04 What Jesus Taught About Saving Faith

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. This is the fourth episode in a companion series to my book, Start Strong: A New Believer's Guide to Christianity. Today we'll study Matthew chapter 5, verses 1 through 12, which is one of the see-for-yourself passages from chapter 4. In this episode, we'll discover what Jesus taught about saving faith in the Beatitudes. You'll learn the four core convictions of real faith, and why Jesus calls the poor in spirit, the meek, and the persecuted blessed. If you don't have a book, there's no problem, you can keep listening. You'll still understand the passage. If you already have the book, you might want to read chapter four before listening. If you're listening or reading with a friend, a group, or a book club, there are free discussion questions for every chapter available on my website. There's also a companion workbook and lesson plans if you're using this book in a classroom. You'll find all those resources, the book and the workbook, at startstrongbook.org. Thanks for listening. If you've been around the church very long, you've probably heard the phrase, saved by faith through grace. It kind of rolls right off the tongue. But what does faith really look like? What does it feel like? How does it act? And most importantly, what did Jesus say about it? That is precisely what chapter 4 of my book, Start Strong, A New Believer's Guide to Christianity, explores. We're going to look at the Beatitudes today to discover how Jesus described saving faith. And I think this passage is one of the clearest and most complete pictures of faith that we have in Scripture. In Matthew's Gospel, chapter 5, verses 1 through 12, Jesus turns upside down our assumptions of who is truly blessed, and in doing so, he describes what saving faith really looks like. So if you've ever wondered, what do I really need to believe to be saved? This episode is for you. I'm going to give you an overview of the Beatitudes today. This will be a top-level big picture kind of summary. I do have a podcast series on the Gospel of Matthew where I spend an episode on each of these Beatitudes. So I go into them in much more detail. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes. In the Beatitudes, Jesus tells us who the truly fortunate people are. These are the people we should envy. These are the people we should want to be like, because these people are in a truly great and wonderful place. The Beatitudes are the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, which runs for three chapters, and this is how Jesus starts the sermon. I'll read Matthew chapter five verses one through twelve, and then we'll go back and talk about them. Seeing the crowds, he, and that he is Jesus, 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 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. As is true of many passages, we face an important interpretive decision right off the bat. We have to think about how we are going to approach these beatitudes, and I would argue there is a wrong way to approach them, and there is a right way. The wrong way to approach the beatitudes is to see them as a series of statements that tell me how my life can go better today. We often approach these as a kind of a checklist. The more I take on these attitudes, then the happier and more peaceful my life will be, the better I'll get along with others, and the better society will be. Some scholars have said, well, the word blessed should be translated happy, and Jesus is telling us how to find happiness. This is the key to finding happiness in life today. Well, I have no doubt that if all of us adopted the attitudes described in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, we would all be happier. Our lives would be positively impacted, and society might even be better. But I think that is totally irrelevant to the point Jesus is making in the Beatitudes. I would argue that it has nothing to do with his purpose in teaching this. He has not set out to show us how to be happier now or how to improve society and get along with others. The right way to approach the Beatitudes is to understand Jesus as describing people who have saving faith. Jesus is contrasting two kinds of people in this world, those who will inherit eternal life in the kingdom of heaven and those who will not. Those who inherit eternal life are characterized by certain attitudes. Therefore, those who have those attitudes are blessed. They are truly fortunate because they and only they will enter into eternal life in the end. Rather than being a formula for finding personal peace and happiness now, Jesus is describing the fortunate ones, the blessed ones, in terms of their eternal destiny. They are blessed because of where they are headed. They are blessed because they will find a place in the kingdom of heaven. Now, as I mentioned, there is no way to cover each of the beatitudes individually in one podcast. I have a podcast series on the Gospel of Matthew where I go over these in detail. I do spend an episode on each of the Beatitudes, and I'll put a link to that in the lecture notes. What I want to do today in this talk is explain the logic behind the Beatitudes and show you how they teach the four core convictions of saving faith. And I'm going to do that by answering five questions. First, the easy one, why are they called the Beatitudes? There's a Latin word beatus, which means blessed or fortunate, and the beatitudes come from that word. The name comes from that word. They are a series of sayings about who are the blessed ones. They all start, blessed are they. And Jesus did not invent beatitudes. There are others in Scripture, most notably in the Old Testament. Now