23 Why Jesus Says You're Blessed When Everyone Hates You (Matthew 5:10-16)

Krisan Marotta: Good morning. You're listening to Wednesday in the Word, my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. I'm Krisan Marotta. This is the 23rd talk in my series on the Gospel of Matthew. Today we're going to be studying Matthew chapter 5, verses 10 through 16. You can find lecture notes with links to everything mentioned in the talk and an outline of the main points on my website. Just click on the link below this podcast or go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Matthew 23. You can find all previous episodes in this series on my website and many other series on wednesdayintheword.com. Thanks so much for listening today. I'm glad you're here. We are continuing our series on the Gospel of Matthew, and today we're going to finish the Beatitude portion of the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5. By way of review, let me remind you how I'm approaching these beatitudes. I have argued that Jesus is describing people of faith. He is describing the destiny of those who will inherit a place in the kingdom of God, and all the people who have a place in His kingdom have saving faith. And these beatitudes suggest that there are four core convictions of having saving faith. They are a genuine desire for holiness in and of itself. I want the things of God, not the things of this world, I hunger and thirst for righteousness and so forth. Second, a genuine understanding that left myself I am not capable of making myself holy. I am poor in spirit. I know in my heart that I am sinful, that I lack holiness, and that I need grace and mercy from God. Third, a genuine understanding that God owes me nothing, that I am unworthy of any gift from God. I am humbly and non presumptuously waiting on God's favor rather than demanding that he bless me. So I mourn over my sinfulness, realizing that God owes me nothing, and if he is to forgive me, it will be because of his grace and mercy. And then fourth, a firm trust that God will in fact make me holy and grant me an inheritance in his kingdom because of the blood of Jesus Christ. I have also argued that each of these beatitudes follows a pattern. First, each beatitude tells us who the people are who are fortunate, who are the people who are in a highly desirable situation, basically what it means to be blessed. Second, they give us a reason why such people are fortunate, and the basic reason we have seen is that they have a glorious future promised from God. Their future destiny is what makes them fortunate now. Third, these beatitudes are exclusive. Only the people with these qualities have this glorious future. Only they will inherit the kingdom of God, and these are qualities that define saving faith. And then finally, the beatitudes are surprising. There's something ironic about them. At first glance, the qualities that gain you the kingdom of heaven do not appear to be qualities you really want. And yet Jesus is saying the people who have these qualities are fortunate indeed. Well, we are going to look at the final beatitude, which is in Matthew five ten, and this one is a little different. Jesus gives us the beatitude, and then unlike the others, he gives us an explanation or a short commentary on this beatitude, which I think is found in five eleven through sixteen. At least that's my understanding of how this is organized. This last beatitude is about persecution, and then verses eleven through sixteen provide further explanation of the idea that is expressed in verse ten. So let's start with Matthew five verses 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. Luke also contains a version of this beatitude in his gospel, and he gives us a little bit of different detail. This is Luke six twenty two and twenty three. 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 your reward is great in heaven, for so their fathers did to the prophets. And then in Luke six twenty six, woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. All right, we're going to step through this according to the pattern, and first who is blessed? Well, in this case, it is the persecuted. Who are the ones in a highly desirable situation? It's the persecuted. I have a lot of background information I want to bring in to help us understand who Jesus is talking about, so bear with me. The persecution of the righteous is a very common theme in the Old Testament, and we've already seen it in some of the Psalms we looked at when we were discussing the other Beatitudes. You may remember Psalm thirty seven, which talks about those who will inherit the land. This is Psalm thirty seven twelve through eighteen. The wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes his teeth at him, but the Lord laughs at the wicked, for he sees that his day is coming. The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows to bring down the poor and needy, to slay those whose way is upright, their swords shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken. Better is the little that the righteous has than the abundance of many wicked, for the arms of the wicked shall be broken, but the Lord upholds the righteous. The Lord knows the days of the blameless, and their heritage will remain forever. Now this is a very common theme in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms. The wicked are pictured as those who have turned away from God. They have abandoned what He says, they have set their sights on what this world has to offer, they refuse to submit to the will of God, and instead they are greedy and arrogant and they act unjustly to take what they want. The righteous, on the other hand, are those who are seeking to follow the Lord. So in this context of this theme, the righteous are not those who are morally perfect or holy, rather they try to live within the will of God. They do not seek profit at the expense of others, they wait