NewCity Orlando Sermons

The Beatitudes: Measure of Maturity

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Pastor of Formation & Mission Benjamin Kandt begins our series on the Beatitudes. Over the next several weeks, we will focus on them one at time. Pastor Benjamin provided this 3 word summary of each one:

  1. Open-handed trust
  2. Broken-hearted honesty
  3. Love-constrained power
  4. Right-making ache
  5. Tender-hearted compassion
  6. Single-willed seeking
  7. Shalom-contending family
  8. Witness-bearing courage
Speaker 1:

Hello everyone. This is Pastor Damian. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, orlando. At New City, we believe all of us need all of Jesus for all of life. For more resources, visit our website at NewCityOrlandocom. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1:

Please stand and join me in praying the prayer of illumination. Heavenly Father, we bow in your presence. Let your Word be our rule, your Spirit our teacher and your greater glory our supreme concern. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen.

Speaker 1:

Today's scripture is taken from Matthew 5, beginning in verse 1. Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain and when he sat down, his disciples came to Him 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 the 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. This is God's word. Please be seated.

Speaker 2:

Well, good morning. My name is Benjamin. I'm a pastor here with New City. This morning we begin a 10-week series on these eight sentences known as the Beatitudes. For 2,000 years, the Beatitudes have stood at the very heart of the Christians' teaching and worldview and understanding of how this world works. People have commented on these words arguably more than any other words in the entire Bible. The Beatitudes are the table of contents for Jesus' first and greatest teaching, what's called the Sermon on the Mount, which begins right here. This is the introduction, if you will, to the whole sermon.

Speaker 2:

If Jesus were to tweet his ministry or ex his ministry I don't know what the new verb is, but if Jesus were to do that thing, he would most likely put these less than 100 words in that form and send it out. So you get an idea of the encapsulation of everything he wanted you to know about life in his kingdom as king. Some would even say that the Beatitudes are a summary of the entire gospel itself. If Scripture interprets Scripture, some believe that the Beatitudes hold the key to unlocking the whole thing. So what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is that the Beatitudes are Jesus' vision for human flourishing. These are Jesus' vision for human flourishing. So I want to look at that together with three questions. The first question is why the Beatitudes? Then what are the Beatitudes? And finally, how do we embody the Beatitudes why, what and how? Now, this is just a flyover because we're going to take 10 weeks, including this week, to go kind of drill down on each one. So bear with me as we kind of do an overview of the Beatitudes. Look with me again first at why the Beatitudes. Why the Beatitudes? It's important to note that from Aristotle to Oprah, from Plato to Jordan Peterson, the Western tradition has been wrestling with a handful of the same questions, things like what is real, how do we know what is a good life? These are questions that have been sometimes agonized over by some of the most brilliant minds in human history, not just Christian history. In their important questions, every philosophy, every religion, every worldview is asking some of the same questions and just putting forth some different answers to those questions. Now, this is important.

Speaker 2:

The early church understood that Jesus was not only a Jewish prophet he was that, but he was also a great philosopher. That's actually really important. And in fact there's this city, this town called Dura Europus, which was discovered right after World War I by some archaeologists. It's in modern day Syria and it dates back to the early 200s AD. And while they were excavating it they found some images painted on the walls in an ancient church, and the images were of Jesus, and you'd imagine some of the typical ones, like Jesus as the good shepherd or Jesus as the great physician. I think there's actually a picture of that in our, like the foyer or whatever out there Jesus as the great physician, jesus as the one who walks on water, these pictures that we're so familiar with. But there's one that might surprise you Jesus as the great philosopher. They depicted him with the teaching or healing or performing miracles, but he was wearing the traditional philosopher's robes and had the particular haircut of philosophers of ancient times, and he was even standing in certain postures that were very indicative of philosophers like Aristotle or Plato or Socrates.

Speaker 2:

Is that interesting to you that Jesus would be considered a philosopher, not just a savior? He is that, but also a philosopher. Why does this matter? Because the early church saw Christianity not merely as a religion but as a philosophical way of life, asking and answering some of these questions that have been on the minds of the most brilliant thinkers in human history and Christianity. Jesus, in particular, comes to the table with his own answers to those questions. Now we live in a day when information is in abundance but wisdom is scarce, and I think this is part of the reason for the emergence of long form podcasting. Think about your podcast guru of choice and why you turn to them to give you kind of info on the good life, what that might look like and to live within the grain of the universe, if you will. Jesus is coming to the table with his own set of answers to some of those questions. He's a great philosopher and some of the most important philosophical questions then and now maybe the most important one was what is the way to happiness, to human flourishing, to a life lived fully alive? What does that look like? Now?

