.

That sort of pressure from the world is not something that I'm facing at the moment.

Does that mean that I'm in trouble?

And what I say, a couple of things to that.

Um, it may well be that there are seasons of persecution and seasons of peace in your life, just as there are in the life of the church.

We find in the book of Acts, for example, that there's a great persecution that breaks out after the death of Saul, but then not long after the persecution, you find in, I can't remember if it's Acts 8 or Acts 9, that it says there's a season of peace, and the the church is built up and they weren't being persecuted, and that was also good and from the Lord.

In 1 Timothy chapter 2, we're instructed to pray for our rulers in order that we might live peaceful and quiet lives in the world.

1 Timothy 2 · chapter mention

And so living peaceful and quiet lives in the world is something which God sees as a good thing, and something which when we receive it, we can accept as a good thing as well.

We don't need to think if we were being faithful, we would all the time be being chased and lied about and etc.

etc.

So there are seasons of peace as well as seasons of persecution.

It may be that if you're looking around and going, I don't feel like I'm being persecuted, it's possible that your sort of bar for what counts as persecution is too high in some ways.

As I say, we live in a time where there's lots of legal protections afforded to Christians, where the general sort of tenor of our nation, even though there's much to agree with, is in you know pretty warm towards the church in lots of ways.

And so what the opposition of the world looks like is going to be more fragmented and smaller than it is in many parts of the world.

That does not mean that when you face it it doesn't hurt, and it doesn't mean that it doesn't count.

Having said those things, it's possible, isn't it?

There might be some sitting in this room who do not feel any heat from the world because, in fact, you've made far too much peace with the world.

It's certainly possible to be a student going to school who never faces any ridicule from classmates because actually they don't know that you're a believer.

Or if they do know, they don't observe anything different about you, that would make a ridicule of you impossible to be in the workplace.

A very similar thing.

So that might be something to reflect into prayer, but perhaps you talk to your pastors about.

In Acts chapter 5, the um apostles are dragged in front of the Sanhedrin, and uh they've been preaching.

Acts 5 · chapter mention

Preaching about the Lord Jesus Christ, they've been doing miracles, uh, and the Sanhedrin, this is all happening.

It's easy to read the book of Acts and forget this.

This is all happening a matter of weeks, months after the execution of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Uh, things are pretty kind of febrile, there's a lot of static in the air, and for them to be going around preaching that the Lord Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and that everyone needs to repent and putting him to death, that's not something which the rulers are super jazz is being preached, and so they they drag them in, and uh they are it's obvious that the death penalty is on the cards at that point, but uh Gamaliel, who's not a believer, uh, nevertheless stands up and goes, probably better not.

Um might be with them in some way, and uh, in that case we won't win.

And if he's not with them, we'll just fizzle out anyway.

So let's not make a big scene.

Um, and so they listen to him and they decide not to make a big scene, instead, they call the apostles in and whipped them, and that's their version of not making a big scene.

And um, they beat them and then they say to them, You must not preach in this name anymore, and off you go.

And the apostles leave.

And there is a wonderful, wonderful verse that says, They left and went home rejoicing that they were counted worthy of suffering disgrace at the name.

These apostles, they've had the Holy Spirit come on them at Pentecost, they've been preaching absolute fire, thousands of people converted, and they are overwhelmed by the privilege of having those whips hit their backs.

What a marvellous thing.

Their eyes light up with it.

And this is, I think, something which perhaps previous ages of the church, which faced more visible external persecution, perhaps had a little bit more on their bloodstream than we do.

There's a wonderful story about the uh church father Origen, who lived in the 200s, I think, um, in Egypt in Alexandria, in during the times before uh Constantine, the emperor, um converted when there was massive persecution, and many believers were uh killed, often not kind of in a kind of stately handed-down edict from the judges, but by mobs who would sort of rove the city, and when when things kind of flashed up, the mobs would come there, kill a bunch of Christians.

And uh at one point, this uh mob thing was happening, there were there were crowds out in the streets, and there was a pretty strong sense that if you went out and identified as a Christian, that would probably be your last day on earth.

And Origen was a teenager, and he was full of fire for the Lord, and his mum thought, if if I don't do something, he's gonna go out and he's gonna be like, I'm a Christian, get me, and they'll get him, and that'll be the end of my son.