patiently for God and they pursue justice and forgiveness and mercy. The wicked hate the righteous. The righteous are an obstacle to the plans of the wicked, the righteous are an easy target for them, and sometimes the wicked actively despise the righteous precisely because the righteous take God seriously. But in the end, God is going to cast down the wicked and bless the righteous. And we see this a lot in the Old Testament. Another very well known place is Psalm sixty nine. This is a Psalm of David, and David cries out starting in verse one, Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire where there is no foothold, I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with my crying out, my throat is parched, my eyes grow dim with waiting for God. More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause. Mighty are those who would destroy me, those who attack me with lies. What I did not steal must I now restore. O God, you know my folly, the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you. Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me, O Lord God of hosts. Let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me, O God of Israel. And then in verse seven David explains why the wicked hate him. He's talking to God here, and he says this is seven through nine, for it is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that dishonor has covered my face. I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother's sons, for zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me. I think that last line in Psalm sixty nine nine sums up the idea here very well. The reproaches of those who reproach God have fallen on David because David follows him. The wicked have a problem with God, David has associated himself with God, therefore the wicked have a problem with David. So David, the one who is seeking God, is suffering precisely because he is seeking God. Now Jesus points us to some other important Old Testament examples. In five twelve he says, Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. And we see over and over again in the Old Testament that the prophets were persecuted precisely because they were faithful to God, and we could look at a lot of examples. I'm just going to give you one. This is from Second Chronicles twenty four, verses seventeen through twenty one. Now after the death of Jehoida, the princes of Judah came and paid homage to the king. Then the king listened to them, and they abandoned the house of the Lord, the god of their fathers, and served the Ashram and the idols, and wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for this guilt of theirs. Yet he sent prophets among them to bring them back to the Lord. These testified against them, but they would not pay attention. Then the Spirit of God closed Zechariah, the son of Jehoida the priest, and he stood above the people and said to them, Thus says God, why do you break the commandments of the Lord so that you cannot prosper? Because you have forsaken the Lord, he has forsaken you. But they conspired against him, and by command of the king they stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the Lord. So here in this little section we see the old king dies, the new king takes the throne, and the people abandon the ways of the Lord. So God sends prophets to call them back and to tell them what to do and to repent. The prophet Zechariah faithfully tells the people, thus says the Lord, this is what God has to say, and this is how you need to repent. But the people don't want to repent, they don't want to listen to God, so they stone Zechariah to death. And this is just one example of the many ways the prophets suffered precisely because they were representing God to the people. Being persecuted for following God is a big theme in the Old Testament, and anyone listening to Jesus who was familiar with the Old Testament would have remembered this kind of historical abuse of the prophets. So when Jesus says, just like they persecuted the prophets who were before you, he's not speaking into a vacuum. Jews would be familiar with this idea, they would recognize it. What is new is what Jesus goes on to say next. He changes the pronoun between five ten and five eleven, and I think that change is significant. In five ten he says, Blessed are those who, and then in five eleven he switches the pronoun and he says, Blessed are you. Now who is he talking to? Well, you'll remember that Matthew has told us that Jesus is speaking to his disciples who are immediately in front of him with the larger crowd behind them. And Luke says in his Beatitudes, he gives us this detail. I think he shifted here from speaking generally about all the children of God who have these certain qualities because they have saving faith, and now he's speaking directly to his disciples as his disciples. His disciples are his students, they follow him, they learn from him, and he's saying, You, my disciples, are blessed if you are persecuted for being my disciples. So the first statement in 510 is a very common Old Testament theme. Yes, in general, those who seek to follow God will suffer for following God, but God will come through for them in the end. And now in 511, Jesus is equating the prophets who suffered for the sake of God with his followers who will suffer for the sake of following him. Now, if you stop and think about that, that is an amazing assertion of his own importance. Jesus is suggesting that his disciples will suffer just for being his disciples in the same way the prophets of God suffered. So in equating suffering for the sake of righteousness with suffering for following him, Jesus is really equating following him with seeking God and seeking righteousness. Now remember, Jesus is talking to Jews for the most part. It was their own Jewish ancestors who persecuted the Jewish prophets. It wasn't atheists, it wasn't pagans who persecuted the prophets of Israel. Other Jews