Now, left to ourselves, we can
be religious, we can be, according to man's standard, moral, responsible,
but we cannot have salvation left to ourselves, because on
our own, we will not seek the Lord. Romans chapter 3 tells
us that, as well as many, many other verses. On our own, we'll
all go the way of Cain. And when you think about the
way of Cain, now I know Cain murdered his brother, but that's
not what the way of Cain is talking about. That was just a consequence
of the way of Cain. The way of Cain was the way of
false religion, salvation by the works of man. That's the
way of Cain. And as a result of that, he hated
his brother and killed him. But that's the issue left to
ourselves. Now Israel, as we learned last
week, Israel, the people of Israel, the people of Jerusalem, the
people of that area, had been taught wrong by the Pharisees
concerning the law. and how the law, what the law
meant, what it was given for, what it led to, and that's why
Christ says in verse 20 of Matthew chapter 5, I say unto you that
except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the
scribes and the Pharisees, you shall in no case, in no way,
enter the kingdom of heaven. So whatever righteousness there
inspiring and motivating and encouraging you to establish,
it's not good enough. That's what he's saying. Well,
where is righteousness to be found? Well, it's only to be
found in Christ. I'm telling you right now, I've
been writing on this all week. I'm doing a new book called,
What is the Righteousness of God? And then I got into something
else that I wrote a little pamphlet on. And that's the issue. That's the issue. Where can,
I have no righteousness, but Christ's righteousness imputed.
That's what I'm saying. Nothing else. You say, but aren't
you a believer? By the grace of God, yes. But
my believing is not my righteousness. I believe in Christ who is my
righteousness. That's not splitting hairs. That's
vital. There's a difference there. And
we need to understand that. Well, when it comes to blessing,
here in the Beatitudes, from verse 3, you could say down to
verse 13. I said verse 13 there, but that
really actually should be verse 12. And then we'll pick up with
verse 13 after that. You have what we call the Beatitudes.
The word beatitudes is not in the scriptures, you know. It's
a Latin word, but it describes these. Beatitude means ultimate
blessing. Ultimate blessing. And what it's
used here, every beatitude, blessed are, blessed are, blessed are. That's the first thing you hear,
blessed are. What is it to be blessed? What
does that mean? Everywhere I go today, I go into
a store, I come out, they tell me to have a blessed day. You've
heard that? Well, I got news for you. Every
day for me is a blessed day. Every day. Now, if I do not want
to see, sometime this week I'm going to see a doctor. I don't
want to hear that doctor say, Bill, I've got bad news. You've
got cancer or you've got this or you've got that. I don't want
to hear that. But if I do, I'm still having a blessed day. Did
you know that? Now, if an unbeliever, all right,
if an unbeliever goes to the same doctor and the doctor says,
you're a picture of health, we're gonna put you up as the shining
example of health in the world. That person is still not blessed.
If they never come to a saving knowledge of Christ. And so there's
three things here that I want to see in this overview. This
blessed hour, what does that mean? And then secondly, who
is truly blessed? And then what is the reward that's
connected with the blessed? That's what he does in these
Beatitudes. First one, blessed are. There's the blessed are.
All right, who is blessed? The poor in spirit. And we'll
get to that next week. And then here's the reward. There's
the character, the poor in spirit. That's the character of the blessed.
describes the God-given character and then he says here's the reward
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Now we'll go to each
one, but first of all let's understand who's blessed. What does it mean
to be blessed? To be blessed of God is a sinner
saved by the grace of God. Graced, you might say. Graced are. It's a sinner who
is chosen of God, justified in the righteousness of Christ,
redeemed by the blood of Christ, born again, regenerated, called
by the Spirit of God into the kingdom. That's the blessed.