And so she hid all his clothes, so he didn't have anything to wear, and he couldn't go out naked, and so that was you know, instead, he had a long, fruitful ministry in Alexander, preaching preaching the word and studying scripture, and the church was very much blessed.

But that desire, oh, how good it would be! If the Lord would give that to me, that would be glorious.

It's right, isn't it?

That's what the apostles had.

That's what Origin had.

There's a slightly controversial preacher in America called Doug Wilson, um, and he tells a story of the very start of his kind of being noticed by the world, where he had gone on a radio show, I think it was, and um uh done some teaching on kind of masculinity and femininity, um, criticized feminism in some ways.

And uh off the back of that, in the post, I think the next day, maybe or the next week, he got just a whole pile of hate mail.

And his wife said to him, like, what is this?

What's happening?

He said, So this is my promotion.

And he's uh as much as there are various things that you have to be careful, but it wasn't, um he has had a massive impact for the church in the decades since then.

Standing firm and speaking the truth.

Just think about the following verses You are the light of the world.

Let your light shine so the people might give glory to your Father in heaven.

Jesus is saying, it is a wonderful thing for Christians to be distinctive.

Show the world that you're different.

And we want that, don't we?

I think that that sort of resonates in the Christian heart.

We hear testimonies.

I was hearing a testimony just from one of you this weekend of not being a believer and then just meeting some Christians and coming from a sort of broken home, meeting Christians, and they're different.

I've heard more and more testimonies like that this this weekend, and and uh and sort of being attracted in by the distinctiveness of what you see.

And I think we hear those things and we go, oh, I would love, I would love to be like that.

I would love for people to see my peace, my my generosity.

You know, I want to be that kind of distinctive believer.

And then, you know, we are in the office or we are at school, and the opportunities to kind of be really peaceable and really gentle don't seem to be arising, and instead we get opportunities to be distinctive in all sorts of ways that we know everyone around us is gonna absolutely hate.

You know, some some topic about kind of gender and sexuality or whatever it might be is coming up, ethical issues where we know that what the scripture teaches is just miles away from what people want to hear.

And we go, I don't I don't want to be distinctive like that.

That's not the kind that I'm looking for.

We fear, I think, we desire distinctiveness and fear pushback.

And we'd love the law to arrange it so that we can have the kind of distinctiveness that doesn't really generate pushback.

And if you believe that resonates at all with you, I'd love you to see this morning that what the Lord Jesus wants to do for you is to take that stumbling block out of your way, to help you stand up straight, with it with courage in your heart, because you know that actually if you get to be distinctive in the way that everyone loves, that's great, praise the Lord.

And if you get to be distinctive in the way that people around you hate, that's great, praise the Lord too.

That's glorious.

Because the Lord in heaven sees it and loves it.

In that moment.

In that moment where you are faced with standing out of the Lord and not being ashamed of the Lord.

I want to say one thing that we do with that, I think, is that if we take this attitude that to be persecuted is a lovely thing, to stand up and take heat for the Lord Jesus Christ is a beautiful thing, that will affect the way that we see other believers who are being persecuted.

I think we naturally don't.

We love those stories from ages past of Christians who've held firm, uh, gone to the scaffold or whatever it is.

Um, but I want to particularly apply this to one way in which we might stumble on this, which is when we see someone being persecuted, and there's something about what they've done or what they've said, which actually we go, oh, I don't I wouldn't quite go all the way with them on that.

Uh I've been reading this book, Fair Sunshine, by uh Jock Purbus.

The illustration from James about James Guthrie comes from that.

It's a book about covenanters.

I recommend it.

You're maybe halfway through, but it's pretty good.

And in that book, it describes the way in which those who were trying to hold fast to the Lord Jesus under great persecution in Scotland had various pretty significant differences of opinion about how they should do that.

And there were some who were going about that, just going, I'm just going to preach.

And if they put me, you know, I'll take a screen through, I'll write some books, and if they want to kill me for that, then they can kill me for that.

And there were some who went, you know, this is off the back of a civil war, and the war hasn't really ended, and we aren't going to take up arms because that seems to be what the Lord is calling us to do.

