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Matthew 5:1-12 What Is a Real Christian Like?
Matthew chapter 5 from verses 1 to 12, hear the word of the Lord. Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain. And when he had 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.".
May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. What do you think a real Christian is like? I mean, when you think of a spiritual person, someone genuinely spiritual, what comes to your mind?
What words come to your mind? I mean, how does he or she react, express, or carry him or herself? What one word maybe would you describe a spiritual person as? Is he or she always peaceful, above the problems and events, just swirling around in life, unworried about money or politics, moving through life like he or she is just above it all, hovering above it all?
The key word is serene. Or is he emotionally engaged, laughing and crying loudly, feeling the depth of every tragedy and the height of every triumph? The key word is passionate. Or is he or she a person of conviction, unshakable beliefs, and unafraid to authoritatively tell them to others, willing to take charge, come riding in, sweeping in like John Wayne on a horse, always confident, assertive?
Key word is bold. Or maybe he's a reserved, respectable man in a three-piece suit, carrying a huge King James Bible in one arm and small talking about football and always, and here's the key word, proper.
Or would he be sympathetic and caring, laughing with people, never at them, never arguing or disagreeing, soothing and sweet and looking to dialogue with you about your feelings? Maybe, if it's okay with you, if you're not triggered by this word, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, maybe the key word is sensitive.
All of them are partly true, but they're missing something, aren't they? How about wretched, poor, helpless, worm? A lot of people have assumptions about what a spiritual person is like. Often they've just inherited them from their upbringing.
That's kind of what they were raised to think this is what he's like. And when I went to California to go to seminary, I was shocked that people would go to church dressed so casually in shorts and T-shirts.
At first, I resolved I'm going to teach these Californians how to dress to church. I wear my suit every Sunday. By the third year, I was wearing shorts and T-shirts. Even pastors would come to the pulpit in floral Hawaiian shirts, no ties, casually kind of talking to the church like you might talk to a neighbor at your mailbox.
And I thought that's just not how a spiritual person preaches. They have a suit and tie. They work themselves and their audience up into a frenzy. They assert their convictions with undiluted certitude.
That's how a spiritual person preaches. What do you think a real Christian is like? When the great evangelist George Whitefield came from Old England to New England in 1740 to central Massachusetts, he stayed in the home of a young pastor, not very well known at the time, except for being the grandson of the famous Solomon Stoddard, who had a reputation.
Solomon Stoddard had a reputation for being a dominating, imposing leader. But Whitefield commented in his journal how this young pastor, Solomon Stoddard's grandson, and his family, they were just remarkably different and better, he said, than all the other pastors he had met in America.
He extolled the young pastor and his family as a model of godliness and pointed to exactly the qualities in this young pastor that are the opposite of what so many people liken today's televangelist. He extolled, Whitefield extolled the young pastor's modesty, he and his family's lack of ostentation, their simplicity, their genuine love.
Whitefield is then a single man, commented how the pastor's wife was such a model Christian woman, a true daughter of Sarah, he called her, and he pined for a similar wife. Whitefield commented how the young pastor, listening to Whitefield preach, wept through almost the whole sermon.
The young pastor was Jonathan Edwards, let's say one of the greatest theologians in America, probably the greatest theologian in American history. Whitefield knew what a true Christian was like. What do you think a real Christian is like?
Here in the opening of the famous Sermon on the Mount, we have a description. It's not a description of wardrobe or of style, it's not a way to look, it's a way of being. These beatitudes, these blessed attitudes follow naturally from the previous paragraph in chapter 4, verse 22 to 25, where the Lord Jesus is traveling through Galilee and he's proclaiming, it says, the gospel of the kingdom.
He's showing what the kingdom of God looked like by healing every disease. And so the crowds flock to him, and with a surge of people flowing to him, he finds a hilltop and began to teach his disciples.
Notice that at the very beginning, because this is the whole setting for the entire Sermon on the Mount. The crowds are coming to him, he goes to the mountain, he sat down, the disciples come to him. In verse 2, he opened his mouth and taught them, referring to the disciples.