You know, those who stand in a right relationship with God
by His grace through Christ. That's the blessed. That's what
he's talking about. Now, the Jews have been taught
that they are blessed for three reasons. Number one, their physical
connection with Abraham. Number two was their circumcision
of the males, which represented the families. And number three
was their law-keeping. That's why they thought God blessed
them. It's kind of like today. Somebody
says, well, I know I'm blessed. I'm an American. Well, let me tell you something.
I love this country. I'm a patriot. And I feel blessed to be living
in this country. I mean, when I taught young people
in Bible school, I said, well, who determined that you'd be
born in Albany, Georgia, with parents who loved you, and who
cared for you, and who fed you, and who sent you to the best
schools, rather than being born on a dirt floor down in Chiapas,
Mexico in a hut, starving to death, your parents trying to
eke out a living best they could. Who determined that? God did.
God did. You didn't choose that. That's
just the way it was, you see. So I love my country, but being
born in America is no indication that you're blessed of God. That's
what I'm saying. And so this blessing has to do
with a sinner who stands in a right relationship with God based upon
the merits of Christ's righteousness alone. I'm justified in him based
on his righteousness imputed. Now there are evidences of this
blessing. For example, you know these are
not the only Beatitudes in the Bible. There's a lot of Beatitudes
in the Bible. And I've listed some of them
here. Psalm 212 says, blessed is he who puts his trust in the
Lord. That's what it means. The King
James translation, I think it's five times, translates this same
word blessed as happy. And you'll find a lot of translations
that'll just do that all the way through. Happy hour, happy
hour. And that's okay, but don't be misled. Does that mean that
if you're a true Christian, you're happy all the time, you're joyous,
you're on a cloud all the time? No, no. That's why I really prefer
the word blessed. I was telling Jim here, he was
talking about translations of the Bible. Do you know there's
a translation of the Bible out that translates the word blessed,
lucky? Lucky are the poor and speech. Ain't I lucky? Well, you know
the Bible doesn't know anything about luck. There's no such thing
as luck in the Bible. That's kismet, that's fate, you
know. That's a pagan idea. But the
guy who did that, it's called The Message. You may have seen
a book out called The Message. It's a terrible translation.
Yeah. So it's not lucky, and it's not
necessarily happy. Here's what I'm telling you.
You take a man like Job. We'll use Job as the example
because, you know, anybody talks about suffering, all right? Job,
at the lowest point of the testing that God put him through, was
still ultimately blessed of God. Now he didn't feel blessed. And
to the world, and maybe even sometimes to himself, he didn't
look blessed. But he was blessed. Blessed of
God. So in other words, this term
blessing has nothing, we normally think of somebody being blessed
when the good things or the positive things happen to them in life.
Somebody wins the lottery. Oh, they're blessed. You ever
heard, you ever seen some of these lottery stories? I know
a fellow up in Kentucky, lived right around the street, his
mother lived right around the street from where Debbie and
I live, and he won the lottery. Forty-five million dollars moved
to Florida, ended up broke, got on drugs and broke, come home,
got cancer and died. That which the world sees as
a blessing is sometimes what? A curse. And we'll talk about
that in just a moment. You know the story of the rich
man in Luke 12 who said, I've filled all my barns. What am
I going to do? I'm going to build bigger barns because I got more
stuff and I got to have a place to put that stuff. And that's
us by nature. We all got more stuff than we
need, don't we? And we got to stuff that stuff
somewhere. And what happened? Thou fool, this night your soul
shall be required of you. All that good stuff that the
world says, oh, he's so blessed. When I was in high school, one
of my favorite poems was a poem called Richard Corey. You ever
heard of that poem? It was written by a man named
Edwin Arlington Robinson. Check me on that, I'm not sure.
But it's talking about a man in a town who was so rich and
wealthy, lived in the big house on top, and all the people the
town envied. And they talk about Richard,
oh, Richard Corey, he has everything that a human being could want.