You can imagine, can't you, the temptation for the two different groups, those who are taking up arms and those who are not, to kind of be out each other's throats.

One of the wonderful things about that killing time is that they weren't.

He tells the story of what's his name, David David Haxton, who was with a bunch of these covenanters.

When the covenanters came upon the carriage of Archbishop Sharp, the great traitor of the Chilex, one who'd been sort of warring in the blood of the Saints, basically, and sending many of them to the scaffold.

And the Covenanters with David Haxton went, This is war.

We've got to get it.

It's been handed over to us by the Lord.

And so they go and they kill Archbishop Sharp, which brings down a much fiercer persecution on them, but they think it's the right thing to do.

David Hankston did not join them.

So I don't feel like I've got permission from the Lord to do this.

He held back.

He didn't join in the fight, he didn't go with him.

But they catch him.

They know that he's part of the same group.

And they torture him horribly.

And they want him to give up the names of those who were with him.

And he will not.

Though he was not in agreement with them on a very significant issue with very significant consequences for the Church in Scotland, yet he loved their love for the Lord Jesus Christ.

And he knew that he was on the same side.

And I want to say to us, um, Jock Purbus sort of makes his own comment here, that as he looks at those who have taken up arms, he says, Whatever we feel about their decision, we cannot but love them.

Those rebels so glorious, so brave for God.

And I want to highlight this because my fear for the church in this country is that when persecution does hit, it will often hit those who were in some way persecuted.

In some way, their great love for the Lord Jesus Christ and willingness to take a hit was in some way mingled with something a bit unwise.

And that's why they were kind of the first on the chocolate block.

And it's so easy, it's a real temptation for us, I think, to latch onto that thing.

I don't think that was very wise what they did, and missed the great love they had for the Lord Jesus.

Couldn't they have found another way?

And so that baker or that teacher or that chaplain or the man arrested praying outside the abortion clinic or the street preacher, all of those real instances, by the way, don't find that they get our support.

We found some little kind of thing that we don't quite agree with them on.

Take it as your motto.

Whatever we feel, we cannot but love them.

Those rebels so glorious, so brave for God.

Take it as your motto that the one who has been brave for God will always find a friend in you.

And of yourself.

I've already mentioned that.

When you're in the room, remember the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me just give you one little suggestion.

Pray this yes, it's you too.

Ask the Lord Jesus.

It's your will and as much as I'll be able to take, as much glory as I can handle, give me this blessing.

Quite a scary prayer to actually pray, because you might answer it.

But well worth doing it.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And notice that that is the same blessing as the very first one in the list, which sort of wraps this whole list of eight together and shows that this is not kind of a ladder ascending up, such that the sort of basic Christianity is at the start and the kind of really glorious Christianity for some Christians at the end, they're this is applying to all believers, more than having the kingdom of heaven.

What does it mean to have the kingdom of heaven?

Being given a kingdom in Scripture does not mean becoming a citizen of that kingdom, but ruling it.

Seated on the throne.

And so I want to finish by thinking about the Lord Jesus, and in particular our connection with him in this blessing.

Lord Jesus, again, obviously is, at least it's so obvious, isn't it, the one that encapsulates this most of all, who embodies it for us, the one who is persecuted for righteousness' sake.

In the days of his flesh, he offered up loud cries and tears to God, and he was heard because of his reverence, it says in Hebrews 5.

He goes to the cross and he goes, the world needs to know, goes to the cross, so that the world may learn that the Son loves the Father.

He is persecuted for righteousness' sake.

Pilate says to him, you know, what are you here for?

And he says, I've come to testify to the truth.

Pilate mocks at him, what is truth?

But he does testify in quiet death to the truth of the love of God.

For righteousness' sake, he suffers.

And through his suffering receives eternal glory and rule over all authorities and powers, all peoples and nations.

And on his throne his stars shine as his glory.

And you, believer, get to share in that glory.

But in a mysterious and wonderful way are a sharing in the sufferings of Christ.

So that when Saul is on the Damascus road, breathing out violent threats against God's people, on his way to throw them into prison and seek to kill them, the Lord Jesus appears to him in a vision on the road and says to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

Lord Jesus is in heaven.

