The Beatitudes - Part 1

Well, if you would like to turn your Bibles to Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

We're in the Beatitudes.

If you know Matthew at all, you might know that Matthew 5 to 7 is the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew has five blocks of teaching scattered through his gospel, a little bit like the five books of the law in the Old Testament setting out a kind of new way of being God's people.

This is the first of those.

And it opens wonderfully with a blessing, or in fact, eight blessings, which the Lord Jesus speaks to his people.

I'm going to read them.

I'll pray again for us, and we'll dive in.

Matthew 5, verse 2.

Matthew 5:2

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.

Father, we thank you for these, the words of your son, blessings on us, and we pray that as we consider them now, we would indeed be blessed.

In his name we pray.

Amen.

A little over a hundred years ago in Scotland, there was a preacher called Robert Murray Chain.

In his day, he was very famous, an outstanding preacher, deeply godly, loved by those who experienced his ministry, and God really blessed his work.

His church grew massively during his short time there.

He was one of those stars that burns very bright and then burns out, and died very young, younger than I am.

After he died, some poor guy had the job of trying to step into his shoes and minister to his church, the one he'd left behind.

When the new minister arrived, he was a sensible man and he knew that there was obviously many remarkable things about McChain that he wouldn't necessarily be able to imitate.

But he thought worth getting a sense of what people saw in him and what was so special about him.

So he pulled aside one of the older men in the congregation, I think one of the deacons, someone who'd been there all the way through McChain's ministry, and said, What was it about him?

What did he do differently?

Why was he so blessed?

And the old man said, I won't tell you, I'll show you.

Come with me to his study and I'll show you.

So they went to McChain's study where he used to write his sermons.

And the old man said to the new minister, sit down in his chair.

The minister sat down on the desk.

And the old man said, Now, put your head on the desk and weep.

But that was McClain's secret.

His work was watered by tears.

My guess is that most of us are not used to thinking about tears as a blessing.

If I ask you, what do you think it looks like to be a really blessed Christian?

Tears would probably not feature on the list that you immediately drew up.

If you imagined in your mind a picture of a really blessed Christian, they probably wouldn't be crying.

But do you think that they feature in Christ's list?

Blessed are those who mourn, he says.

In this first session, I want to look at the first three of these, they're called Beatitudes, which just means blessings.

The first three of these blessings, which I think are all along this theme.

Poor in spirit, mourning, and meekness.

And my hope is that this first session, although it is probably going to be the hardest of all four, will be very spiritually useful for us.

Here's the thing: sadness and sorrow in the Christian life, we know will ultimately go.

We rejoice in that.

They are not going to hang around forever.

We read with joy those words.

One day God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

But what I want us to see this morning is that there is a particular kind of sadness, a directed sorrow, that in this world is really healthy.

There are tears that if you're not weeping them, you're missing out.

I hope it seems a strange thing to say, but I hope we might finish with you actually wanting to cry.

Not necessarily feeling the tears welling up, but longing that God might give you this sort of blessing.

And if that sounds like a totally new idea, then that means the Lord Jesus Christ has something to teach us and to bless you with this morning.

The way we're going to do it is we're going to work through these three in order, but just the first half of each one.

And then I want to come back, having worked through all three, to look at the blessings, the second halves together.

And then briefly at the end we'll consider the one who is speaking to us.

So, first three, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Right off the bat, that is a huge, I promise, isn't it?

We'll think about that more in a second, the kingdom of heaven.

But just briefly to say the glory and joy and never-ending life of heaven, here you have, in the first line of Jesus' first great sermon, the only entry requirements.

Here are the people who have the kingdom.

Who are they?

The poor in spirit.

What does that mean?

Well, being poor is about not having what you need.

You go to buy something, and your card is rejected.

You go to the cash point and your account is empty.

A mother tries to feed her kids, but can't quite stretch the budget to give them all three meals a day, so she only gets one.

Not having the resources that you need is horrible.

It's an awful experience being poor.

It's scary, it can be humiliating, it can feel very hopeless.

And the Lord Jesus says that's how you need to be spiritually.

In other words, when you look at yourself, you need to have that feeling that you might get by looking at an empty bank account.

I do not have the spiritual resources that I need.

I cannot spiritually provide for myself.

One day I'll stand before God and I have nothing of my own to show him.

Jesus says the way into the kingdom, the only way into the kingdom, is to realize that you cannot get yourself into the kingdom.

And he illustrates that in Luke chapter 18 with a story, a wonderful one.