And if you remember that poem, what happened at the end, it
says, Richard Corey went home one night and put a bullet through
his head. You remember the parable of Lazarus,
the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man, he fared sumptuously
in this life. What happened? He perished in
hell. Lazarus laid outside the gate
with leprosy, I think that's what it was, the dogs licking
his sores. Lazarus was blessed. What Christ
is speaking of here is not how men and women by nature see things,
but how God sees things. And that's what this blessing
is all about. This is not the power of positive
thinking. This is a sinner saved by the
grace of God, blessed in Christ. Ephesians 1.3 says, Blessed be
the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who
hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places
in Christ. That's the blessing. So what
he's talking about here in these Beatitudes are the saved. Sinners saved by grace. Nobody
else. Now that doesn't mean that unbelievers
and those who never come to faith in Christ do not receive good
things here on earth. But those good things do them
no good eternally or spiritually. And so with that in mind, look
at the second point, who is truly blessed? Now we've already seen
that. But what I wanted to do in this point was to take you,
go over to Deuteronomy chapter 30. I want to show you what's the
opposite of being blessed? Cursed. Cursed. Now here's Moses. You know what? Deuteronomy means second law. Remember Moses was given the
law on Mount Sinai over in Exodus. And that law was the Ten Commandments,
but it also included the ceremonial law, it included the civil laws,
all the law. It wasn't just Ten Commandments,
that was the heart of it now. But it included the whole law.
Well, you know what happened, how God punished the nation for
their idolatry and caused them to wander in the wilderness 40
years until that first generation died off except for Joshua and
Caleb. Joshua was a picture of Christ.
Caleb was a picture of his people, believers. You know what Caleb
means? It means faithful. Some say it means faithful dog. So that's okay. But, so they
wandered 40 years. Well, here they are on the brink
after the 40-year wilderness wandering, and they're going
into the promised land, and Moses reads the law to them before
they go in. You know, Moses didn't go in.
But he's reading the law to the nation. And that's why it's called
the second law. This is the second time he read
the law to the nation. Well, look at Deuteronomy 30
and verse 19. Deuteronomy 13 verse 19. He says,
I call heaven, this is after the reading of the law. He says,
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you. Now think
about that. That I have set before you life
and death. Here's life and death. In other
words, there's no, this is not a light matter. Blessing and
cursing. Therefore, choose life. Now somebody
says, well, who in the world would choose death over life?
Nobody but a fool. You're exactly right. But anybody, for example, in
the gospel realm, anybody who chooses to believe anything other
than the true gospel, wherein Christ is set forth in the glory
of his person and the power of his finished work, They may think
they're choosing life, but they're choosing death. There's a way
that seemeth right unto men, and it's a way that leads to
death. So he says, choose life that both thou and thy seed may
live. Well, what is it to choose life
under the law now? Okay? Look at it, verse 20. that
thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey
his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him, for he is thy
life in the length of thy days, that thou mayest dwell in the
land which the Lord swear unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac,
and to Jacob, to give them." What's he talking about? I'm
not keeping the law. You see, that old covenant was
a conditional covenant toward the nation. Now here's the question. If you ever read or studied the
history of the nation, did they keep the law? And the answer's
no. That's why it was a condemning
law. That's why it was a ministration of death. Because on the whole,
they didn't choose life, they chose death. They didn't choose
blessing. Now, turn over to the book of
Galatians chapter three. Remember what's happening in
Galatians. Some people say that in the area
of Galatia there were several churches, local gatherings of
believers. And I probably think that was
the case, but it doesn't matter. This is written to professing
believers. Paul had been there and preached the gospel, and
it's written to professing believers. And when Paul left, false Jewish
preachers had crept into the church and sought to bring believers
back under the law as a condition for real salvation, real holiness,
and real righteousness. And that's why Paul said, for
if righteousness come by the law, then Christ died in vain.