that's the easiest question we'll talk about. The second question is what does Jesus mean by blessed? I think the way to get a handle on what it means to be blessed is to look at its opposite. We have bless on one side and curse on the other side. And we can use these words to talk about the attitude someone has for someone else. If I bless you, I think well of you, I approve of you, and I wish you well. If I curse you, I think badly of you, I don't approve of you, and I wish bad things for you. It doesn't necessarily mean I have taken any action at all. In English, we use this idea to mean our attitudes and maybe our speech. If I say bad things about you and wish bad things for you, then I could be cursing you. If I say good things and I wish good things for you, then I'm blessing you. The Greek word for blessed can and the Greek word for cursed can be used in just the same way. What we say and what we wish about someone, regardless of how we've acted. However, these words can also be used in connection with what we do and how we treat someone. If I approve of you, if I bless you, I do good things for you. I bless you by doing right by you, by treating you well and doing good things for your benefit. On the other hand, if I curse you, then I don't do good things for you, I treat you badly, and I try to bring some sort of suffering or harm into your life, I withhold good things from you. Blessing and cursing can either be talking about my wishes or my actions towards someone else, both in English and in Greek. But in the New Testament, when God is the subject of these verbs bless and curse, we are always talking about action. When God is the subject, these words refer to action. To bless or to curse is not just an issue of what God thinks about me. There is an unbreakable connection between what God thinks of me and what he does for me. If I am in his favor, then he will bless me, he will do good things by me and act to improve my welfare. Likewise, if I'm not in his favor, then I come under his wrath, and I can expect the consequences of that. When God blesses someone, he approves of them and he works for their benefit. When God curses someone, he disapproves of them, and they fall under his wrath. So to be blessed is the opposite of being cursed, and to be blessed is to be in that position where I am in the favor of God, and because I am in his favor, good things are coming my way. To be blessed is to be a person to whom good things are coming because I am in God's favor and God is on my side. Now fortunate is a good translation of this word as long as we don't slip into thinking that we have these things through blind luck. To be blessed is not random fortune, fate, or luck. It is a deliberate decision of God to work on my behalf. So we can understand Jesus to be saying, Those who are fortunate, the ones who are fortunate are those who are well off because God is working in their lives. Now if you have an older translation of the Bible, you may see this word translated as happy, and that's not really a bad translation either, as long as we understand the older sense of the word happy. There's an old word hap, which means fortune or chance. That root word shows up in various English words today, like mishap, happenstance, happen, hapless, haphazard, and maybe the old English mayhap, which kind of means maybe, and it shows up in happy. All of these words are related to each other through this root hap. What happened is what came your way. It's the fortune or chance that came your way. You happened upon it. Someone who is hapless is unlucky or unfortunate. Now happy used to be understood in not in terms of how I'm feeling at the moment, not whether I'm currently in a good mood. Happy used to refer to my situation. If I'm in a good situation because good things have come my way, that I'm happy. What has happened to me has put me in a good place. For example, say in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennett says to Mr. Darcy, this is a happy meeting, she does not mean she feels good about it, though she might feel good about it, but what she means in that day and age was it's a good thing we met. It's a fortunate meeting, it's a good turn of events. So if you understand happy, not in the sense of how I feel, but that a good turn of events has come my way, then happy is a great translation of blessed. Things are good for the person who is poor in spirit. That makes this passage one of what we might call the Bible's greatest hits, because Jesus is giving us his description of those people who are truly fortunate. Here is Jesus' description, the Messiah Himself describing what you or I want to be true of us. And if this is true of us, we are truly fortunate people. Essentially, Jesus is saying, if you understood the situation, you would be crazy not to want to be one of these people. Because these people, the people who have these qualities, are incredibly well off. Okay, that's our second question. The third question, what's at stake? What does it matter whether I'm blessed or not? To help answer this question, I want to bring in the Gospel of Luke. Luke has a parallel passage on the Beatitudes, and his version gives us some helpful information to answer this question. He includes some ideas that Matthew left out. This is Luke chapter six, verses twenty through twenty six. And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, again, that's Jesus, and said, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold, reward is great in heaven, for so their fathers did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. So Luke includes not only the blessed are you section, he includes the woe to you section. Jesus is essentially dividing humanity into