Speaker 2:

It might surprise some of you that the earliest some of the early biblical manuscripts they had a heading or a title for Matthew 5 through 7, which is called the Sermon of the Mount today, and the title was quote concerning happiness. You could rename the Sermon of the Mount earliest Christians did concerning happiness. This is Jesus' great teaching on happiness. Why would they do that? Because Jesus was, according to the earliest Christians. A philosopher of happiness. That seems significant.

Speaker 2:

In his book Jesus the Great Philosopher, jonathan Pennington says it like this it is no mere accident that the very first teaching in the very first gospel shows Jesus to be giving his own authoritative opinion on what constitutes true happiness. That shouldn't surprise us, he goes on. He says this is what philosophers did, the way of life that Jesus describes as being truly flourishing poverty of spirit, loneliness, living up one's rights, being wrongly persecuted. That is shocking to any hearers then and today. But what does not surprise first century readers is that Jesus the philosopher is pontificating on what makes for our happiness. That would not have been a surprise for the earliest hearers. It might be a surprise to us, which shows how far we've departed from the original vision of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount.

Speaker 2:

And so how does that strike you Like? How does that shape your notion of Christianity? What does that mean? That your happiness is not irrelevant to Jesus. In fact, there's a philosopher named Joseph Peeper who says this the human being desires happiness just as the falling stone seeks the depths, or as the flower turns to the light, or as the beast hunts its prey. In other words, there's almost this instinctive movement towards what is going to be our happiness. That's just innate to being human. This is why the founders of our country put quote the pursuit of happiness right next to life and liberty as some of your inalienable rights given to you by your very Creator that it's the government's job to protect. That's, the founding fathers of our country thought the pursuit of happiness was that important. Why? Because there's this grand tradition of philosophical wrestling with the question of what is the way to happiness, and they thought it was that important, next to life and freedom, the pursuit of happiness. And Jesus stands in that tradition, in fact maybe he's the fountainhead of that tradition. And so to pursue happiness is to be human. According to the Declaration of Independence, it's a God-given right to pursue happiness. And so the great question is where do you find your happiness? Where do you find your happiness? Jesus is here promising happiness. I'm going to show you that. That's what's going on in the Beatitudes.

Speaker 2:

But there's lots of false promises of happiness. When you realize you've been chasing after a false promise of happiness, we have a word for that it's called regret. We know that acutely. We know that sense of what it means to realize this was not actually going to fulfill me the way that I expected it to. You could say the serpent in the garden could have said it like this the lesser of those who eat, for they shall not surely die. It's a Beatitude. It's a false promise of happiness.

Speaker 2:

Now, this is important because then the issue comes down to trust. Who are you going to believe? What vision of the good life are you going to buy into Jesus as he steps up on the mountain and opens his mouth and teaches his disciples, or any of the other myriad options on offer to you today? Ignatius of Loyola said it like this Vision is unwillingness to trust that what God wants is our deepest happiness. So why the Beatitudes? Because there is a pervasive lie that's been going on since Genesis three that God is opposed to your ultimate happiness. It's deep embedded in our very bones. We can't help but instinctively think that God's way is actually some sort of cosmic killjoy. And so Jesus steps up in the mountain and, contrary to the self-help books that would say hey, happiness is to be a successful man, or to be a wealthy woman, or to have a person who's in love that's what happiness looks like or maybe somebody who can get what they want, when they want, from whom they want. That might be a picture of happiness that's on offer, but Jesus has an answer to your heart's cry of I just want to be happy, and his answer is the Beatitudes, his vision for human flourishing.

Speaker 2:

So I wanna look at the Beatitudes together and ask the second question, which is which is, what are the Beatitudes? If you have a Bible, go ahead and get Matthew five in front of you, because we're gonna look at this pretty closely. You might experience point two as more teaching oriented instruction. I really wanna help you see what's going on here. Because the Beatitudes. It's not for nothing that people have thought about these for millennia and have not exhausted their depth. So let's look at them pretty closely here. Let's look at the first four, matthew five. Three 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. Now we have to ask the question at the beginning here what does blessed mean?

