From 50 Days of Devotionals through the Chronological Harmony of the Gospels
In 2014, members of FBC Killeen went to Israel and one of the greatest thrills for me was to teach a study on the Beatitudes while physically standing on the Mount of the Beatitudes!
When your read through the first few verses of Matthew 5, you can feel a crescendo of thoughts as Jesus guides us through the various “Blessed are” statements, also translated as “happy”. The blessed statements are like a stairway of sanctification, each step leading to a higher calling in spiritual growth.
First, we see we are blessed when we are impoverished in our own spirit. For us to die to self and live to God is the first step of salvation and in the stairway of becoming more Christ-like. Our reward for humbling ourselves, Jesus said is the Kingdom of heaven, our eternal reward both for now and all eternity!
Second, we find a marvelous contradiction: To be happy, we must mourn! When we look at how we’ve failed God, how our sins have hurt us, others, and even God, we climb higher in our spiritual growth, because our mourning leads us to repentance and also we receive comfort from God’s own Spirit.
Our third step is being meek, and while it rhymes with “weak”, they are vastly different. When we are meek, we are strong, stable, teachable, and kind! Our reward is the Earth for our inheritance. Look at Psalm 37:11 and we see both Testaments state that God rewards the meek physically, not just spiritually.
Next is a hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness! Our yearning is for God to declare us to be in right-standing with Him. When God declares us to be righteous, we no longer thirst or hunger to justify ourselves. God satisfies our longings with His filling, His fulness.
We climb the fifth step to being merciful and receiving mercy. Jesus gave a marvelous story about a man who was shown mercy, but unable to give mercy to someone else. Mercy is more than forgiveness, and it is different than grace. Grace is receiving what we don’t deserve, but mercy is not getting the judgment we do deserve. And being merciful means that we release others from our biased standards for perfection.
The sixth beatitude is purity in heart and the reward is seeing God. A sinful heart does not want to see God! It shrinks from holiness in fear and trembling. But a pure heart longs to see Him face to face, and one day that will be our reward.
On our seventh step, we go from purity to peace-making. No, we’re not talking about a quiet prayer for world peace. That will never be long-lasting. The peacemakers of this beatitude make eternal peace between sinful humanity and a holy God. When we bring the good news of peace with God, we are called “children of God”; we bear His image and His inheritance!
Finally, we reach the eighth and final step in the beautiful beatitude staircase! This beatitude takes three verses to describe this final and greatest pinnacle of all the “happy blessings”. And it is? Persecution! And its reward? The same as on the first step, the Kingdom of Heaven! Is this confusing? Not at all. Nothing is more foundational to begin our journey, nor inspirational along the way, nor aspirational to end our ascent than the Kingdom of Heaven. And climbing the beatitudes is worth every step!
Lord Jesus, we praise You for giving us direction on how to live. In these eight steps of life, we aspire to live higher and more noble lives for Your glory. Let us climb higher by humbling ourselves in Your ways. In Jesus’s Name, we pray. Amen.
--By Tim McKeown
(see more at bit.ly/FBCKBeatitudes)
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