two groups here. One group is blessed and one group is cursed. To be blessed in the way Jesus describes it here, is not just extra icing on the cake of life. Jesus describes two groups, blessings to you or woe to you. The choice is are you going to be poor or rich? Are you going to weep or laugh? And we'll talk about what that means in a minute. But for now, realize these are two separate roads and you are on one or the other. You are either in the group that is blessed, and you are fortunate and in a very good place, but woe to the other group because they are in very big trouble. There's no middle ground. Either we are in the favor of God or we are under his wrath. The one who is blessed is in God's favor, but the one who is cursed is under God's wrath and will face his judgment. If you've read much of the New Testament, you may be used to approaching this question from the language that Paul uses. The Apostle Paul in his letters talks about being justified by faith. And I would argue Jesus is describing the same thing. Those who are justified, those who are right with God are blessed because they are in God's favor and good things are coming their way. That's what the word justification is all about. If I am justified, then I have been made right with God. I am no longer under his wrath, but I am standing right before him. And if that is true, then I will inherit eternal life. If not, I will face condemnation. Those who are justified have saving faith, as we know from Paul's teaching and elsewhere in the New Testament, and Jesus is describing here what saving faith looks like. Now he doesn't use the words faith or justification here. He doesn't talk about the cross, but he does talk about a set of qualities that are true of people who will inherit life in the kingdom of God, and those are people who have faith. Now that brings us to our next question. This is number four. Why are these people fortunate? What is it that makes them blessed? Well, these people are fortunate because these people, and only these people, will inherit eternal life. Jesus describes them in terms of their future destiny. Why would you want to be one of these people? They are in a highly desirable situation because their future is wonderful. With each quality, Jesus emphasizes if you are this way now, then something really wonderful will happen down the road. But if you're not this way now, then something very undesirable is going to happen in the future. So you are blessed not by where you are right now, but by where you end up. The Old Testament promised that a day is coming when God will intervene in history and establish his kingdom over all the earth in a new and fundamental way. Everyone on earth will recognize that he is God and He is our Creator, and they will worship Him. And on that day, God will set His Messiah, Jesus Christ, on the Davidic throne and give him dominion and authority and rule over all of creation. And at that time all the people of God throughout history will be raised from the dead, and they will live in peace and righteousness under the Messiah. The Beatitudes describe the people who will be raised from the dead on that day and inherit eternal life in the kingdom of God. And you can see this in the language Jesus uses. He says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They shall inherit the earth. Their desire for righteousness will be fully satisfied. They shall see God, they will be called sons of God. And at the very end he says, Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great. So why do you want to be one of these people? Well, his appeal is not based on your current, happy, prosperous life. His appeal is based on the reward that you will get in the future. You want to be one of these people because they will be in the kingdom of heaven. Ultimately, I ought to evaluate my situation right now. I ought to decide whether I'm in a good place or a bad place by where I am going to end up. I ought to look at my life and ask myself, am I on a good road or a bad road? And whether I am on a good road is not determined by where I start, but where I finish. A bumpy road that takes me to my destination is much better than a smooth and easy path that leads me astray. The question I want to ask myself is whether I am going where I really want to go. And if I'm not on the right path Road, then I should turn around and repent. Okay, our last question, the fifth question, why this list? Why do these qualities mark the people who are truly fortunate? At first glance, it doesn't seem like you really want to be the person Jesus is describing. It's not immediately obvious that you would want all these things to be true of you. Being poor, hungry, mournful, and persecuted doesn't sound so great. Merciful and forgiving, and you think, great, someone hurts me and I don't get any justice? Peacemaker, they hit me and I don't get to defend myself? How is it good to be meek or gentle? How is that going to get me to the top of the corporate ladder? At first reading, this list does not immediately inspire the comment. Wow, that's what I always wanted to be. My lifelong ambition is to be poor, hungry, mournful, and persecuted. The qualities that Jesus lists as marking people who are truly blessed are not qualities that are highly prized by the world around us. If God didn't open our eyes and give us his understanding and viewpoint, we children of God would not look at our circumstances and immediately recognize that we are blessed. We might look at the lives that Jesus is describing and say, you know, that sounds like kind of a bad idea. That looks like a tough life. But Jesus says, no, you are actually truly fortunate if these things describe you. So why this list? Why these