He can't be heard anymore.

He's in his resurrected body.

There's no pain that you can apply to him.

But his members are on earth, the members of his body, through the union of the Holy Spirit.

And as Saul is persecuting them, he's persecuting the Lord Jesus Christ.

Talks extraordinarily in Philippians of his own ministry and the suffering that he faces in ministry later afterwards converted him.

He talks about it in this remarkable phrase that he is filling up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.

And that we get to, in a sense, fill up the glory of Christ in suffering by being his suffering members on earth.

So that at the end we have Christ and his glorious perfected bride, both of them sharing in the glory of having gone through pain for the sake of the Father.

We share in his death, says Paul.

So that we might share in his resurrection.

So, brothers and sisters, we had a I hope you feel, I've certainly felt myself a very blessed weekend here.

It's a lovely thing, isn't it, to be spending time with God's people.

Tomorrow you go back into the world.

Lift your head.

You're being given glory by your Father.

Oh, how remarkable.

Just how remarkable your blessings, your love for us, as we've been thinking all weekend.

These little things on our heart are greeted by you with such overwhelming generosity.

We do not deserve the honour of sharing the sufferings of Christ.

We praise you that you hold out that glory to us.

And we ask for hearts to see this glory.

We pray that through our lives the Lord Jesus Christ might be exalted.

In whose name we pray.

Amen.

I'm not leaving because I believe that now is QA.

Is that right?

Nine minutes.

Nine minutes for QA.

Sorry I racked along.

In the nine minutes that you have.

Yeah, thank you.

And I think this is a very sort of wide principle that when we face not just suffering from persecution, but any kind of suffering in this life, the scripture tells us to treat it as a glory.

So James 1 verse 2 counted all joy when you face trials of various kinds.

James 1:2

And so that includes persecution, but it also includes cancer or stuffing material, whatever it might be.

And the Lord is using those things to refine you and to make you persevere and to build up your character and all those things that James says will lead to eternal glory.

You find the same thing in Romans 5.

And I often suggest to my church that one of the things that means is not that we should stop praying for relief from suffering.

That is very clearly a scriptural prayer to pray.

When you see a person who is church, it's absolutely right to pray that the Lord would grant them relief.

And when you see a sick Christian, it's absolutely right to pray that they'll be healed.

We definitely shouldn't stop doing that.

But we should pray more than that.

We should also pray the Lord would use that as He promises for their good and for their glory.

And so I think, yeah, we can definitely be praying that for the Persputer Church as well.

Thanking the Lord for those who are standing firm, thanking him for the glory in heaven that they'll be shining out eternally.

That'd be a great thing to pray.

Gosh, um, thank you.

Great question.

Um I don't feel like I'm super wise on this matter, to be honest.

Um, this is something which I'm I'm sort of trying to think through for our own little church, and we don't really have much of any kind of formal ministry to the poor yet, so um, probably better to ask your own ministers, you have more experience of these things.

Um I think I I will say, I I definitely don't know this in your congregation.

Um, I think that there's a trajectory in this country where uh basically liberal Christians who've let go of the core elements of the gospel, often in a desire to have some sort of form of godliness while denying the power, latch onto social works and ministries.

And in a kind of reaction against that, it means that faithful Bible-believing Christians can often be suspicious of those things.

And I'll just encourage us to go.

The church all through the ages has really taken seriously the need to care for the poor, and uh don't let us take the foot off the gas on that thing just because some liberals are also doing it and claiming that's Christian.

Um, that'd be a great, a great shame and a loss to us.

Yeah.

That doesn't really help in practice, does it?

But just to kind of encourage us for that attitude, which I think if the attitude's there, the worst will come.

Um encourage you, don't like the church is called to do that corporately, but also individually, and also so quietly that nobody else will know.

So go to it.

Yeah, great question.

Um, I think we do need to say that the Lord in heaven does not look at our sufferings with a kind of scientist looking at an ant kind of like objectivity, like, oh no, it's gonna be good for them in the end, so it's totally fine.

Like the Lord enters into our uh sorry, he is a compassionate God.

Um we can cry out to him not feeling like he's just super far away and just sort of pulling some strings, and that's really important.

