A reflection on the reality of God's reign and the challenges of humanity's reign

The Lord's Prayer - A reflection on the reality of God's reign and the challenges of humanity's reign

Jesus' announcement of the good news of God's reign and the healing miracles

The Kingdom of Heaven - Jesus' announcement of the good news of God's reign and the healing miracles

An introduction to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the announcement of the kingdom community based on sacrificial love

The Beatitudes - An introduction to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the announcement of the kingdom community based on sacrificial love

An exploration of the word "ashrei" and its significance in the Jewish wisdom literature

The Asheret Statements - An exploration of the word "ashrei" and its significance in the Jewish wisdom literature

Comparison of societal expectations of the good life with Jesus' perspective on the good life

Expectations of the Good Life - Comparison of societal expectations of the good life with Jesus' perspective on the good life

Reflection on the values God seeks in his kingdom and the blessing of those in humble circumstances

The Surprising Identity of God's Workers - Reflection on the values God seeks in his kingdom and the blessing of those in humble circumstances

The importance of craving right relationships and living in a right relationship with God and others

Craving Right Relationships - The importance of craving right relationships and living in a right relationship with God and others

Kelly's acts of generous love and Jesus' invitation to embrace sacrificial love

Generous Love and Righteousness - Kelly's acts of generous love and Jesus' invitation to embrace sacrificial love

Jesus calls out hypocrites and emphasizes the value of pure motives and actions

Hypocrites and Pure of Heart - Jesus calls out hypocrites and emphasizes the value of pure motives and actions

The unexpected values of the kingdom of heaven and the call to bring peace into chaos

Surprise Values of the Kingdom - The unexpected values of the kingdom of heaven and the call to bring peace into chaos

The concept of shalom and the call to bring peace into chaotic situations

Bringing Peace into Chaos - The concept of shalom and the call to bring peace into chaotic situations

The expectation of persecution for seeking righteousness and living in right relationships

Persecution and Righteousness - The expectation of persecution for seeking righteousness and living in right relationships

The value of sacrificial love and the invitation to believe, repent, and follow Jesus

Sacrificial Love and Following Jesus - The value of sacrificial love and the invitation to believe, repent, and follow Jesus

- The speaker begins with a prayer and discusses the reality of God's reign
- Jesus preached about the coming of the kingdom of heaven and the type of people ready for it
- The sermon on the mount is about the coming of God's reign on earth
- The Beatitudes are about joining a new community based on sacrificial love
- The word "blessed" in the Beatitudes is a perspective on who is truly happy and flourishing
- The Beatitudes would have sounded familiar to Jewish listeners in the first century

- Jesus' perspective on the good life is different from societal expectations
- He values humbling circumstances and sees the powerless, grieving, and victimized as blessed
- Those who are suffering are seen as ideal citizens for the kingdom of heaven
- Jesus' words would have surprised and impacted his listeners
- He sees the value of the kingdom of heaven in those who are broken and beaten

- Jesus promises a rich inheritance to the vulnerable and victimized
- The Kingdom of Heaven values those who crave right relationships and extend generous love
- Repent and change your ways to live in a right relationship with God and others
- Mercy is shown through generous love and care for others

- The speaker describes Kelly as someone who stops to help people in need, showing generous love
- Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount invite people to want to have a pure heart and extend generous love to others
- The Kingdom of Heaven values those who bring peace and seek right relationships
- Jesus challenges his followers to bring his peace into chaotic situations and live in right relationships
- The commitment of followers of Jesus is to justice, love, and reconciliation, which challenges the world's systems of oppression and injustice

- The speaker challenges systems that perpetuate injustice and urges allegiance to the kingdom of heaven
- Jesus promises good life for those persecuted for right relationships
- Jesus associates suffering with Old Testament prophets and experienced persecution himself
- Following Jesus may lead to conflict with worldly powers
- Belief, repentance, and following Jesus are emphasized
- The speaker encourages staying for lunch and the AGM to contribute to the church community and help those less fortunate.