qualities? Well, if you study society and culture at all, it doesn't take long to realize that the human race as a whole is deeply committed to some lies about some very fundamental truths. There are three of them, and I talk about these in the book Start Strong. The first one is we lie to ourselves about God. God in reality is our all-powerful, holy, merciful, and loving creator to whom we owe gratitude and loyalty, obedience and worship. But we tend to ignore him, reject him, trivialize him, we accuse him of terrible things, and we charge him with doing bad things for us and deny that he exists at all. So we lie about God. Second, when we look at ourselves, we lie about ourselves. In reality, we are self-centered, selfish, rebellious people who don't love God as we should and we don't treat each other as we should. Yet, in our own minds, we always find a way to justify ourselves. We can excuse ourselves and spin reality to say, you know what, I'm okay. I mean, I made a mistake here or there, but really I'm doing pretty well. Not like my neighbor. Boy, she's really a mess. You know, it was just the sun in my eyes, that's all. So we lie about God, we lie about ourselves, and third, we lie about the world around us. The reality is our world is broken, it's defiled by sin, it's filled with death, tragedy, corruption, frustration, and futility. It is a difficult place to find any meaning or satisfaction because it is so broken. But we are always trying to convince ourselves that something in this world is going to truly fulfill us. Maybe it's money, power, beauty, fame, maybe it's prestige, career success, pleasure, whatever, we chase after all kinds of things and we lie to ourselves, saying, if I just had that, then my life would be perfect. But this world is never going to satisfy us and it's never going to make everything alright. Now consider if we stopped lying to ourselves. What does the world look like to people who have stopped telling themselves those lies? When you come to terms with reality and see God as the holy, loving, righteous author and creator of the universe, and you recognize that you yourself have a very serious problem with sin, and everything in this world is going to hell, literally, how might that change your attitude? What characteristics might now be true of you if you saw the world the way it truly is? Other people might be able to convince themselves that they will find fulfillment in riches, power, beauty, and fame, but if you've come to terms with reality, that's just not going to work anymore. Other people may convince themselves that God loves everyone. They may convince themselves everyone who dies goes to heaven, and we don't have to worry about God because, hey, we're just as good as the guy next door. But the one who sees life and sin as it really is is not going to be convinced by that view. Once our eyes have been opened to see the truth, we are no longer so pleased and satisfied with ourselves. We're no longer fulfilled by what the world has to offer. And we recognize that the solution God has offered on the cross is the only solution that's going to solve our problems. In other words, I'm going to see that having an inheritance and a place in the kingdom of God is the most important thing I can grab hold of in this life. I would argue that Jesus is describing people whose eyes have been opened to those truths. He's describing people who have stopped lying to themselves about God, themselves, and the world, and that this set of qualities is typical of people who have saving faith because people who have saving faith no longer believe the lies of the world. So Jesus is describing the character, the disposition of the heart of the person who has been saved, and how they now think about God, their neighbors, and the world around them. And he's giving us a picture of what it looks like to be a person who has saving faith in contrast to the person who does not have it. Now, if we were to go through each of these Beatitudes in detail, I think I could show you how what I've called the four core convictions of saving faith emerge. And this is how I've defined saving faith. To be saved, you must hold these four core convictions to be true. And I summarize them with the acronym REAL, R-E-A-L. The first conviction of saving faith is recognizing I am a sinner and I long to be holy. That's the R in real. Recognize your sin. I've stopped lying to myself about who I am, and I recognize that I am a sinner and I need the mercy of God. The second core conviction, the E in real, is embrace. Embrace my need for a savior. Saving faith includes the genuine understanding that left to myself, I am not going to be holy. I have no way of making myself holy. I have no way of earning God's favor. If I'm going to be saved, Jesus has to save me. The third core conviction, the A in real faith, stands for accept, accept the grace of God. So saving faith includes the genuine understanding that God owes me nothing. I am unworthy of any gift he gives me. I've done nothing to deserve his grace, and he is not obligated to save me. And then finally, the fourth core conviction is El in real lean, lean on Jesus. Saving faith is a firm trust that God will forgive me and make me holy because of the cross of Jesus Christ, that he will in fact forgive me and grant me life in his kingdom because of what Jesus did for me on the cross. Jesus says he has come to rescue us from sin and death, and I recognize I need that rescue. Jesus says he has come to grant us life, abundant life, the kind of life that truly satisfies and never fades away, and I deeply want that. Jesus says I don't have to earn his favor, he will willingly die in my place as an act of love and grace. And I gratefully and humbly accept that. So in this list, I think Jesus is confronting us with those fundamental attitudes of saving faith. Now I'm going to run through each of them quickly to show you how I think they teach that. Again, I have a podcast series where I look at each of these in much more detail, and there's a link to that in the show notes. So let's start with the first one, Matthew 5.3. