The Beatitudes

This is my first post so please be patient with me. If you want to rebuke me please do so.

This past spring I went through the Beatitudes with a group of guys and in my opinion these 9 or 10 phrases are a beautiful illustration of how the Gospel roots itself in someone's heart and begins to transform their lives by our Lord's sanctifying power. In my opinion they capture the message and essence of the Gospel in a striking way. When I first approached the Beatitudes I couldn't even pronounce the word right and although I had read them I honestly had no clue what each one truly meant. But leaning heavily on the work of Arthur Pink, Sinclair Ferguson, and Martyn Lloyd Jones, I began to see what our Lord meant with each of these. My purpose in this post is as much if not more, for my benefit. It is an attempt to express and record what I have read and hopefully learned by reading these men. To be quite honest this post cannot begin to scratch the surface on what the Beatitudes mean and what they look like in a Christian's life so I would urge you to read and rely on those who are much more articulate and knowledgeable than I am.

The Beatitudes begin in Matthew 5:3 and run through verse 12. They mark the beginning of Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount which almost everyone, both Christian and non-Christian know at least parts of.  Everything our Lord said has incredible importance and we should read, study, and learn all of His words but the fact that He began such a famous sermon with these blessings means we should be especially vigilant to what He is trying to tell us. A very important thing to remember is that these blessings are as Dr. Ferguson writes "kingdom characteristics" they are not something we can manufacture through work or concentration or willpower (this is incredibly important to understand) but they are instead the product of the Spirit's work within us. Paul writes the Spirit is in Christians and thus if we see these blessings in our lives that are describe in the Beatitudes we must understand that this is evidence of the Spirit's sanctifying (making us holy) work that will result in us beginning to resemble more and more, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So if we can see these blessings we can believe that they are the marks, the characteristics, that we are in Christ and belong to the Kingdom of God albeit still being in the kingdom of men. Like all things spiritual though, these blessings can be counterfeited or faked, Dr. ferguson gives a strikingly simple metaphor to what this looks like. He says that while we can at first counterfeit these blessings, they will be like a rock that is thrown into the air. At first it looks like it will continue to go on and on forever but then gravity begins to pull on it and the rock's progress is stalled until it plummets back towards the ground. In this same way we can tell those who counterfeit these blessings from those whose have experienced Christ's grace in their lives and love Him with all their hearts. Christ says later on in this sermon (7:16) that we shall know them by their fruit. To those who love the Lord Jesus and have the kingdom characteristics that are describe in the Beatitudes in their lives, the Fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) come from their hearts through the grace of our Lord. This fruit, like trees that are planted in fertile healthy soil, produces healthy fruit. For the plant, this fruit is the result of pristine growing conditions but to the Christian this fruit is the natural outpouring and upwelling of a heart that loves Jesus. To a person that counterfeits these blessings though they are much the same as if we stapled fruit to a tree. At first glance this fruit looks natural, it looks like it is the product of a plant that was well cared for and had proper growing conditions but if we wait long enough we will begin to see the telltale signs that the fruit that has been stapled starts to rot and starts to become discolored. This is much like the moment when we begin to see that the rock that was thrown into the air begins to slow in its ascent. Eventually the fruit will fully rot and fall from its staples to the floor just like the rock will plummet and then smash to the ground, revealing the counterfeiters for what they are. We haven't yet looked at the individual passages that comprise the Beatitudes but the question for us today and tomorrow and forever is are we counterfeiting the work of the Spirit within us? Are we faking His blessings because if we are that shows that we never truly loved the Lord and as damning as it is, that maybe just maybe He never was at work in our lives. All we can do is turn to Him and ask Him to redeem and renew us from this body of death. We will look at the passages in upcoming posts but for know all we can do is to pray to the Lord that He would reveal to us the ways in which our pride counterfeits His blessings and that He would heal us from this and from so many other things. As I shall say many many more times as I work through the Beatitudes there is a hymn that sums up the Christian life in a very beautiful way. It says: Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy Cross I cling. We should cling more deeply and more sincerely to the Cross and realize more and more that we truly have nothing to bring to Christ.