And so the crowds are just kind of the spectators in the background here. He's teaching his people. Now he shows what the kingdom of God looks like by describing those who live in it. Now first, they will be blessed.
After all, this is the gospel.
It's the good news, that's what gospel means, the good news of the kingdom. Good news, by definition, announces something that is surprisingly better than what we had expected. The gospel is the surprisingly good news that if you're in the kingdom of God, you're blessed.
And that word there, that blessed, is really not about a technical or just vaguely spiritual term for a state of kind of blessedness that's totally detached from our real life. A blessed state that we're supposed to kind of name and claim as our own, even when reality is disawful.
As though we can be inwardly depressed and outwardly harassed. Work is dreary. Family or relationships give us anxiety and frustrations and not joy. Got a bad diagnosis has come. But when someone asks us how we're doing, we're supposed to put on a smile and exude, I'm blessed.
I'm too blessed to be stressed. Really be fake. And then go home and plop down and wonder, is this really what it means to be a Christian? No, the word blessed in reality in Greek is just a simple word for happy.
You could replace every time with happy or fortunate. But a fortunate, of course, not depending on fortune, but here on God himself. It means that these kinds of people are to be congratulated. These are the marks of a good life.
This is a happy life. Yes, that happiness sometimes lives side by side with other things, with grief and persecution. In this age, sometimes it may be temporarily drowned out by depression and suffering.
That's the reality. And we're not called to be fakes and to pretend that it's not the reality, to slap people in the back and to say, I'm blessed when we're mourning. But we are to remember that if we are subject to the kingdom, living under the rule of God, then we have blessings either now or not yet, either at this time or waiting for them to come in the future.
But we we know they're coming. And that makes us happy. Well, the first thing to say about what a Christian looks like, a real Christian who is living under the rule of God, is that he or she will be happy.
They are happy for eight reasons, one more than perfection. Seven, perfection. One more, a bonus, a full overflowing of happiness. And that comes from living in God's rule. Those are the eight Beatitudes listed here.
And notice the first, poor in spirit, and the last, persecuted for righteousness sake, are the same in their blessing, the same in their reward, and the same in time. There are eight Beatitudes, and the first and the last one have the same blessings.
In verses three and ten, the kingdom of heaven, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They're also both the same in time. When you get this kingdom of heaven, it says in both, for theirs is, present tense, right now, currently,.
The kingdom of heaven.
Each of the other Beatitudes say, for they shall, in other words, future tense, for they shall be comforted, inherit the earth, be satisfied, receive mercy, see God, called sons of God. And all of them look forward to a coming blessing.
But the first and the last say that we have that blessing now, under the rule of God. We have these benefits of God at this time. And that tells us two things. First, the blessings and the happiness of God's kingdom are both now.
We get some now, and we get the fullness of it not yet. Some we can have at this moment on earth, and some we'll have to wait until later. It also tells us, second, that the eight qualities are not kind of individual, disconnected options, that you can kind of choose one but not the other, pass over a few.
You can have the few you like, maybe skip the rest, kind of cafeteria style. Maybe you like a little meekness. You'll have lots of that mercy. You keep heaping up the mercy. Try to be a peacemaker if you can, but opt out of the hard ones, like the poverty of spirit.
I don't like the way that sounds. The mourning, no, I'll pass that completely. Especially the persecution, no, keep that away from me. We want nothing to do with that. No, that the first and the last ones are the same in blessing and the same in time, that shows us that they're bookends, tying together everything in between them.
So these are not eight separate attributes. We kind of pick and choose among them, but these are eight facets of one diamond. What is a real Christian like? He or she is poor in spirit. The poor in spirit are those who are poor, like the materially poor.
What does a materially poor person have? By definition, not much. They have nothing they can offer you. They can't pay you a lot.
They can't buy you off.
They can't send you on a nice vacation. They can't give you a gift. The poor and the materially poor, they know this. They have nothing to offer. And the poor in spirit are the same way. They are those who know they have nothing to offer, nothing that they can buy you off with, nothing that they can impress you with because they know they have nothing in their hands and that they depend solely upon God.