Luke 18 · chapter mention

It's often been pointed to as sort of teaching this very central truth in the Christian life.

You can turn there if you like, but I'm just going to retell it to us, so feel free just to listen.

The story goes: two men go into the temple to pray.

There is a good man and a bad man, basically.

And Jesus' telling of it, it is a Pharisee, the good man, and a tax collector, the bad man.

The Pharisee has lived his whole life by God's word.

He's keen to keep God's laws.

And he does, everyone would agree, a pretty good job of doing that.

He loves discussing theology.

If I can sort of modernize it a bit, he's at church twice a Sunday, every Sunday.

He's keen, he's on all the rotors.

And the bad man is bad.

He has not darkened the door of the temple in a long time.

To be honest, when he arrives in the temple, not everyone is 100% comfortable with him even being there.

He's not just the sort of person that religious people would think of as bad.

He's the sort of person that everyone hates.

As I say in the story, he's a tax collector, which means he is both someone who's greedy for his own gain and prone to cheating people, and also someone who has, in order to do that, betrayed his own people and worked with the oppressors, the Romans.

We don't feel the same way about tax collectors today, I don't think.

If you said you worked for HMRC, I'm not sure that you get the same level of booze.

Kind of guy who gets rich off shady deals, and then uses his money to go to Thailand for illicit things, that kind of guy.

And each man prays.

The good man's prayer is very simple.

God, he prays, thank you.

Thank you that I am the way I am, the way you've made me to be.

I'm very grateful.

Thank you that I'm not like other people, not committed adultery or murder, not like that.

Tax collector over there.

I give my money to church, I pray every day.

Thank you, God.

You've been very kind to me.

Amen.

Bad man's prayer is also very simple.

He doesn't even look up to God.

Instead, he stares at the ground.

So distressed that he beats himself on the chest as he prays.

And his prayer is God, have mercy on me.

A sinner.

And then the two men go home.

And Jesus says, two men prayed, but God listens to one of them.

One man goes home justified, righteous in God's sight, pleasing to him, his friend.

The other man walks home still deeply guilty.

God listens to the tax collector and ignored the Pharisee.

That parable illustrates exactly the point of this first blessing.

It is the poor in spirit that God listens to.

It is the poor in spirits who are in the kingdom.

Jesus finishes in Luke 18 that story by saying, Everyone who exalts themselves will be humbled, and everyone who humbles themselves will be exalted.

I just want to press home one little detail of that story.

When the tax collector prays, he doesn't pray, God, I have sinned.

Have mercy on me, I have sinned.

He says, God, I am a sinner.

It's not just that I have done bad things.

Much deeper than that is that I am a bad person.

That's what it means to be poor in spirit.

Not just to say, I haven't got righteousness, I haven't added up my list of good things high enough, but to say more, I can't get righteousness.

I'm too screwed up.

Evil is too deep in me.

I do not have the resources that I need in myself.

The reason I want to press that home is that I think we can very easily slip into thinking that, for example, when we confess our sins in church on a Sunday or speak to others about our need of forgiveness, that what we're really saying is, I have done some list which we might admit to in our minds, I've done a little list of bad things.

Probably if I went around this room, every one of us has stuff in our life that we know isn't sorted.

The guilt you feel over perhaps neglected quiet times, devotions, pornography that you watched this week, gossip that you shared in, resentments that you can't shake off, laziness that keeps on tripping you up, or worse things, or other things.

But it may be that there are some in this room who are slightly puzzled by the presence of those things.

You know, you have this thing that you've done or that you keep doing, and it sort of why is that?

Can't figure out why I keep failing to do what feels like this easy thing.

Maybe you think, if, you know, this is a problem for now, but if I just set my mind to it and grit my teeth, I'm gonna spend next month focusing on this thing, and then I'll just crack it.

I could just knock this on the head, I could stop.

And if that's you, you need to let the Lord Jesus speak to you.

The reason why there are individual sins in your life is because you are a sinner.

You are in your own nature, and apart from the grace of God, a bad person.

And you can't deal with it.

Maybe you could deal with one or two of the results of being a sinner.

Maybe you could just discipline yourself into fixing that particular thing which is bothering you.

But you can't deal at a deep level with the underlying sins because that's you.

It's not to say there's no hope for change, there's huge hope for change, and we're going to see that later this morning.

But it does not come from you when it comes.

Jesus says the first step to being in my kingdom, the step which takes you through the door, is giving up on yourself.

I can't do it.

God must do it.

God be merciful to me, a sinner.