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The question is what kind of poverty is he talking about? What is the poverty that grants you entrance into the kingdom of heaven? It's not financial impoverishment. There's no guarantee that if you are financially poor, you will enter the kingdom of heaven. He's talking about moral and spiritual bankruptcy. Holiness is the most valuable thing in all of human existence, and we don't have it. People who are poor in spirit, that means poor in their own eyes, this phrase in spirit, I think, is often used to describe your mental outlook, your self-attitude, your self-consciousness. Those who look at themselves and judge themselves to be spiritually bankrupt and morally poor are blessed because theirs is the kingdom of heaven. In other words, they are of real faith. They recognize their sin. Fortunate are those who recognize their own spiritual bankruptcy because they will gain the very thing they lack. They will be granted citizenship in the kingdom of God, where they will be made holy. 5-4, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Of course, the question of the hour is mourn what? In the context of the Beatitudes, Jesus is talking about mourning our sin and the death it unleashes, both in us and in the world around us. It's the heart level sorrow that comes when God peels back the fog and we finally see sin and corruption for what it really is. This is not boys being boys or people being people. This is recognizing that sin is tragic, it's evil, and it's wrong. Mourning or grieving is the appropriate response to discovering that I'm not a good person. I'm not the person I thought I was. The world is broken in ways I can't fix, and so am I. And what would actually comfort someone who grieves like that? Well, real comfort is being made holy, and Jesus is saying that in the kingdom of heaven, God will answer that longing completely, he will fully and finally conquer sin and death, and all his people will be made clean and whole and beautiful. The comfort is knowing that I have a place in the kingdom where that kind of life and justice and holiness will reign both in me and in the world around me. So this is the flip side of the first conviction of saving faith. Not only do I recognize my sin, I want to be free of it. People who grieve over their sin are fortunate because God will finish what he starts. He will comfort them by rescuing them from sin and making them holy and morally beautiful creatures in his kingdom. 5.5 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Well we have to know what he means by meek here. This is not a personality type. Jesus is not praising people who are naturally quiet or somehow conflict averse. Basically, meekness is a posture before God. The meek are those who refuse to grab what they want by presumption or disobedience. Instead, they humbly wait for God to give what he promises in his timing and in his way. Why would anyone do that? Because the meek have faced the truth about themselves. They don't just say, Well, I'm having a hard time spiritually, they say, I am morally and spiritually bankrupt and I'm to blame, and God owes me nothing. Meekness grows where the first beatitudes have already done their work. After recognizing our spiritual poverty and grieving over our sin, we accept the implications. I have no claim on God. He owes me nothing on the basis of who I am or what I've done, and left to myself I deserve judgment, not reward. This is the A of real faith, the accept grace. Meekness says, God owes me nothing. I have no basis to ask him for anything as if I've earned it. I will only be saved if God chooses to save me. Now let's talk about the promise here. They shall inherit the earth. For a long time that one really puzzled me. How could anything on earth satisfy the longing wrapped up in meekness? If meekness is this deep awareness that God owes me nothing and choosing to trust him and wait for him, then what in this broken world could possibly feel like an inheritance? Well, my mistake was in assuming that Jesus meant something in this life. I don't think he does. When I did a word study on this phrase and looked at how it showed up in both the Old and the New Testament, it became clear it is also a future hope. This language echoes Psalm 3711, and in that psalm, inheriting the land is not about grabbing blessings now. It's the future God gives to those who trust him and wait on him, in contrast to the short-lived success of the wicked. So it was really understanding the Old Testament usage of inherit the earth and inherit the land that it became clear that this is another way of describing our future in the kingdom of heaven. This is God's promise of a real and lasting home in his kingdom. Those who are meek, those who know their spiritual poverty, grieve over their sins, and come to God with a broken and contrite heart, and stop demanding his blessings, they will be comforted because they will have a place in his kingdom. Okay, the next one, 5-6, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Hunger and thirst are survival words. Jesus isn't talking about a casual interest in being a little bit better. He's describing a deep gnawing ache, a God-given appetite for holiness. To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to see the intrinsic worth of holiness and to