Sermon preached on Sunday, February 21, 2010 at Garden Valley Chapel during our Sunday morning service based on Matthew 5:3.

Take your Bible if you will and open it to the book of Matthew chapter five - where we continue our exposition of the greatest sermon ever preached by the greatest preacher who ever lived, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Having finished our introduction to the Sermon, we now arrive to the first section of this Great Sermon, which has long been called the Beatitudes.

Today I want to look at verse three (3). Follow along as I read.

Read Matthew 5:1-3.

The disciples and the crowds listening to Jesus that day must have been spellbound from the very beginning.

Thy must have been enthralled by the very opening sentence:

3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Not only by the very opening sentence but by all that followed:

4 "Blessed are those who mourn...
5 "Blessed are the gentle...
6 "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness...
7 "Blessed are the merciful...
8 "Blessed are the pure in heart...
9 "Blessed are the peacemakers...
10 "Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

He begins with tidings of blessedness. The news is good indeed for He teaches us where man´s true blessedness is to be found.

It does not come, as Calvin has noted, "from the world´s applause, or from the enjoyment of wealth, honours, gratification and pleasure."1

It is to be found in spiritual poverty, in mourning, in being gentle, in a hunger and thirst for righteousness, in being merciful, in being pure, in being a peacemaker, and in being persecuted.

Not what you had expected is it? This is a counter standard of living; counter to everything the world both knows and practices.

The result for such a life is indeed blessedness (Gr. μακάριος).

This is a new kind of life that our Lord sets forth in His Great Sermon.

And its primary target is the heart of a man and his character – from the inside out, right? This is how our Lord cut through all the religiosity back in His day and how He cuts through the mediocrity in our day.

His emphasis was not on externals, but on internals. He was not telling them a new way to live, but a new way to think that would result in a new way to live every day which would in turn be a new kind of life.

It is not about behavior. It is about attitude.

Now as you may recall from last time, the Sermon on the Mount is centered on the Kingdom of God.

From early on, Jesus proclaimed, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel” (cf. Mk 1:15).

It is about the Kingdom of God and the Beatitudes simply reveal what we could call “Kingdom Character” (vv. 3-12).

The Beatitudes describe the character of those who possess the Kingdom of God, of those who belong to the Kingdom of God.

In theses verses you have a description of what every Christian is meant to be. They are a description of Kingdom Character.

This is not meant for those exceptional Christians. This is not merely a description of the Hudson Taylors or the George Müllers or the Whitfields.

This is a description of every Christian. Not only that. All Christians are meant to manifest all of these characteristics.

You cannot think of it as a buffet line – a little bit of this and a little bit of that with only a few people having “poor in spirit” and “peacemaker” on their dinner plate. No!

By the end our study of these verses you will realize that each one of necessity implies the other. There is a sequence, a progression here.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones called it a “spiritual logical sequence.”2

Look with at verse 3. First we see the poor in spirit which is the right attitude towards sin, which leads to mourning in verse 4, which leads to a sense of humility, then to a seeking hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And that manifests itself in mercy, verse 7, in purity of heart, verse 8, in a peacemaking spirit, verse 9. The result of being merciful and pure in heart and peacemaking is that you are reviled and you are persecuted and you are falsely accused.

Q: Why is that?
A: Because by the time you are poor in spirit, mourned over it, become humble, sought righteousness, lived a merciful, pure, and peacemaking life, you have sufficiently irritated the world so they are going to react.

In the same way Paul, Silas, and Timothy “turned the world upside down” (cf. Acts 17:6) in their day, you too will too and you can expect the world to react. It is just a matter of when and how.

But when it’s all said and done, verse 12 says, you can

12 “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great…

And when you live this way: poor in spirit, mourning, meek, seeking righteousness.

Which results in becoming merciful and pure and peacemaking and having the world revile and persecute and say all these things against you, then you can be sure that verse 13 is true:

13 “You are the salt of the earth…

It is no wonder that this message is, as the theologian and preacher Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430) has said, “a perfect standard of the Christian life.” 3 You and I were meant to live such a life.

But make no mistake about it. Only the grace of God produces such a life. As we have said before, no man can live the Sermon on the Mount in and of himself, and unaided.

These attitudes, these dispositions, these characteristics are not natural qualities in a man; nobody by birth and by nature is like this.

These characteristics and dispositions are a result of grace, the product of God’s gracious act of salvation – turning a heart of stone to a heart of flesh.

This is the kind of message that draws a hard line between believers and unbelievers; between those who are saved and those who are not.

It is so sad that the line has been made blurry w/ the Christianity of today. The world has come into the Church and the Church has become worldly in its thinking and sadly in its actions.

As kingdom citizens you are called to live differently.

I love what Martyn Lloyd-Jones has said –

“The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.”4

My hope is that God would awaken our souls, cause us to face ourselves like never before, and test ourselves to see if we “are in the faith” (cf. 2 Cor. 13:5).

CONTENT

In introducing the first Beatitude, I want to look at the Pronouncement, the Character, the Result with the hope that it will serve as a general guideline to the remaining Beatitudes.

The first beatitude will help us lay the foundation to the rest. It is the key to all that follows.

The Pronouncement (v. 3a)
The Character (v. 3b)
The result (v. 3c)