persecuted the prophets of Israel. Other Jews who claimed to worship the same Lord, but in fact also worshipped other gods alongside him were the ones who stoned the prophets of God. And notice how Luke brings this out in his version. He says, Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven, for so their fathers did to the prophets. That was 623, and then in 626, woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. Now Jesus often warns the Jews of his day not to be like their fathers, and here's another case of that. He's saying, Now, in your lives today, people are going to hate you, my disciples, just as your fathers persecuted the prophets. So you, my disciples, are going to face the kind of persecution that ultimately Jesus is going to face and leads to his death on the cross. And it was the religious leaders of Jesus' day who ended up hostily, violently rejecting him and seeking his death. I think at the center of what Jesus is suggesting is that the religious Jews of His day are going to respond to Him and His disciples just like their fathers responded to the prophets of God in the Old Testament. He makes these repeated statements in the Gospels that those who hate me, Jesus, will hate you, my disciples. And who is it that we see hating Jesus in the Gospels and ultimately seeking his execution? It wasn't the atheist, it was the religious leaders of his day who sought his death. It was leaders from the chief priests, the scribes, and the Pharisees who sought to put him to death. Jesus, speaking to the twelve, says this in the Gospel of John 16, two. This is the kind of persecution we see in Jesus' life. Jesus was a threat to the religious leaders of the day. They didn't receive him well. The religious leaders were offended that Jesus healed on the Sabbath. He directly criticizes the Pharisees for paying too much attention to outward ritual and not enough attention to the moral demands of the law. He calls everyone to repentance, including the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He's merciful to sinners, and he associates with those social outcasts, the tax gatherers. He accuses the Pharisees of being worldly hypocrites, and I could go on. Jesus is warning the sort of thing that I'm going to encounter, you, my disciples, will encounter. Yes, the pagans and the atheists are probably going to mock and scoff at you, but you will also face persecution from the religious of your day. With all of this as background, then we can build a picture of who Jesus is talking about in this beatitude. In the Old Testament, we see that the righteous, those who seek to follow God, are persecuted by the wicked, those who reject and abandon God. The wicked see the righteous as an obstacle and a target, and they hate the righteous specifically because the righteous seek to follow God. The prophets are a good example because they were hated for proclaiming the word of God. But the prophets weren't persecuted by pagans, they were persecuted by their fellow Jews. Jesus then says his disciples will face the same sort of hostility for following him that he is about to face from their fellow religious Jews. Their own people are going to hate them for following him. This beatitude then says these people who face this kind of hostility I just described from both the worldly and the religious are fortunate. And why are they fortunate? Because theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And notice that Jesus has brought the beatitudes full circle. In the first beatitude, the poor in spirit were fortunate because theirs was the kingdom of heaven, and then here in this last beatitude, Jesus gives the same reason. Now I've argued that each reason in each beatitude points ahead to the kingdom of God. The blessing he's talking about is the blessing that comes to those who find their inheritance in the kingdom of God or they find eternal life. And it's the same here. It is their future hope, their future destiny that makes them fortunate now. Jesus goes on then to explain why they are fortunate in another way. Look at 512. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. So the prophets stand to inherit a reward in heaven. They were faithful in the face of persecution, and they will inherit a great reward. Likewise, the disciples of Jesus stand to inherit the same reward. The disciples of Jesus are in the same situation. They are responding to the words of Jesus, just as the prophets responded to the word of God, and their reward will be like that of the prophets, that is, they will inherit a place in the kingdom of God. We see this same idea in Hebrews eleven. This chapter speaks of the Old Testament faithful, including the prophets, and we find this in Hebrews eleven thirty six through forty. Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword, they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering about in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth, and all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. Now there's a lot going on in that section, but for our purposes I think we just want to bring out that the author of Hebrews is telling us the prophets were faithful to the point of death. But the promise has not been completely fulfilled for the prophets yet. They had to wait for the time of Jesus. They will receive the reward together with all the followers of Jesus in the kingdom of God when God sends his Messiah a second time to establish his righteous rule over all creation. But notice that the reward of the prophets is the same reward as the reward of the faithful followers of Jesus, and that reward is to find life in the kingdom of God. The prophets were mistreated because they were faithful to God. Likewise, the followers of Jesus will be mistreated for their faithfulness to God, and both will inherit a place in the kingdom of God. They will find eternal life. The third aspect of a beatitude is that only those in