The text discusses the coming of God's reign on earth and the values of the kingdom of heaven, as taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. It emphasizes the importance of living in right relationships, extending generous love to others, and challenging societal expectations. Jesus promises a good life for those who are persecuted for their beliefs, and followers are encouraged to contribute to the church community and help those less fortunate."""

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Would you give us this day our daily bread?

Would you forgive us our debts as we've forgiven our debtors?

Would you lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil 1.

Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever, amen.

There is a reality other than the reality that we know.

In that reality, God reigns supreme and unchallenged.

In that reality where God reigns, everything can flourish.

Everyone can be redeemed and everything can be rebuilt.

In our reality, which you can see, God's reign is challenged by us, by humanity.

And for now, he lets us reign however we choose.

In this reality where we reign, we subject 1 another to exploitation, to injustice, to violence, and to suffering.

And whatever we build, no matter how good our intentions are, we end up corrupting it.

When Jesus began his public ministry in the first century, he announced to all who would listen the good news that God's reign is coming here and that it's close at hand.

That when God's reign arrives in his fullness, all the damage done through our reign would be healed by the power manifested in his reign.

A reign that Jesus described as the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus preached this message everywhere that he went.

Repent, change your ways because the kingdom of heaven has come near and as Jesus went from village to village with this message, he healed many people and performed many miracles.

Crowds of people came from all over the place to find Jesus and to hear this good news.

In particular, the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, the sick.

These were the kinds of people showing up to hear more about this new kingdom.

And at just the right time, when the crowds had swelled as big as they could get, Jesus walked up a modest hillside and he sat down and he gathered his disciples and he began not with an instruction, but with an announcement.

An announcement about the kind of people that are ready to take part in this kingdom of heaven.

About the kind of people that are ready to change their hearts for this kingdom of heaven and about the kind of people that are ready to love sacrificially for the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus said blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are those who hunger and who thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, and they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Rejoice and be glad because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Today is the first week in an eight-week series we're teaching at Rosemount Bible Church on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, a series we've entitled, Flourishing in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Over the course of the next 8 weeks, we'll come to discover together that Jesus' entire sermon is about the coming of the kingdom of heaven, about the coming of God's reign here on earth.

The big idea in today's message, the 1 thing if you were to walk out of here remembering that I hope you would remember is that Jesus is inviting you to join him, to follow him, and to be a part of this new community that he's building, a kingdom community that's based on generous and sacrificial love.

And quite frankly, it's the most important decision that you're ever going to make in your entire life.

We call this opening announcement the Beatitudes because of the way that each of Jesus' 9 statements here start with the English word blessed, which comes from the Latin beatus, beatus, beatitude.

That word is translated from the original Greek word that Matthew wrote in his gospel, macarios.

And that word macarios is a translation of the word that Jesus probably spoke in his original Aramaic.

The word Ashrei appears 45 times in the Old Testament, and 75% of those 45 times occur in what we call the wisdom literature of the Bible.

Job, the Psalms, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes.

And when we read these occurrences of the word ashray, we find that they're part of a very specific and very formulaic way of writing.

This way of writing almost always consisted of 3 parts.

In the first part, we have a human observer providing their perspective on another person's situation.

An exclamation celebrating that other person's state of blessing.

And the third part involves some kind of evidence of God's blessing in their lives, something the observer would have seen.

Psalm 1 is a perfect example of this kind of statement.

How blessed, how ashray is the 1 who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of markers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and light.

That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.

We find another example in Proverbs chapter 3.

How blessed, how ashrei are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding.

For she, he's talking about wisdom, is a woman.

For she is more profitable than silver, and she yields better returns than gold.

She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her.

In both cases, we see these 3 parts at work.

In part 1, the author pronounces ashray on his subject, not because of the circumstances observed in part 2, but because of the evidence of God's blessing in part 3.

And this little language study that I just gave is important for 2 reasons.

The first reason is that when we read the word blessed in our English translations, neither the psalmist nor King Solomon who wrote the Proverbs nor Jesus in the Beatitudes were blessing anyone directly when they said blessed are.

In all 3 cases, they are offering their unique perspective on who is truly happy, who is truly flourishing, who is living the good life based on the evidence they see of God's blessing.