And really, the other seven blessings that Jesus goes on to expound really just build off that one.

They show us what happens when we give up on ourselves.

So let's go on to mourning and then to meekness.

Blessed are those who mourn.

What does that mean?

Worth saying that when Jesus says blessed are those who mourn, he is not pronouncing just a very general blessing on anyone who feels sad for any reason.

We find elsewhere in Scripture, 2 Corinthians 7 would be a good example of the place where this is unpacked, that there are there is remorse, godliness, mourning that leads to life, and there's a regret that leads to death.

You might think of Peter and Judas at the cross of Christ, both deeply distressed, and Peter goes and weeps and is later restored.

And Judas goes in deep sorrow and bitterness of heart and hangs himself.

The two outcomes could not be more different, and because Judas' mourning was not the kind of mourning that Jesus is blessing here.

To understand what that kind of mourning is, you need to see it in context.

This is the sort of mourning which follows on from being poor in spirit.

Really, the sort of mourning which is about being poor in spirit, which I think again highlights what's going on in Luke 18 in that story of the tax collector.

Notice that he does not stroll in and say, God, on reflection, realize that I've been a bit of a rotter.

And so notice that I can't save myself and I need your mercy.

So if you could show me some mercy, I'd be much obliged.

No.

He grieves.

He can't look up to heaven.

He beats his chest with sorrow.

God be merciful to me, a sinner.

It hurts him to see what he's like.

He's mourning.

No.

I'm not saying that we need to be crying all the time.

In fact, I want to say, having introduced this by talking about tears, that physical tears are not compulsory in the Christian life.

We're all wired in different ways.

Some of us tear up quite easily, and some of us you can be all chewed up inside, and your eyes would be as dry as the Sahara, and that's totally fine.

But let me say, it should, whatever's going on outside, it should hurt.

When you see yourself as poor, when you get your real spiritual status, it should hurt.

When I see my sin, I really see it.

I'll hate it.

And uh I need to say, what Jesus is doing here is obviously very different, isn't it, from our culture, even often from the culture in our churches.

Our culture is a culture of self-esteem.

You are exalted, exhorted, not just encouraged, but pressed by those around you, by the news articles, by the radio, on a daily basis to avoid this kind of hurt, and instead to celebrate yourself.

The default assumption around us is that humanity and you are basically good, and that my real need is to be appreciated and to appreciate myself.

I keep being told to assert myself and to stand up for my rights.

And uh the kind of teaching that the Lord Jesus is giving here might well be labelled by many in our culture as spiritual abuse.

We need to recognize that he comes not to abuse us, but to bless us.

So, believer, let me say to you, you must mourn.

You must mourn.

Let me highlight just a few different ways that might be necessary for you.

First, you must mourn over your sin.

We are people of grace, aren't we?

We are people who rejoice in the Lord's forgiveness.

We know the Lord's love.

We we love to apply that to ourselves and others.

It is a beautiful thing to be able to say words like, as far as the East is from the West, so far as he removed our transgressions from us.

It's one of my great privileges as a minister, after we confess our sins in church, to be able to pronounce assurance of pardon to people and to kind of rub that into their souls.

But I want to add a warning to that: that there is a way to do that too quickly.

To slap it as a plaster over a still gaping wound.

Jeremiah talks of the false teachers in his day who dress the wound of his people lightly, saying, peace, peace where there is no peace.

And we need to be aware of that in our own repentance.

It's so easy to sort of catch a glimpse of my sin out of the corner of my eye, as it were, and turn away from it immediately.

Immediately quickly to reassuring myself with the grace of God.

No, I'm forgiven.

It's okay.

And never have actually looked clearly at the sin itself, never have brought it clearly and openly to the Lord.

Well worth in your own time going and reading Psalm 51.

And reflecting on the way that, as David says, have mercy on me, O God.

He then goes into a deep exploration of his own sin, laying out before God how wicked it was accusing himself before receiving from the Lord the pardon that he knows the Lord gives.

I mentioned earlier the possibility that there are some in this room, I imagine, probably many of us in this room, who have sins in your life of which you are conscious and yet against which you perhaps feel like you're making little progress.

You might be asking yourself the question, why am I making so little progress?

And there are many possible answers to that, and if that is you, I do encourage you to talk to someone about it and talk to Andrew or Gavin and get help for your soul.

But I want to suggest one possible reason, which is that maybe that you're making little progress against that sin because you have never really mourned it.

You haven't allowed it to cause you pain that you are like that.

Mourn over your sin.