Speaker 2:

In Greek, the word is Makarios. Someone say Makarios, thank you, excellent. I'm not one of those people that's like, hey, you gotta understand the Greek because I feel like it takes you apart from the Bible. But I think it's important. Makarios is the word here. Why is that important? Because in English, blessed and blessed look like the exact same word, spelled the exact same way, and unless you articulate it differently, like by saying blessed versus blessed, you wouldn't know. These are actually two different words in Hebrew, two different words in Greek, with two very different meanings.

Speaker 2:

You see, when we think of being blessed, we typically think of God's divine favor on someone, and that's right. That is what it means to be blessed. When it says God blessed them, it said be fruitful and multiply. That's what's happening. It's an invocation of divine favor. At the end here, I'm gonna stand up and I'm gonna give you the benediction, which just means good word or blessing. That's invoking divine favor on you as you leave. That's not what Jesus is doing here. In fact, what it means to be blessed, makarios is actually a state of being. It's actually a state of being that could be better defined as flourishing, being fully alive. So it's not invoking divine favor, it's actually stepping into a state of being. That's what Jesus is talking about here, the opposite of being blessed is being cursed. The opposite of blessed is woe. Woe to you. In Matthew 23, jesus says seven times Woe to you. That state of being you're in is not good. That's what a woe is. Do you see? This subtle difference makes a big difference in how you understand what Jesus is doing as he steps up on the mountain.

Speaker 2:

So from the African American New Testament commentary to the Australian commentary, people are wrestling in the English language to try to give a proper word or translation of this word Makarios blessed. Because almost everybody agrees that's probably not the best way to talk about it because of our religious connotations with the idea of receiving blessing. And so here's some happy R, flourishing R. Congratulations to Fortunate R. One of my favorites is I learned this actually when I was with some Australians in Tacoma in 2013. And they had this saying they used all the time They'd be like oh, good on you, mate. Some of you are like that is a terrible Australian accent. I grew up on crocodile dundee. It's like the best I got for you. So good on you, mate is actually how one of the Australian translations translates this Good on you, mate, if you're poor in spirit. I kind of love that, but we don't have something in Indian like that.

Speaker 2:

In American English it could be good for them or worthy of honor, or hail to those, or how blissful are or risen from the dead are those who are meek. These are all different ways of translating the same really rich, robust word. Ray Ortland Jr says the word blessed is kind of like a biblical high five from Jesus. This is Family Worship Sunday, so if you kids remember anything, maybe that's it. Now here's the second question. If I've established for you what it means to be blessed is something different from what it means to be blessed.

Speaker 2:

The second thing is are these commands Like? Is Jesus commanding you to mourn? Is that what's happening here? They're not commands, they're actually descriptions, descriptions of the good life of Makarios. Jesus said blessed are the meek. Not be meek Doesn't say that says blessed are the meek. And so I want you to finish this.

Speaker 2:

For me, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man Amazing. That could be a beatitude of sorts right. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. It's not a command, but if you trust Benjamin Franklin and his poor Richard's almanac, it might actually change your life. You might live in line with that beatitude, if you will. That's the context. That's the kind of statement Jesus is making here. It's not a command, it's more of a description of what it means to flourish in this world. Now, that's significant, because to say that peacemakers flourish is an observation, not a demand, but it implies that becoming a peacemaker is a good idea if you wanna flourish. You hear that there's a subtlety there, but it's really important. The beatitudes are Jesus's invitation to human flourishing. Now the question is will you trust him? Will you trust him that he's right?

Speaker 2:

Yesterday I was looking up at the sky with my son, augie. As we're looking up, we see some of these birds of prey just circling as they do, soaring in circles so high above us. I said, augie, you know what they're doing. And I said they do this thing where they ride what are called thermals, which is the sun heats up the air, hot air rises and they can catch those thermals, if they can find them, and they can just rise with very little effort. They experienced Makarios, blessedness if you will.

Speaker 2:

All Jesus is saying is hey, if you wanna get into a thermal, if you wanna soar, learn how to mourn, learn what meekness looks like. Like, not a command. You don't have to do this. There's no obligatory demand, there's nothing being laid on you. This is an invitation. This is what flourishing looks like according to Jesus. Now, is he right? That's the question you should be asking, because if I'm going to align myself, if I'm going to get into that thermal, I hope it works. If it doesn't work, that's a bad situation for me, if I'm pursuing happiness, which I think you are.