this situation will inherit this reward. And Luke makes that really clear in his version because he adds, Woe to you when people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. And we see in the Old Testament the false prophets tell the people exactly what the people want to hear, and everyone loves them. And Jesus is saying, Look, if all people are speaking well of you, that's not really a good sign. People love the false prophets. They love it when you tell them exactly what they want to hear. So Jesus is clearly implying that if you're going to be his disciple, you are not going to make everyone happy. There will always be people who hate Jesus and they will hate you for following him and speaking his truth. The fourth aspect then is that this beatitude is surprising or ironic in some way. Of all the beatitudes, the ironic aspect here is probably the easiest to see. Because of course we don't want to be persecuted. Of course, we don't want people to hate us. We would consider ourselves to be unfortunate if we were persecuted and hated. And yet Jesus says, No, you are actually in a very good situation when you are persecuted and hated for his name's sake. But Jesus has more to say about this in 13 through 16, and I think he's expanding on the idea that only such people are blessed. Because this raises the question, well, Jesus, isn't there some middle ground? Can't I be a faithful disciple of yours without being hated and without being mistreated? Can't I just avoid all that conflict with the world? And what Jesus says next is basically no, you can't. Let me read Matthew five, thirteen through sixteen. You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. Now over the centuries this salt metaphor has been explained and expounded on in a whole lot of different ways. And you could say that it is kind of a poster child for the idea that you are not supposed to take a metaphor and run with it in any direction you want. Jesus is making a point in the context. And what we want to find as Bible students is the point that Jesus is making in the context, not just any point that might occur to me based on what I know about salt or light. You've probably heard something like, well, salt was used as a preservative, and so God uses believers as a preservative in society and culture. Or you may have heard salt is a corrosive, it eats away at what it's applied to, and so believers are to eat away at the injustice in society. And I could go on and on. Bible teachers love to take every last feature and detail that we know to be true about salt and pour it into this passage. That's what we want to avoid. We want to look at the context and ask, what point is Jesus making? He is not saying that every last thing that is true about salt is also true about his disciples. He's making a specific comparison, and that's what we want to find. And I think Jesus tells us what feature of salt he's talking about, and that's taste. He says you are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, and then he goes on. So the comparison he's making is not between salt as a preservative or salt's corrosive powers. He's talking about how it tastes. Salt has a very distinctive flavor. When salt is in food, the food tastes salty, and you notice it. If you add too much salt, it's practically the only thing you can taste. When salt is missing from food, you notice that it's not there. So the flavor of salt is very distinctive, it stands out. And not only does Jesus comment on the taste of salt, the other metaphors he uses in this paragraph also focus on this idea of being distinctive, of standing out. So a city on a hill stands out. You can't hide it, it's distinctive. You can see it from everywhere. Light stands out in the darkness. It's visible, it's distinctive. If you look out a window in the dark of night and your neighbor down the street has his porch light on, you notice that porch light immediately. Your eyes are drawn to that point of light in the midst of the darkness. It stands out. That distinctiveness is what's at stake in the salt metaphor. When food has salt on it, you expect it to taste salty. If you sprinkle salt on your food and it doesn't taste salty, you would say, well, this salt is worthless. By its very nature, salt makes itself known in food by the distinctiveness of its taste. If salt no longer has that taste, then it is no longer salt and it is no good. That's the point he's making about the disciples of Christ. To follow Christ in this world is to stand out, to have a distinctive flavor. You can't help it. Being different than the world is inherent in the very nature of following Christ. To live a life dedicated to repentance and to seeking the kingdom of God marks you as a very different kind of person. You speak differently, you handle your sexuality differently, you have a different view of the importance of money, you have a different view of what it means to be generous or how it looks to climb a career ladder, you may spend your time differently, you have different values, and so on. These differences are like salt and food. Everyone notices that they're there. If you're not distinctive in this world, so that you look just like everybody else, then you've lost the distinctive characteristics of being a disciple of Christ. The only way salt can be tasteless is to stop being salt. The only way a disciple of Christ can stop being different than the world is to stop being a disciple of Christ. And that's what Jesus emphasizes in his following metaphors. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. This verse has two different metaphors. First, disciples of Jesus are like a light in the world. You go into a dark room, you turn on a light, and it stands out. It has an unmistakable impact on the darkness. Likewise, a city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Imagine you are traveling down a road and in the distance is a hill and on top of that hill is a city. Well, every single traveler on the road is going to have his eyes fixed on that city. The people who live in that city cannot rely on a strategy of invisibility to protect themselves because it's just not going to work. Everyone knows they're there. They are high up and visible for everyone to see. Well, the same kind of distinctiveness is true of the disciples of Jesus. We don't have the option of blending in. We are going to be noticed. The only way to blend in is to stop being a disciple and be like everyone else. In fifteen and sixteen, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. He's saying, Look, the whole point of lighting a lamp is so that it will shine in the darkness. Whoever heard of lighting a lamp and then putting a basket over it so that no light escapes, that's not what you want to do. You want to put it up high on a stand so that it will give light to every corner of the house. The very nature of light is that you want it to shine. You want it to stand out. You put it in a place where it will have the most impact on the darkness and will be visible everywhere. And this is God's plan for the disciples of Jesus. He wants us to be visible and to stand out. When he says in 516, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works, he's not telling us to be religious show-offs. He's not saying, Tell everyone else what great people you are and broadcast all your good works so that everyone knows you're doing them. Now you've probably run into people like this. Just a little farther down in 6 2, he's going to criticize the Pharisees for blowing a trumpet when they give alms to the poor. That kind of showing off and proclaiming, look at me, I'm being good, is exactly what Jesus does not want. Remember, we want to understand this language in the context of persecution that he's been talking about. We are to live distinctive lives as his disciples. We're not to hold back from following him for fear that the world might note us and hate us. We are to be his disciples and follow him, even though it makes us different and different in a way that often invites mocking and scoffing and persecution. We are to stick out like light in the darkness. Let your light shine. Don't hold back out of fear of hostility. Be the disciples you're called to be and trust God for the consequences. So this phrase see your good works can sound like we're supposed to go out and very publicly and ostentatiously do good works so that everyone notices. Maybe I go out and work in a soup kitchen or volunteer as a school counselor in a way that everyone knows I'm doing it. Well, I don't think that's the kind of thing that's in view in this context. The idea in context is let them see that you are poor in spirit. Let them see that you are merciful and pure in heart, that you hunger and thirst for righteousness, that you mourn your sins, and that you will seek peace and pursue forgiveness and repentance and so on. Basically, let them see that you're living as a disciple of Jesus. He has warned his disciples that this kind of difference, this kind of visible difference, is going to invite persecution and hostility, but in 516 he ends on a positive note and he says, Well, there can be another reaction, and that is the watchers may see the hand of God in your life and glorify him too. So, yes, you'll invite persecution and hatred of some, but others are going to see God and turn to him. So here's the big picture of this section. Jesus saved the most surprising beatitude for last. Those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness are fortunate because the reward is great in heaven. The fact that those who seek God will be mistreated by those who reject God is a rich theme in the Old Testament. Sometimes those who seek God will be mistreated precisely because they are following God. And the prophets are a great example of those who are persecuted for following God. They were persecuted for proclaiming God's message. The disciples of Jesus are going to face the same sort of hostility, in particular, the same hostility Jesus faced from the religious people of his day. Just as their fathers persecuted the prophets, so the religious people of Jesus' day persecuted Jesus and his followers. And it must be this way. There is hostility between the world and God. Many religious people are still very worldly and in their own way hostile to God. It's impossible for the disciples of Christ to blend in. Their very faith is a stumbling block to the people of the world and will invite hostility and rejection. So Jesus is calling us to be true disciples, to be distinctively Christian. If we are his disciples, we are going to be different. That's just the nature of things. We're going to handle our life differently, make different choices, have a different attitude toward sexuality and money and career and the work family balance. We'll seek to have a different kind of marriage, we'll have a different view of divorce. We will forgive sin but not condone it or excuse it, and in living like that we are going to anger our neighbors. I think it's no accident that Jesus left this beatitude to the end. If we are people marked by being poor in spirit, mourning over our sin, non presumptuously waiting on God, hungering for righteousness, and so on, then we will have the distinctive sort of life that will draw the hostility of the world. Now, unfortunately, that rejection can happen within the religious community, and many of you can probably testify that you lost a friendship or two when you became a believer. People rejected you because they didn't like the changes they saw taking place in your life. But perhaps other people saw those changes and drew closer to you, recognizing, hey, we're now on the same path. It can be threatening to friends and family members when we start getting serious about the faith. It can be threatening to coworkers when we start taking the Bible seriously