They know they have no other choice. And this is the opposite of what so many people today think a psychologically healthy person should have. People today, we're told, should be confident in themselves.
Unlike Muhammad Ali boasting, I am the greatest.
Really?
Now, it's true that there is such a thing as an unhealthy, low self-esteem. That is, we can be too low in ourselves compared to others. We're always the worst. We're always to blame compared to other people.
That's really not poverty in spirit. Being poor in spirit is not thinking less of yourself. It's thinking of yourself less. People with low self-esteem as compared themselves to others constantly can still not be poor in spirit because they are thinking of themselves constantly.
Oh, if I were only as good as he was. If I were only as could do that as well as she does. That's all about you. Stop thinking of yourself so much. They can still think they have something in their hands that they're bringing to impress God or to demand something from you, their victimhood.
The great missionary William Carey, often called the father of modern missions. He began the whole movement of modern missions. Eventually, he gathered a church in India. I say eventually. It took him a while.
Translated the entire Bible into six languages and parts of them into 29 other languages.
Think about that.
That means you've got to learn 29 other languages. Who persevered for 40 years to the loss of a son. Then his wife went insane. Then his wife died. The first seven years he had no results. He has no conversion.
He had no fruit. He had nothing to show for it whatsoever. He lost one son already. His wife is insane at this point. He's trying to have to control her. And he persevered. And became the father of modern missions.
Planted a church there.
Great fruit. What was William Carey's secret? How did he do that? When he died in 1834 in Serampore, India, a simple tablet was put on his grave with the words that he requested. It reads, A wretched, poor, and helpless worm.
O 'er thy kind arms I fall. That's poverty of spirit. The first condition to come to God, the first beatitude, is to come with empty hands. A true Christian mourns in verse 4. Almost sounds self-contradictory, doesn't it?
Blessed are those who mourn. That is, happy are those who are unhappy. And the word here for mourn is the strongest word for mourning. What we experience when someone close to us dies, what we find at a funeral.
It's grief. It's a sorrow for sin, for injustice, and for the price that had to be paid for our sin, because of our sin to bring justice to the world, to create a people on earth who are right with God.
We mourn over that. It is in part why we regularly take the Lord's Supper, as we just did. To hear those words, This is my body, which is broken for you. And we mourn over that. You look at that piece of broken cracker.
His flesh was broken because of me. And that causes us to mourn. We're told to continue receiving it until he comes, to continue to mourn. But when he comes, we no longer have to remember. We'll see him face to face.
And finally, we're told in Revelation chapter 21, verse 4, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain. For the old order of things has passed away.
We who mourn now will be comforted then. True Christians are meek, in verse 5. Those who've entered his kingdom are what is here called meek, gentle, controlled, patient, teachable, and open to reason.
They now know and they acknowledge an authority that is over them. They're in the kingdom of God. They're not the king of the kingdom of God. They're subjects of the kingdom. So in other words, they recognize there's an authority, a king, over them to which they used to rebel in the past.
And they now know that there is still part of them, if left to itself, that would rebel, if not for grace by which we stand. And as of the psalm, they know and feel to their core that their salvation is not in their own hands.
And that knowledge then makes them humble, teachable, changeable, open to reason, able to listen to other people who are appealing to them on the basis of that authority to which they are now surrendering.
There is a kind of spirituality that thinks being a Christian is asserting yourself without listening to anyone. I once heard a notable Christian leader, I don't consult anybody. Just goes with what he thinks is right.
Never willing to question himself. Self-assured. He doesn't need to learn or to read or to change or to be accountable to anyone. He doesn't even need to go to church. And if he does need to go to church, he certainly doesn't need other people nosing around in his personal business.
He has confused a confidence in God's word with a confidence in his own word. And the result is that such people are basically unreasonable and unteachable. You just can't get through to them because they don't listen to anyone who tells them anything differently than what they already know or they think they know and believe.
Today we have legions of people, call themselves Christians, go to church, who have opinions about things that were usually just kind of made up in the 19th century, often about the end times, or maybe you want Bible version to use, and you can't get through to them.
You cannot reason with them. You can't teach them.