In a similar vein, we're called, aren't we, by the Apostle Paul, not just to rejoice with those who rejoice, but to weep with those who weep.

And here perhaps we're broadening mourning out from just sin to wider things, but I want to say again, the same instinct in us can often show itself to quickly slap on the assurances of the gospel.

And how rich those assurances are.

We feel when we see someone in tears that desire, oh, how good it is to know heaven coming, how good it is to know forgiveness of sins, how wonderful to know the sovereignty of the Lord and all these things, that none of this has happened by accident, and we want to quickly give all those comforts.

Remember the Lord Jesus Christ, who at the moment that he is about to raise Lazarus from the dead and dry all the tears of those around him, still weeps.

You do likewise.

We must mourn over the sins of others, mustn't we?

We see the Lord Jesus Christ as he approaches Jerusalem weeping over it.

How often have I longed to gather you together?

And we live in this country, and in our day-to-day lives, we pass by empty churches.

We pass by monuments of God's glory in ages past, now desolate or maintained only as museum pieces.

We live in a world where you only have to turn on the news to find various forms of evil, celebrate it in the most grotesque ways in the highest places in the land.

There is much to mourn over.

And again, often we sort of want to either retreat and not think about that, or work hard at doing things about it.

And there is a right place which I think is often neglected, simply to lament.

You must weep.

Mourn as well over the lost.

My guess is, I don't know this congregation very well.

My guess is that there are here, because there have been in every church I've ever served in, parents who have some children who have strayed from the faith.

That's such a deep grief, isn't it?

Brothers and sisters, it's good to weep over that.

Don't try and bottle it up.

Take those tears to the Lord.

Friends that you know are on the path to hell, or colleagues.

Let your heart be soft towards them.

It's hard, isn't it, these things that I'm saying?

We don't want to go out.

The world is so full of sharp edges, you kind of have to often it feels like make a sort of shell of yourself.

And there's you know the world's so big and so full of sorrows that if you were to have a soft heart towards everything that you see on the news and every person you meet in the street, because there wouldn't be enough tears there in your head.

And yet we are called to this.

Remember that you follow a man of sorrows.

There will be plenty of time for rejoicing in heaven.

There is plenty of joy now.

We're going to see that in the rest of the attitudes.

But there is a call now also to be men and women of tears.

Lord, give us strength to weep.

Blessed are those who mourn.

And then, thirdly, blessed are the meek.

Blessed are the meek.

What is meekness?

A little hard to define in some ways.

I think you could summarize it perhaps as giving up on your demands, receiving quietly even things you do not like, because of your sense of trust in the Lord, but also because you know that you have some of those things coming.

And that comes from poverty of spirit and meekness.

You might define it more fully in the words of the wonderful words of Psalm 131.

David says, Lord, I've not lifted up my eyes or spent my time on those things which are too high for me, but I've stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother.

Like a weaned child is my soul within me.

I think you can play out meekness in particular in a couple of ways, a couple of angles, directions.

Meekness towards God, as God deals with you.

I think this is very beautifully expressed in Micah chapter 7.

Micah 7 · chapter mention

You don't have to turn there, I'll read it for us.

Micah chapter 7, verses 8 and 9, where Micah the prophet says, Rejoice not over me, my enemy.

Micah 7:8

When I fall I shall rise.

When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.

I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me.

He will bring me out of the light.

I shall look upon his vindication.

And uh what's Micah doing there?

He's saying, I am currently in darkness.

I feel like I am in the pit, and I will stay here as long as the Lord puts me here, I will bear his indignation, and I will, at the same time as he shows indignation against me, I will be putting all my hope in him for deliverance.

Meekness before God.

Meekness as well before others.

Then if you if you know Little Popquiz, who in the Old Testament is described as the meekest person in the world?

Anyone have that at the tip of their tip of their brains?

Moses.

It's actually Moses, Numbers 12, verse 3, which I think is a very helpful verse, partly to guard us against false ideas of meekness.

Numbers 12:3

And Moses, perhaps, of all the characters in the Old Testament, is not a doormat, is he?

He's not someone who just lets other people get away with stuff.

And yet at the same time, that verse highlights how, as Moses deals sometimes ferociously with the evil around him, he never does so out of a sense of his own injured pride.

He's always serving the people and serving the Lord.

He has left behind his own rights and given himself over fully to those around him.

He is a meek man.

And of course, meekness, the quality of meekness, flows from what we've seen.