Speaker 2:

And so I want to look at this and say well, what is the structure of each beatitude? You can break them down in half. Each one really has two parts. Who is blessed and why are they blessed? Blessed are the meek. That's the who. Why? For they shall inherit the earth. You could use this formula there's a virtue plus a promise that equals happiness, that equals blessedness. If you step into the virtue of meekness, you will experience the promise of inheriting the earth. A little bit here and a lot of it there. That's the promise of what he's getting at. But that's the structure of a beatitude. What about the eight beatitudes? Let's look at this. There's a slide behind me that should give you a picture of what these actually look like. Excuse me, okay. So in the eight beatitudes.

Speaker 2:

First of all, you need to know this is poetry. David White, a poet, says poetry is language against which we have no defenses. The Bible's so wise when it puts things in poetry. Those of you who hate poetry are like I hate the Bible's poetry. I'm telling you, the Bible's after something. It's trying to get past your defenses and it uses poetic words. Jesus is a poet.

Speaker 2:

These beatitudes are poetic. You'll notice this. There's eight of them, okay, and the way that it works is there's two sets of four, one through four, five through eight, okay, and there's two stanzas. If you will, if you know poetry, talk. That's like JV, I know. I'm with you, though. Okay, both stanzas, hear me, have exactly 36 words in Greek. Did you know that? Probably not, because there's a level of nuance and detail that Jesus is after here. In Greek, there's only 36 words in each stanza. That's how we know, one of the reasons we know there's two stanzas here.

Speaker 2:

Here's another reason the last line of each stanza, if you notice this the fourth beatitude in verse six and the eighth beatitude in verse 10, repeat the word righteous. Do you see that the word righteous is at the back end of each stanza? Here's the other thing. The first and the eighth beatitude bookend the whole with, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. There's an incredible, brilliant structure to how Jesus is poetically inviting you in to human flourishing.

Speaker 2:

Now John Calvin, reflecting on this, said the first four are more inward looking beatitudes, more in spirit and mourning and meekness and hungering and thirsting, and the next four are outward oriented beatitudes towards our neighbor, peacemaking and being persecuted and mercy. There's a significance to that. Another way to say that is maybe the first four are about our emptiness before God and the next four are about our fullness towards our neighbors. That's the invitation to happiness here. Now, since early, early, early in the church, the church has seen these eight actually as sequential. Another way to say that is using the words of Augustine of Hippo the eight beatitudes are steps by which we ascend in happiness, the first one being the fountain for all the rest Blessed are the poor in spirit, the first step, the basis of them all. So did you catch all that? I said it was gonna be more teaching oriented. I warned you on the front end. That's me answering the question what are the Beatitudes? Now let's look at the final and third one, which is how do we embody the Beatitudes? How do we get these inside of us? How do we actually enter into the thermal, if you will, and experience the flourishing that Jesus is pointing to here, saying this is the good life. You can find it if you want.

Speaker 2:

Christian author Mark Scrandrett tells the story of an unlikely friendship that he developed with a Zen Buddhist monk named Shinko. And they were developing this friendship over time and one day Mark asked Shinko. He said hey, what is the way of Zen Buddhism Like? When you wake up each day, what do you seek to do and to be? In about four minutes, shinko succinctly answered the question. He said first he named the four noble truths of Buddhism. Second, he explained the eightfold path right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. And then Shinko said each day I just seek to deepen my experience of this path, to which Mark replied. I was struck by how clear and concrete his answer was.

Speaker 2:

Then Shinko turned and asked me Mark, you identify as a follower of Jesus. When you wake up each day, what do you seek to do and be? I wonder how some of you would answer that if you were being asked by a Zen, buddhist, monk, christian. What does it look like to wake up in the morning and try to do and to be in the way of Jesus? What does that look like for you, mark says I hesitated. My first impulse was to explain how I'd become a Christian, but that wasn't the question. I quickly recovered and said each day I try to love God with my whole being and love my neighbor as myself. I congratulated myself for giving an adequate answer, but I was haunted by how vague my response was, compared to Shinko's. What exactly do I do each day to love God and people? I didn't have a clear answer.