They have an unlearned mind.
Guarded by an unteachable attitude, and that attitude, which they imagine to be spiritual maturity. They imagine that this is conviction that I gained through learning God's word. Really it's the opposite of that.
They've long ago given up learning and listening, which is another way of saying they've given up living under the rule of God, the kingdom of God. But the meek shall inherit the earth because they submit to a higher authority than themselves, and when that authority speaks, they will not compromise that for any man, if it's God's word, but when it's just their own opinions speaking and they know the difference, then they can compromise, they can give, they can learn, they can grow.
And so when all others have lost the world because they would not listen, they wouldn't learn, they wouldn't grow, the meek inherit it. True Christians inherit the earth because it is their father who owns it and he bequeaths it to them.
They know that the great blessing of being one of God's people and a perfect earth under God's rule is not something they can achieve on their own, with their own work or their own force of will by demanding it.
They let go of every claim, every bill of rights that tells them that they deserve it. They hold out empty hands to God, letting him give them an inheritance. And it's the earth. A true Christian hungers and thirsts for righteousness.
In verse 6, they long not so much to be rich or be successful or powerful or popular, but to be right with God, have a good relationship with God. That's their craving. And they pant for it like a deer pants for water.
The righteousness here that they're panting for in verse 20 is the same as in verse 20, where our righteousness, Jesus says, we'll say a little bit later, our righteousness, our righteousness, must exceed, surpass, be greater than, the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees.
So it's a right standing before God. The scribes and the Pharisees had all kinds of righteousness. They kept the rules outwardly. But in their hearts, they weren't right with God. That's the righteousness we want, a good relationship with God.
And that will result, of course, in lived out righteousness. You can't have a good relationship with God and then live contrary to his word, to his will. A true Christian longs to live in a way that is pleasing to the Father.
It's not that you long to live right so that you can then be accepted as right. No, it's the other way around. He accepts you as right and so you want to live his way. It's that now having been made right with God, having entered his kingdom, you crave to live every day as often as you hunger and thirst for breakfast, lunch and dinner to do what is right before God.
You're king.
You now are in a relationship with God and so wanting to please God is as much a part of you as now wanting to eat or to drink. Real Christians, those who are in the kingdom, hunger to please their king.
And they will, in the end, be satisfied because eventually they will be raised perfectly with no more sin. Their quest for righteousness will be fulfilled. A true Christian is merciful, in verse 7. Now what do people who are in the kingdom of God,.
What do they look like?
They are merciful. How do they get in the kingdom in order to become merciful? Well, they had mercy first given to them. They came with nothing in their hands, with open hands seeking mercy. And having received it, they then turn around and dispense it to others.
They hand off mercy to other people. They are those in the final teachings of the Lord Jesus in this gospel, in the Gospel of Matthew. Here's Jesus' first teaching and he says, blessed are the merciful.
And his very last teaching in Matthew, he says those who are merciful to the least of these, the powerless, the oppressed, those who can't do anything for you, have nothing to offer you, like today, the pre-born, who cannot give you anything in return.
And so the only reason that you care about them, that you do anything good for them, is because you are merciful. And so when the king comes with all his holy angels with him, the merciful will hear him say, come, you who are blessed by my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
One of the greatest signs of being a person of the kingdom, someone saved by grace, is graciousness. If you receive mercy, it will transform you and make you merciful. And then again, completing the cycle, the mercy will come back to you, making you happy.
And it all starts and ends with mercy. A true Christian is pure in heart. In verse eight, a person can come to church for all kinds of reasons, for the basketball, if it's his church, for the girls or the guys,.
For the friends,.
For his own self-righteousness, or just out of an old habit, he forgot why he started in the first place and just raised with it maybe. But to be in God's kingdom, to be truly one of God's people, to be ruled by God, there can be no mixed motives.
You come for one reason and one reason only, to be in a relationship with God, to know the Father, to follow the Son, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He alone is your heart's desire. Your motives must be pure.
The word pure means unmixed. It's undiluted by other motives. Nothing else in there. Not for the contacts you can make for your Amway business or whatever the pyramid scheme is going on now. Nothing like that.