Um at the same time, we do need to go.

The Lord sees the end from the beginning, and he desires better things for us than we often desire.

He knows that these things do lead to good and to glory for us, and he's willing to go through for us to go through pain in order that we might experience that fruit.

Scripture talks about that in so many ways.

Um, you know, that the father pruning the vine, that it might be more fruitful.

I think if you want one illustration of it, it's the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Father loves the Son, and because the Father loves the Son, he sends him to the cross.

Wouldn't it be uh better for there to be looking in the first place?

No.

Why not?

Uh well we know that because the Lord in his wisdom has decided that, and so we can just go, that's clearly, that's clearly what he thinks, and he's wiser than me.

Um I think I think we there's there's a kind of work of faith to go go here, where we go, it it the Lord is going to bring good out of the suffering, otherwise he wouldn't send it.

In fact, he's gonna bring enough, so much good out of the suffering, that the good that comes is greater than the suffering that it came through.

And the Lord does promise that to us.

Read that in Revelation, and he calls us to trust him in that.

And that's often what the exercise of faith is.

There's loads to meditation on here.

I think James 1 and Romans 5, you've just mentioned, are really good places to start that thinking.

Very often, yes, if that's the question, do we have choices?

Um sometimes the the there's only one route which is obedient laid out to us.

Um I think very often we're called to prudence and wisdom and weighing up various different paths, and you know, you decide which city you're gonna live in and what career you're gonna have, and all those things.

There's just a great deal of Christian freedom in that.

And the fact that one of those paths might be the most obviously kind of filled with suffering doesn't mean that that's the path you have to take.

Um I don't think I've said this, but let me just lay out so clearly.

The persecution that Jesus particularly highlights in the verse that we've just looked at is part of the wider picture that all suffering is used by God for the good of believers.

And so if I look at a particular form of suffering and I go, I can't label that persecution, that doesn't mean that I'm like, what a second, it doesn't count.

Like it's still something which if if I take it on for the Lord's sake, that the Lord is pleased to see me do.

Does that help at all?

Come and talk to me again about it afterwards if you if you'd like to probably like a bit more.

Thank you.

Um, what a big question um to deal with in one minute.

Uh basically every good thing that God gives us is a blessing.

Um and I think when you we particularly find in the Old Testament that um lots of just physical material things should be seen as blessings.

Material wealth, the Lord who gives you the ability to produce wealth, it says in Juju Toronto.

Um children, they're a blessing, a happy home, a stable country, uh all those things that good things from God, just the harvest in your fields that comes from the Lord.

Um in the New Testament, I think what we get is not that those things get downgraded or scrapped.

They're still blessings.

If they weren't blessings, God wouldn't have given them in the first place.

They are genuinely good things, and when we receive them, we should be grateful for them.

But I talked uh yesterday, I think, about kind of ordered affections, ordered desires that we should desire greater things more than lesser things.

I think what the New Testament does is as the Lord Jesus comes, as he gives the Spirit, as he reveals the future, he opens, he sort of pulls back the curtain and shows us higher things.

And so we we go, for example, I would love to have uh you know a happy, ordered home with a bunch of kids in it where they're playing around, and that's all cheerful, and that is a genuinely good blessing.

Um and if the Lord calls me to suffer in a way that might disrupt that, that's an even higher blessing.

Not that I despise the lower one, but that I have it rightly ordered in my heart.

Um just one more thing to add to that is um I think in the Old Testament, those physical blessings are largely presented to us just as those things will come through obedience, just because that's the way the world works, and kind of the setup of creation sense.

There is, I think, an overlay of kind of a particular covenant framework on that, where in order to illustrate the way grace works, um, the Bible comment, if you do these things, you will receive these blessings.

Not just sort of general covenant, but a specific comment.

That belongs to the old covenant setup, and that doesn't apply so much to believers now.

But I think we can often take that kind of the fact that we're not in that sort of covenant as a way to go what all those blessings are things that Christians shouldn't care about now.

And that's not what Scripture teaches us.

You shouldn't care about all those things, but you should have the higher blessings that Jesus revealed, reigning over them in your heart.

I hope that helps you read that.

Father says, Thank you so much for the end.

Love blessings.