Speaker 2:

The rest of the book that this is written in is Mark basically realizing that, historically, christians would have had a great answer to that. It's called the eight Beatitudes. They would have said oh well, bless her to the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Bless her to those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Bless her to the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. They would have just rifted those off because they knew that was the heart, the very center of the way of Jesus. That's what it looked like, that's what true flourishing means, and so if we're going to embody them. We actually have to understand them. If we're going to embody them, we have to understand them. What are these nine Beatitudes, these eight Beatitudes, what do they mean? And we're going to have nine more weeks on top of this one to unpack each one. But let me just kind of set the table for us here and now, and the way I want to do that is by giving you three renditions of the Beatitudes. Okay, three different ways of rendering or translating them. The first one comes from memes for Jesus, an Instagram profile that translated the Beatitudes for Gen Z. So anybody in Gen Z in here. This is for you. The rest of you, bear with me. This is how they translate our text.

Speaker 2:

This morning, after Jesus started live streaming and the chat filled up, he began to go off saying W to those who aren't thirsty for this midlife, for they will have eternal life. W to those who take L's from this life, for they will receive it in its everlasting W. W to those who don't throw hands, for they will secure the eternal bag. W to those who want help passing God's vibe check, for he will say bet. W to those who don't cancel others, for they will not be canceled by the top G. W to those whose spiritual fit is immaculate, for their hearts will be cuffed by God. W to those who turn ops into bros, for they will be called CEOs of peace. W to those who catch hands for being valid, for they will not be left unread by God. W to you, when the ops be capping hard and do you so very dirty, because you're my fam. Trust you have crushed it and have the eternal W for so they did. The true bros before you.

Speaker 2:

Some of you are like was that English? And somebody in here just came to know Jesus for the first time? Like you were born again. In this moment You're like I just now got it. This makes sense to me, what you've been yapping about for this whole time. Listen, as with anything, contrast is the mother of clarity. So that was the Beatitude Translated for Gen Z.

Speaker 2:

Here are Ray Ortland Jr's unbeatitude. So this is kind of an inversion in light of our secular moment, asking hey, if we were to write our Beatitudes that we actually live by today, what would they sound like? And this is what he says Congratulations to the entitled, for they grab what they want. Congratulations to the care free, for they shall be comfortable. Congratulations to the pushy, for they shall win. Congratulations to the greedy, for they shall climb the food chain. Congratulations to the vengeful, for they shall be feared stats. Congratulations to those who don't get caught, for they shall look good. Congratulations to the argumentative, for they shall get in the last word. Congratulations to the popular, for this world lies at their feet. Those are the unbiattitudes, if you will, the inversion of what Jesus is saying, but really relevant in our cultural moment. The third and final one is my own rendition and I said hey, since we're going to spend eight weeks or nine more weeks unpacking these, I'm just going to give you the biattitudes in three words each. Here we go.

Speaker 2:

The poor in spirit are those who live with open-handed trust open-handed trust. Those who mourn live with a broken-hearted honesty. The meek are those who live with love-constrained power, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. They experience a right-making ache. The merciful are filled with tender-hearted compassion. The pure in heart have a single-willed seeking. The peacemakers are a shalom-contending family and the persecuted are those who have witness-bearing courage.

Speaker 2:

Now, why live like this? I've been saying all along you have to trust Jesus big time on this. If you're really endeavor to follow Him in this way? Why live like this? Won't we be taken advantage of? Won't we be walked all over? Who wants to live hungry and mourning? Christine Jesky, reflecting on her experience working among the poor in Nicaragua, says there's nothing quaint about grinding poverty. There's no indication anywhere in Jesus' ministry that he desires suffering for suffering's sake. Rather, he offers relentless reminders that suffering is not a landing place forever.

Speaker 2:

In the biattitudes, jesus tells us the end of the story before we arrive, so that both now and in that future scene we will know what a good story it is. What if you knew the end of the story? What if you knew you were going to inherit the earth? Would that maybe move you to be more meek? What if you knew that you would be comforted? Would that open you up to feel negative emotions that you just resist with all of your energy right now? What if you knew the end of the story?