If you're a politician, not for the votes you can get. No one comes here to this church for the votes you can get. You've got enough votes to win anything. But he is here, everything. He is everything.
And so everything becomes a way of serving him. We see our work. We see our family. We see our marriage or our dating relationships, our relaxing time, not just our church time, but everything, all of life, we see as a way of serving the King with unmixed motives.
And so we look for him in it all. And as we are looking for him with a pure heart, unmixed heart, we shall one day be able to appreciate the pure beauty of the sight of him in it all, as our all in all.
A true Christian will see God. A true Christian is a peacemaker, in verse 9. They're doers, literally doers of peace. They do peace. But they do, the way they treat their wife or their husband or their children or neighbors or coworkers, are not all about using them to get their way out of them.
Using them for their advantage with no thought about their well-being. Peace means well-being. It's a holistic, it's all-encompassing blessing. It means justice and righteousness and love. It's not just an absence of conflict, as if two countries could be at peace.
If there's no war,.
But maybe one is taking advantage of the other. Maybe one is exploiting the other, suppressing it. The weaker one is just too afraid to fight a war because it gives everything to the bigger country. That's not peace.
That's just exploitation. Where there's no justice, there's no peace. Slave owners in America were not at peace with their slaves, even when there was no violence. Even when they weren't beating them, they were still exploiting them and depriving them of their well-being.
A family is not at peace just if they happen to smile and get along, apparently, superficially, and say sweetly, I love you. If it's all a fraud, it's a little shared, needs aren't met, some are lonely and unloved.
That's not peace. A married couple is not at peace just because they don't scream and yell at each other all the time, throw iron skillets, or hit each other. They're still, if they're still careless, about peace and cold and unconcerned, and they can do it all with a calm, civil, lowered voice.
Peacemaking in a marriage means a reconciled relationship, means faithfulness, covenant keeping, forsaking all others, till death do us part. A church can be all smiles and handshakes, but have no peace if sin is not resolved and there's no church discipline, if the well-being of the members isn't the goal of the fellowship and the ministry of the word.
If I'm just preaching this to get my money, and you're just here to think you've checked off a box, you've served your time in church, that's not peace, that's not church either. A true Christian living under the rule of God does what is right for others, and so is a peacemaker.
And that starts with seeking that others are at peace with God, that they have entered God's kingdom, that others have entered his kingdom, others have made peace with God, have repented of their sins, have been reconciled, and so doing we are just like the Father who sought our good and gave us the Son as our perfect sacrifice that we might be reconciled and have peace.
So we will be called, if we're like the Father, seeking to reconcile people with him, we will be called at that final judgment, called by God, a son or daughter of God. The Father himself will proclaim, you are my child.
A true Christian is persecuted, in verse 10. Now, in a world that's in rebellion against God, being a peacemaker who seeks to get people to make peace with God by a total surrender to him, to his kingdom, has to confront the world, has to challenge the world.
You're at war with God.
You're trying to suppress his truth. And so it will mean going against the stream of this culture to stand out, to be different, and to tell the people of the world that they need to be different. They need to repent.
They need to make peace with God. And the response to that from the world will either be, some will surrender to the kingdom, letting go of everything they trusted in, and tears and bowing and craving the Father's will, or it will be rejection and persecution.
They're not discontent to say, no, I don't want to do that. No, they'll try to suppress that. And the one who really lives under the rule of God will provoke persecution from those who are in rebellion against him.
We should be thankful that so far in this country, not much of that persecution can come with the force of government so far. But it is possible that soon, if we say what the king says, particularly about sex or about life, and we must say it because he's the king, some people's idea is, well, we won't say these things that offend the world and we will avoid persecution.
No, if he's the king, you have to say what he tells you to say. And we will suffer persecution for that. But for now, we're more likely to be persecuted by being thought of as weird. A little religion is fine, people think, but you've taken it too far.
Let's be clear. If we're serious about being biblical, that is living under the rule of the king, that will make us different. And the result of that is that those who are not so serious will persecute us.