and applying it to our lives. And it can be uncomfortable when you start taking mercy seriously, and perhaps forgiving a family member with whom everyone else is nursing a grudge. Many atheists and religious people are going to be threatened by these kinds of changes. And all we can do is trust and seek to faithfully follow Jesus and pray for those who reject us. Since we've come to the end of the Beatitudes, let me wrap them up and bring them to some sort of conclusion. First let me review the list. There's the poor in spirit, those who know inside that they are morally bankrupt, they are broken, rebellious and sinful people, and they recognize that nothing in this world will make them truly rich. Next, those who mourn, those who feel an appropriate sorrow over their own sinfulness and the brokenness and corruption of the world. The meek, those who humbly wait for God rather than presumptuously and disobediently grabbing for what they want or think they deserve. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, that is those who are not satisfied by anything in this world and instead long for the day when God will free them from sin, death, futility, and corruption. The merciful are those who are willing to commit the costly act of being forgiving toward others who have wronged them because they know how much they themselves have been forgiven. The pure in heart, those who are being cleansed from hostility toward God and freed from worldliness and growing into a sincere faith. Peacemakers, those who do not return evil for evil, but instead take the costly step of being reconciled to those who have hurt them because they know that they themselves have wronged others as well. And finally the persecuted, those who attract the hostility of the world because their lives as disciples of Jesus are different and distinctive. Now I've argued that these people show four basic convictions of saving faith, and therefore they stand to inherit a place in the kingdom of God. So the first was a genuine desire for holiness in and of itself. They want the things of God and not the things of this world. So this answers the question, saved from what? What am I hoping that God will do for me? And a core conviction of saving faith is that I want to be freed from my sin, I want to be holy. I have a genuine desire for holiness. The second, a genuine understanding that I'm a sinner, that left to myself, I am not going to make myself holy. So this is that basic, humble repentance before God, knowing I can't earn his favor, I can't make myself holy, and I'm not going to try to presumptuously grab for it. Third, a genuine understanding that God owes me nothing, and I'm unworthy of any gift. So I have done nothing to merit forgiveness. There's no divine spark within which requires God to save me. I am not better than any of my fellow human beings. I can forgive because I know how much I've been forgiven, and I know that God owes me nothing. And then finally, this is for all the reward part of the Beatitudes, I have this firm hope and trust that God will make me holy and grant me an inheritance in the kingdom of God because of the work of Jesus Christ. And that is saving faith in a nutshell. These are the qualities that we develop and grow as we go through God's curriculum in this life. Now we don't start out upon conversion perfectly, courageously and consistently, displaying all these qualities of poor in spirit and meek and mourning and so forth. But as we grow in faith, we do grow in these qualities. 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. These are a general, almost proverbial description of what makes a disciple of Jesus and what makes a disciple of Jesus distinctive. In general terms, this is 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 that they need mercy, between those who are persecuted because they stand out as Christians, and those everyone loves because they accept and go along with everything in popular culture and society, and so on. 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, mature saving faith that God will develop in us. What we're called to do is not go out and try to manufacture this ourselves. Saving faith is a gift. We are called to trust and believe, to seek the word of God and to wait for it and to stand firm in it. We are going to be put in situations that ask us these kinds of questions. Am I willing to see my own sin and moral failure? Am I willing to trust that God will keep his promises? Do I believe that true life is to be found in the kingdom of God? Am I willing to admit that the values of this world are misguided and wrong? Am I willing to live in light of the truths of the gospel? These are the kind of fundamental issues we all face every day. Do I actually believe this gospel I say I believe, and am I willing to live like it? And if I can answer yes to those questions, then these are the sorts of qualities that are going to emerge over time and patience. The Beatitudes are not a complete picture of the gospel, but they are a gospel of sorts, because they tell us who stands to inherit eternal life in the kingdom of God. They tell us what saving faith looks like in our lives, and these are the sorts of people that we should long to be. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also seeks to show you how to figure it out. You can hear all previous episodes in this series and find many other series on my website, WednesdayintTheWord.com. No charge, no spam, and no ads. It's all free to help you improve your study skills and understanding of scripture. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please subscribe to the podcast, leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen, and most importantly, please tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coach. You can find his music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I hope I see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.