feel how much I lack it. Nothing in this world can fill that emptiness. Success can't, applause can't, not even good religious habits can fill them that lack. What I want most is to be right with God and to live in a world where his justice and holiness reign. This kind of longing grows out of the first three beatitudes. If I've faced my spiritual poverty, if I've mourned the ugliness of my sin, if I've embraced the reality that God owes me nothing, well now I find myself wanting the one thing I can't manufacture by myself. Righteousness in both its main uses, both the status of being right with God and the character of holiness that does what is right. Well, what does Jesus promise to people who long like that? He promises they shall be satisfied. In the kingdom of God, God will make us holy. He will give us holiness in full measure. One day he will free us completely from sin and death, from tragedy, futility, and corruption forever. The very thing we crave is the very thing He intends to give us, and He does not underfeed His people. So this beatitude sounds like the heartbeat of saving faith. I know I am sinful, I know I can't save myself, I know God is not obligated to save me, but I long for the salvation he promises. I want to be free from my sin, and Jesus calls that kind of longing blessed because it ends in the fullness God can provide. Matthew 5 7, blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy. Now this concept shows up a lot in the New Testament. We see it in the Lord's Prayer, for example. Mercy is the costly choice to forgive someone who has wronged you. It doesn't deny that the wrong was wrong, it doesn't pretend that it didn't hurt. Instead, mercy looks the offense in the eye and says, You don't owe me payment, I release you from the debt. And that's costly because real forgiveness can cost the forgiver. Why would anyone do that? Because faith has already taught us something very humbling about ourselves. If I'm poor in spirit, if I know that I'm morally bankrupt before a holy God and that I live every day on his mercy, then how can I demand he give justice to someone else? Once I realize that I don't stand before him on my own record of being good, I only stand before him because he is forgiving and merciful, then I realize that has to be true of everyone else. It's not logical, it's not coherent to say, God, give me mercy and turn around and give everyone else justice, because we're all in the same boat. So when someone sins against me, the logic of the gospel presses in. I begin to realize that the person who hurt me needs mercy just as desperately as I need it. Showing mercy doesn't mean calling evil good or excusing abuse. It means refusing to become the collector of the debt. I entrust justice to God, and where appropriate, I entrust justice to rightful authorities, while personally releasing my claim to vengeance. So mercy is not soft on sin, it's honest about sin, but generous towards sinners, because God has been generous toward me. And Jesus' promise is striking here, they shall receive mercy. If I insist on strict justice for everyone else, then I have to remember that same standard condemns me. There's no measure, no standard by which I can condemn someone else that does not also fall on me. But when I show mercy, because I know how much I've been forgiven, then I'm living in step with the very grace God delights to give. The merciful are blessed, not because mercy earns salvation, because being merciful reveals a heart that understands the gospel. Those who extend mercy are the very people who have already begun to receive mercy, and one day they'll receive it in full from the one whose mercy never runs dry. Matthew 5 8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Now this phrase pure in heart can sound very intimidating, maybe even impossible. The word pure means clean or unmixed. And in Scripture, the word heart usually refers to the control center of a person, the place of trust, desire, will, and decision. So not just our emotions, but the thing that makes me me. So what does it mean to have a heart that is pure? Well, there are two ways people often read this. One is to say that pure in heart means moral perfection, as in spotless behavior, no sin at all. But if Romans 1 through 4 has taught us anything, it's that no one fits that description. None of us stands morally perfect before God. So Jesus can't be praising a standard no human being except himself could meet. The second option is that pure in heart means single-hearted devotion to God, a heart that is cleansed of its hostility toward God and focuses solely, freely, and totally on Him. The opposite would be to be double-minded. You could think of purity in this context as undivided loyalty. I want holiness above everything else. I value righteousness like the merchant who sold everything he had to buy the pearl of great price. I'm willing to let go of every other competing idol and desire if it stands in the way of knowing God and becoming like him. That's the pure in heart. They are single-mindedly focused on God. Their loyalty is not divided. And what's the promise? They shall see God. And where shall we see him? In the kingdom of heaven. And notice the logic, we don't gain this vision because we earned it by staying morally spotless. We gain it by faith, by a single-minded trust that God will keep his promises and forgive us because of the blood of Jesus Christ. So Pure in Heart describes saving faith. I'm done with half-hearted religion. I'm done with trying on my own. I want God, I long for his holiness, and I trust him to make me holy because of Jesus. Okay, Matthew 5.9, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Like mercy, peacemaking is an active, costly