This is the one quality that the Lord Jesus elaborates on in verses 11 and 12.
Isn't that interesting?
He could have elaborated on every one of them, like I just did, but he didn't. Just this one. He says, we are blessed, that is, we will be happy when others revile us. I think, how can you be happy when you're reviled?
You're hated, rejected. Say all kinds of evil against you. You may be persecuted for hunger and thirsting for righteousness. You go to church rather than make a little more money on Sunday morning. And they criticize you for not helping the family get those few more dollars.
They're upset. And that makes no sense to those whose religion is only a way to try to get other people to think well of them. The person who only goes to church so his or her parents will approve of them or the politician or salesman who only goes to be seen as the upstanding citizen to sell their product or whatever, make contacts, get clients.
That quest to be approved and popular with everyone is something you will have to let go of if you come into God's kingdom. But make sure you are letting go of that craving for human approval for the right reason.
For in verse 10, for righteousness sake, not for your ego's sake because you want to be seen as the tough guy who tells people how wrong they are. In verse 11, for my account, for Jesus. We shouldn't be persecuted just because we're arrogant or old-fashioned or contentious or just a jerk, but only for the Lord.
And when we are, when we're accused of being a cult because we really do have a church covenant and we help each other follow it, we take membership seriously. We're seeking the government of God. Then we can rejoice.
Then we can be glad because that's what they did to the prophets, to the Lord Jesus himself. So be happy. You're in good company. Perhaps the man in church history who best lived these beatitudes, blessed attitudes is Jonathan Edwards.
As a young man, he made a list of resolutions, an expression of a pure heart to follow the Lord. His first resolution was, quote, resolve that I will do whatever I think to be most to God's glory and, you'd be surprised what he says next, and my own good profit and pleasure.
Wait, that seems different.
No.
For him, he believed that they were the same, God's glory and his profit and pleasure.
Right?
They were the same. And do that in the whole of my duration. He became the assistant pastor and under his domineering and forceful and famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Edwards is a very different personality. He was mild, he's quiet, he's reserved, meek. He didn't impress his people like his grandfather had. And so when his grandfather died six months after Edwards came to Northampton, Edwards was the sole pastor of a church of people who didn't know what to make of this meek young man.
Maybe some thought they could push him around. Like a lot of people, they mistook meekness for timidity. Edwards consistently preached for his people to see that their poverty of spirit, to let go of all the other things that they are trusting in and their religion and their morality, their own, what they think was their goodness, to mourn over their sins and have their greatest happiness in the Lord, to really believe that God's glory meant their own good, profit and pleasure.
But some of his people believed that they could hold on to some of those things. I have a good heart, I'm of good nature. And enter God's kingdom. And that clash between the poor in spirit and those who will not make peace with God eventually led Edwards to being persecuted by his own people, even fired and driven away, deprived of a way to support his family.
Edwards lived under the rule of God and was so reviled and denounced, losing even the ability to support his family. He was so poor at one point, he wrote some of his great theological treatises in shreds of whatever paper he could find, like on the back of receipts, that kind of thing.
All for the Lord's sake. His last words were to his children. You are now to be left fatherless, which I hope will be an inducement to you all to seek a father who will never fail you. He, in the whole of his duration, sought God's glory.
So we end where we began, with our present blessedness for the poor in spirit. Theirs is now the kingdom of heaven for the reviled, the slandered, for the rejected, for the sake of Jesus. Your reward is now great if you will but be ruled by him.
You will be, in the end, happy, comforted, earth inheritors, satisfied, mercy receivers, viewers of God, children of God. All you need to do is to come to God with empty hands. Nothing in my hands I bring, but only to thy cross I cling.
It's the easiest condition to meet unless, unless, you're trying to hold on to the world's warm hand, or you have a wad of cash.
In your hand,.
Or a bill of rights. So let go now of whatever it is that's keeping you out of the kingdom. Whatever it is you're holding on to, see that you've earned judgment, and see the cost Christ bore to bear that judgment, the scourging he endured.
Cling to the cross and say to God now, I am a wretched, poor, helpless worm. Into your kind arms I fall.