The person who is poor in spirit, who has recognized their own sin and their need, the person who is mourning deeply over that, does give up on their demands and their needs and sits quietly before the Lord and deals quietly with others.

If you know meek people, and I'm sure there are plenty in this congregation, you will have a sense of what a very beautiful quality that is.

And perhaps that is the first little sign from the Lord Jesus of just how wonderful poverty and mourning are and the good fruit they produce.

I want to spend a bit of time having gone through those three thinking about why all this is a blessing.

Why is it good to mourn?

Why is it good to be meek?

Why is it good to be poor?

Just have a look then at those verses again, and let's think more about the second half of them.

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.

The remarkable thing about those promises is how wildly mismatched they are to the conditions.

God does not owe us the second half of any of those lines.

If you are poor in spirit, well, great, you should be, shouldn't you?

That's just recognizing reality.

You don't earn anything by being humble.

If you're mourning over your sin, well, that's right, you should.

Your sin is horrible.

You don't get a gold star for that.

If you're meek, not arrogantly demanding from God, but humbly receiving, then again, good, you're just starting to recognize reality.

None of that earns you anything.

But God graciously meets those things with such riches.

You finally realized that you have nothing.

Good.

Here.

Have everything.

Yours is the kingdom of heaven.

You finally started mourning over your sin.

Great.

Here.

Let me give you the joy of forgiveness, the full comfort of the gospel.

You are my son.

I love you.

You finally realize you deserve nothing from me.

Wonderful.

I've got a little present for you.

It's the whole world.

Christians talk a lot about joy, don't they?

The secret ingredient of joy, I think, we find in these verses.

The ingredient, perhaps, let me say that some of us might be missing.

The secret missing which leaves our joy somewhat brittle without it.

The secret ingredient is tears.

When I see my utter worthlessness and mourn over it, and give up my idea that God owes me anything, and then I turn and find that he still loves me.

In fact that he's always loved me.

Even when I had nothing and I didn't know it.

And he's going to keep on loving me because his love does not depend on me.

It depends on him.

When I give up all idea of earning from the Lord, and then find him scattering jewels on me.

Friends, there is no greater joy.

Blessed, says the Lord Jesus, and he really means it.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

It's true.

Jesus told us those things because he loves us.

And I want to consider very briefly as we close that he told us those things to invite us into his blessing.

All eight Beatitudes are a description of what we can be in Christ, because they are first a description of what the Lord Jesus is.

Think how he is the one poor in spirit.

Strange thing to say.

Being poor in spirit, I've just defined as sort of being worthless, having nothing.

He obviously is the Lord of heaven and has all righteousness in himself, and there's no sin in him.

How can you say that?

And yet he, unlike us, is poor in spirit because he made himself like that.

You go and read Philippians chapter 2, and you find that he has equality with God.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

It's not a thing that he needs to grasp, and yet he empties himself, makes himself nothing, becomes a servant.

He already has the kingdom.

He is already sitting on the throne.

But rather than holding on to it, gripping, he lets go.

And he comes through poverty and receives it again as a man.

We've already seen, haven't we, a couple of times in the Gospels where Jesus weeps?

I want to say, even more than those times as he weeps about sin out there, consider him in the garden, the garden of Gethsemane, as he considers taking our sin on himself.

The one who had no sin, being made sin for us, and his sweat was like tears of blood falling to the ground.

He grieved over it.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Truly the man of sorrows.

He had in heaven all joy and comfort.

He was offered by the devil the chance to take for himself all comfort, to turn these stones into bread.

It's easy for you to live a good life.

And he turns away from all that and mourns and has now received the rich comfort of his father and his bride.

Consider how meek he is.

Again, the devil offers him the earth, doesn't he?

You can inherit the earth really quickly right now.

Just worship me.

And he turns away in favour of meekness.

And he travels to small lands and is frequently rejected and misunderstood.

And at his trial, accused by those so unworthy of him, he is reviling.

And he doesn't revile in return.

He's silent.

He gives his cheeks to those who pull out the beard, gives his back to the whip, he goes quietly to the cross, and he has inherited the earth.

He is your Lord.

And as you look at him, you see that these things are truly blessings.

So brother and sister, pursue them.

Can we pray for us?

Lord, how much we need your grace.

Not only after we have seen these things, but even to see them.

To know our poverty, to see our sin, to truly give up on our own urgent demands is a work of your spirit.

And so we ask, Lord, for these blessings this morning.

Please help us.

And as you give these painful good things to us, give us in great measure the comfort, the kingdom, the world that goes with them.

Amen.