This is not a transaction that if you do this, I will do that.

It's also important for this second reason.

We need to understand how familiar these 45, sorry, these 9 sayings of Jesus would sound, the 9 beatitudes, how familiar they would sound to the ears of the Jewish listeners in the first century.

To their ears, these 9 statements would sound very familiar.

They would trigger memories of these 45 other Asheret statements that they would be familiar with in the Jewish wisdom literature that they would study.

They would sound familiar, But for Jesus, the good life would look very different from what we expect.

Speaking of what we expect, there's my son Thomas.

I asked Thomas to help me with a little survey this week.

Thomas is part of the Young Adults group here at RBC.

They are a wonderful, thriving, exciting group of young men and women.

And they all participate in a group chat, like many of you might participate in a family group chat or text message chat.

I asked him to float a question to the group chat for me, and the question was, what does the good life look like for you?

And here are some answers that I received.

The good life is doing something I'm passionate about, so I can make enough money to go on 1 or 2 vacations a year and And also not have any regrets about my life choices You see the pressure these poor people are under this generation.

I Mean it The good life is a small cozy house in the countryside with a few sheep and a nice garden, some close friends and quality time with my future spouse.

The good life is having people in your corner who know you and who love you unconditionally.

The good life is finding out who you are and loving yourself as much as possible.

The good life is doing something that you love and being with your loved ones.

This last 1, which is my wife Kelly's personal favorite, the good life is chilling on the beach.

We all have our unspoken expectations about what the good life looks like, about what we imagine a happy, flourishing life is.

Back then, if someone were to start talking about good news that a new kingdom would be coming to take over the Romans who were ruling at the time, I guarantee you they had expectations in their mind.

They might expect to get their land back and their homes back.

I bet you that they were expecting to stop paying such high taxes to Rome, to get rid of all the Roman idols and all the false gods that were brought into their town where otherwise they'd worship in their temple.

Everyone has an opinion about what the good life is like.

But here at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus announces with authority his perspective on what the good life is.

So let's dive into these first 3 Beatitudes.

Jesus' statement on what the good life is.

What we will learn by examining these first 3 statements is that God values humbling circumstances.

How good is life for the powerless because theirs is the kingdom of heaven?

How good is life for those who grieve death and loss because they will be comforted?

How good is life for the victimized and the vulnerable because they will inherit the land?

These are the very first words of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

After all the rumors of healings and miracles, after all the buzz about the kingdom of heaven talk, I can only imagine the surprise and the emotional impact these very first words Jesus spoke would have on his listeners.

For those who are so poor in spirit that they have no drive left on the inside and they exert no influence on the outside.

How good is life for those who grieve death and loss?

How good is life for the victimized and the vulnerable?

On the surface, our natural reaction, our human reaction to Jesus' words might be very swift disagreement.

That's not a small cozy house in the countryside.

This is where we need to remember that three-part formula, those ashray statements that I brought up earlier.

These things sounded familiar to Jesus' listeners.

They knew the way those sayings were structured, that the writer saw God's blessing in the second half of the Asheret statement, not in the first half.

From Jesus' perspective, it's the powerless who are most ready to see the kingdom of heaven for the amazing news that it is.

They will get the message of the kingdom of heaven before any of the rest of us will.

It's the broken down and the beaten who can see that all of our systems here are broken, that everything humanity touches gets corrupted by our greed and our fear and our sin.

And it's exactly because these people see the value of the kingdom of heaven that makes them ready to be the first ones who want to take part of it.

That's why Jesus says, I see them living the good life.

Better to suffer these circumstances so you can see the kingdom of heaven as it arrives and be a part of it than to enjoy all the riches of humanity's rule and to miss out on this invitation, or even to resist it actively, to fight against its coming.

From Jesus' perspective, those who are grieving death and loss, they are the people whose only remaining refuge is a comforting God.

They are the ones who are especially dialed in to the suffering of others, who can see those mourning around them and extend the care and compassion that they themselves have received from the God of the universe.

They see the suffering of their family members, of their friends and their neighbors.

They see the suffering of those in their extended community, even of their whole nation.