choice. It means I refuse to return evil for evil. Now, if someone sins against me, the natural spiral is kind of resentment, retaliation, and escalation. And that's the stuff of war. But if you sin against me and I choose to forgive, I break the cycle. Forgiveness doesn't pretend the wrong was not wrong. It looks straight in the eye and says, I forgive you, I release you. And that's the stuff of peace. And why would I do that? Because the gospel has already humbled me. I know that I have wronged others because I am a sinful person, and I know that I live on the mercy of God every day. It makes no sense to beg God to forgive me and then demand he throw the book at everyone else. Like the merciful, peacemakers are not naive about sin. They're honest about it, but about both themselves and others' sins. And because they trust God to judge rightly and to change hearts, they can leave vengeance, justice, retaliation to him, and lay down their own personal vengeance. The promise here again is striking, they shall be called sons of God. That's family language. Paul uses this phrase to talk about our inheritance. Sons receive the inheritance of their father's kingdom, and we will be called sons of God because we have been adopted into his family and stand to inherit eternal life in his kingdom. That's our future. That's where we're headed. The future we're headed for is one where we are conformed to the image of God's Son, where we will be made holy and filled with righteousness, and where peace is not fragile but final. All right, the last one, Matthew five, ten through twelve, 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. Persecution here is the hostility you attract because your life is aligned with Jesus. Notice the qualifying phrases for righteousness' sake, on my account, falsely. In other words, we're not inviting trouble because we are harsh and hypocritical. Instead, we bore Christ's name with integrity, and that integrity puts us out of step with the world. Suffering for doing what right is not an anomaly. It's part of following Christ. In 1 Peter chapter 4, he even calls those who are insulted for the name of Christ blessed, because it evidence that the Spirit of God rests on them. And Jesus is making the same point. If you pursue the things of God, that will put you at odds with a culture that rejects God. And Jesus tells us how to respond when this happens. Rejoice and be glad. Not because the pain is pleasant, but because of two solid anchors. First, your reward is great in heaven. God sees, God remembers, and God will make it right. And second, you're in good company. This is the same way they persecuted the prophets. When you suffer for Christ, you're standing where generations of faithful men and women have stood for centuries. Now the last conviction of saving faith is not technically included here, and that is trusting God to grant you holiness because of Jesus. We get that elsewhere in the teaching of Jesus. In fact, we saw it in the passage we looked at in last week's podcast episode. So saving faith grows and matures. We start with a basic understanding of these four core convictions, and our understanding develops and grows and strengthens as we go through God's curriculum in this life. We don't start out upon conversion perfectly, courageously, and consistently displaying all these qualities of poor in spirit, meek, mourning, and merciful, but we do grow in them. Jesus is not calling us to run out and try to manufacture these qualities in ourselves. We don't need to run out and seek persecution, for example. We don't need to create a show of mourning or forgiving others. These beatitudes are not marching orders. They are a general, almost proverbial contrast that marks the disciples of Jesus. Generally speaking, these are the kinds of things that make the disciples of Jesus distinctive. It's the contrast between those who hunger for righteousness and those who love the world, between those who think they've got it made and those who know they need mercy, between those who are persecuted because they stand out as Christians, and those who go along with what everybody else has to say and accept popular culture to fit in. In the end, through the mercy of God, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the trials and circumstances God asks us to walk through, these are qualities of a strong faith that will develop in us. What we're called to do in response is trust and believe. Seek the Word of God and believe it. So the Beatitudes are not a complete picture of the gospel, but they are a gospel of sorts. They tell us who stands to inherit eternal life in the kingdom of God. They describe what saving faith looks like in our lives. And these are the sorts of people we should all long to be. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but shows you how to figure it out. The blog version of this episode, including links and resources, is at WednesdayInTheWord.com slash Start Strong Podcast or. You can find all the episodes in this series at Wednesdayintheword.com. There's no charge, no spam, and no ads. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please follow it, rate it, or review it on your favorite podcast platform. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. If you're reading along in my book Start Strong, a New Believer's Guide to Christianity, read chapter 5 before the next episode. You can find it wherever books are sold, or just start with the free resources at StartstrongBooks.org. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can listen to Reggie's music on heartfilmusic.org. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm Krissan Marata, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.