Speaker 2:

Pastor Sam Wells says it like this the first part of each biattitude is a description of the cross. It's going to feel like death, but good thing is, jesus went that way before. He promised it was the way for happiness, right. And so it's going to feel like the cross to be poor and thirsty and meek and merciful and persecuted, and on and on. And the second half is a description of resurrection. It's a description of what it means to be comforted and receive mercy and be a part of the family of God and even the kingdom of God.

Speaker 2:

But we live right in the middle, between the first half and the second half, what he calls dwelling in the comma. Brothers and sisters, friends, we dwell in the comma between blessed are the meek comma, for they shall inherit the earth, and some of you know that right now. You know what it's like to live in the, in between the tension of the times, if you will, the comma between hunger and satisfied, the comma between mourning and comfort, the comma between cross and resurrection. You know what it's like to live there, to dwell there. And here's where embodying the Beatitudes calls forth trust.

Speaker 2:

You got to remember this important piece. The flourishing is not in the condition, it's in the kingdom. The condition of mourning in and of itself is not a good place to be, but that condition, because of the kingdom of God, becomes the place of happiness, becomes the very place where God's reign brings comfort to those who mourn. That's significant to understanding what's going on here. The meek are foregoing power, but then they are given the title to everything. Things are pressing into relational conflict and are getting the family of God in exchange. The merciful are foregoing vengeance, but they're opening themselves to mercy and abundance. You see, we are blessed. We experienced this flourishing because we're experiencing the reign of God in our midst, and we will experience it even more in the future. Each Beatitude ends by pointing to the reality of God's reign that began with Jesus and his continuing until it's in full bloom Now.

Speaker 2:

One thing that every commentator agrees on over the last 2000 years, which is not much. When it comes to the Beatitudes, the one thing they agree on is, as God the Father painted the portrait of his son's life, he used the Beatitudes as his color palette. Another way to say that, in the words of Tim Mackey from the Bible project, the Beatitudes are pieces of stained glass that together make an image, and that image is Jesus. I want you to hear me say we must fill our imaginations with the vivid image of Jesus embodying the Beatitudes for us in order to get the Beatitudes in us.

Speaker 2:

Jesus knew what it was like to dwell in the comma. The way Hebrews puts it is that it was for the joy that was set before him, the second half of the comma after the comma that he endured the cross, remember. On the cross, jesus said Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, like all those who are poor in spirit. Jesus mourned with all the Godforsaken crying out my God, my God, why? On the cross, jesus meekly said not my will, but thy will be done. Jesus cried out I thirst. Is Jesus mercifully hanging on the cross, forgiving his enemies that are crucifying him? Jesus' pure heart was pierced so that blood and water flowed, mingled down.

Speaker 2:

Jesus made peace between God and man and between man and man. This was persecuted to the point of death, even death on a cross. Why? So the kingdom of heaven could be ours, so we could receive the comfort of God wiping away our tears, so that we could have the spirit as the guarantee of our inheritance, so that we could be satisfied with our righteousness not our own. So that we could receive God's unshockable mercy. So that we could see God one day face to face. So that we could be called the beloved sons and daughters of God. And so that, when we suffer for identifying with Jesus, we know death is only a more full entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

Speaker 2:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it this way, so that from the cross we could hear the call blessed, blessed. This is Jesus' invitation to lasting happiness. This is Jesus' vision for human flourishing. Let's pray, lord. Jesus, we come to you fresh, not only as teacher and philosopher, but as Lord and as Savior. We trust you, we trust your words. We long to bring our lives into alignment with what you have said is the true flourishing life. Help us, holy Spirit, be with us over these next nine more weeks as we endeavor to embody these Beatitudes in our life, together and for the world. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. As always, we respond to God's word to us in prayer back to him.

Speaker 2:

And so, for this time of responsive prayer, what I want to do is I want to lead us one by one, through these three word Beatitudes, as I summarize them. So I'm going to invite you to do is, wherever you are, to take some space here. I'm going to lead us through each one and then give a moment of pause between each one for you to ask your own self God, would you create this in me? Would you form me in these ones, in these Beatitudes? Let's pray, father, we trust your son's words. Would you develop in us, we, a people, new city, open-handed trust? Would you lead us in broken-hearted honesty? Would you teach us your way of love? Constrained power? Would you fill us with a right-making ache? Would you open us to a tender-hearted compassion, lead us in a single-willed seeking? Take us new city, a shalom, contending family? Would you sustain us with a witness bearing courage? Thanks for your beautiful name. We pray.