The very reason God is bringing his kingdom to Earth is because of his compassionate nature.

He sees how we sit in our suffering, a suffering that we have inflicted on ourselves.

In God's kingdom, these kinds of people are the suffering servants.

They will be the first who will actually follow Jesus in bringing comfort to those in the world who need it And I know he's not here right now But as James who just recently lost his wife to cancer was praying for Dave and Katie I could not help but make that connection in my mind.

James is a suffering servant, extending comfort because he has received that comfort in his suffering.

That is a picture of what we're talking about today.

That's why James and others like him are blessed.

Though Jesus sees the suffering in their circumstances, he also sees that the way God has shaped their hearts through these circumstances makes them the ideal citizens to join the kingdom of heaven.

A kingdom full of people who are going to be dialed into the grief of everybody around them and then extend God's comfort to them.

From Jesus' perspective, those who have been victims of injustice, those whose worldly status makes them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, these are especially the kind of people that he is bringing his kingdom for.

Consider the kinds of people that Jesus sought out and ministered to.

We have the blind beggar, the paralytic man, the 10 lepers, lepers, not lepers.

The woman caught in adultery and judgment.

Everyone that society looked down upon, judged or ignored completely or took advantage of, these are the kinds of people who are going to inherit everything in the kingdom of heaven.

And in a time where very few Israelites even still owned their land because of the Roman occupation and the Greek occupation before that, Jesus claimed that these people would inherit the land.

Absolutely scandalous, what he said there.

And who is Jesus that he claims any authority to give land away that doesn't belong to him?

And yet these are the people to whom Jesus promises this rich inheritance.

This is an inheritance that Jesus is practically quoting word for word from Psalm 37.

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.

Do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.

For those who are evil will be destroyed, but Those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.

A little while and the wicked will be no more.

Though you look for them, they won't be found.

But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity.

That's why Jesus says that the good life is theirs.

Because in the vulnerable and in the victimized, Jesus sees the promise of Psalm 37 coming to life and fulfilled in God's kingdom.

In the kingdom of heaven, God values humble circumstances.

The powerless, those grieving death and loss.

The kingdom of heaven is coming for them.

This is the surprise identity of those with whom God is working in this world.

My brothers and sisters who are suffering this morning, be encouraged.

What we will discover in this section is that God values the pure of heart.

How good is life for those who crave right relationships, because they will have them in abundance.

How good is life for those who extend generous love to others, because they will be loved generously.

How good is life for those who extend generous love to others because they will be loved generously?

How good is life for those whose actions and whose motives are pure because they will see God?

I want us to remember that Jesus' entire message and ministry started with the words, repent, because the kingdom of God is near.

Jesus believes that all of us need to change our ways, not just to change how we behave on the outside, but to change how we think, to change our heart motivation.

And even though there are a ton of examples of how we could practically do this, in fact, Brother Steve is gonna be preaching on these types of changes over the next 2 weeks.

These 3 verses here that you see on the screen describe the overarching values that God wants us to change into.

From Jesus' perspective, the kingdom of heaven needs those who crave right relationships.

I experience a lot of cravings in my life, particularly in the middle of the night.

The people who might be into the Marvel cinematic universe or comic books, I am like Galactus.

My family literally needs to hide things and lock them up, or I will come and I will devour.

When I have these cravings, it's all I can think about.

I just need to satisfy this very strong desire.

Kelly always tells me that it's just in my head and I said that's the problem, Kel.

I want it in my mouth and I want it in my belly.

The Bible says that the kingdom of heaven is for those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Righteousness is what happens when we live in a right relationship with God, when we live in a right relationship with other people and with God's creation.

You can't claim to love God if you're not loving other people.

You can't claim to be in a right relationship with God if you are not in a right relationship with other people.

Do you gossip or spread rumors about others?

Do you damage other people's reputation by the words that you say or create division?

Do you harbor resentment or bitterness towards someone who has wronged you, refusing to forgive them and to reconcile?

Do you prioritize your own interests and desires at the expense of others?

Do you neglect their needs and their well-being?

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Flourishing in the Kingdom of Heaven