You profess to believe in Christ, but you make salvation conditioned
on sinners. Well, Christ died in vain. If
that's the case, because he fulfilled all conditions. So here they
were trying to bring him back under the law. Well, look at
verse 10 of Galatians chapter 3. Here's the point. For as many as are of the works
of the law are under the what? The curse. For it's written,
now this is quoted from Deuteronomy 27. It's written, cursed is everyone
that continueth not in all things which are written in the book
of the law to do. In other words, if you're seeking salvation by
works of the law, you're required to keep it all perfectly. And
that's impossible. He says in verse 12, or 11, well,
here's the conclusion, but that no man is justified by the law
on the side of God, it's evident. Somebody says, well, I can't
keep the law perfect. Well, that's evident. You say, no matter how
good I try to be, I can't keep it perfect. Aren't you glad that
the Lord sent Christ to be the end of the law for righteousness
to everyone that believeth? And that's what he says in verse
12. The law is not of faith, but the man that doeth them shall
live in them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law.
So when he talks about the difference between being cursed and blessed,
what's he talking about? He's talking about a sinner standing
before God. Without righteousness, without
Christ, that's a cursed person. No matter how they fared in this
life, they may fare sumptuously, they may be the picture, they
may live to be 969 years old like Methuselah. But when they
stand before God, without the righteousness of Christ imputed,
without having been washed in his blood, they're standing there
in their filthy rags, in the sight of God, that's a metaphor,
sin imputed to them. Remember David said in Psalm
32, blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity. To be blessed means this, God
doesn't charge me with my sin. To be blessed means God charges
me with rights. So a sinner standing before God,
I don't care if his name is George Washington or Joe Schmoe from
Kokomo, if he doesn't have Christ, he's cursed. But any sinner who stands before
God in Christ, he's blessed, redeemed. Even though he was
ruined by the fall, born dead in sin, doesn't deserve any blessing
from God. That's one thing you need to
understand about blessedness. We don't deserve a bit of it.
Somebody say, well, does God bless? Let me give you an example. And this is something, this is
what I call the advanced citizenship of a Christian. You came to worship
this morning. God's gonna bless you. in this
worship. Does that mean that you earned
it and deserved it by coming here? The answer is no. Let me
tell you something about God's blessings. God connects his blessings
with things he commands us to do. Prayer, for example. But
it's not because we earn that blessing or deserve it. It's
just connected with it. That's just the way it is. That's
God's sovereign way. Read the Bible, you'll be blessed.
Listen to the gospel, you'll be blessed. And you'll be blessed
in things that you don't earn and you don't deserve. That's
what I call the advanced citizenship of a Christian. See, that's why
we have to be taught and learn to think right. Anything I receive,
the next breath, how many times you hear me say it? Take your
next breath. That's a blessing from God if you're washed in
the blood of Christ, but you still didn't earn it. and you
still didn't deserve it. Thank you, Lord, for saving my
soul. Thank you, Lord, for making me
whole. Thank you, Lord, for giving to
me thy great salvation so rich and so free. That's what it is. And that's how we learn to think.
Well, that's the blessing and the curse, blessed in the grace
of God. And the descriptions, now in
this Matthew 5 passage, the descriptions of those who are blessed in the
Beatitudes show what God has made his people by his power
and grace. Now, let me just say this in
closing, I want to say a word about the reward. Each thing,
like it says, poor in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, these
are spiritual blessings that no man or woman by nature has. This only describes true Christians. Now let me say this. There are
counterfeits to these. I know people who are humble,
for example, before men. But my friend, until you know
the gospel, until you're brought to be submitted to Christ and
His righteousness, you're not humble before God. So each one of these descriptions
here are things that God has made His people by His grace. through the power of the Holy
Spirit in convincing them of their sin, convincing them of
righteousness in Christ, and convincing them that they have
no hope but in Him. These are Christian virtues,
and no unchristian has them, even though they can counterfeit.
Satan has his counterfeits for everything. You understand that.
You say, well, that fellow's so humble, even though he believes
a false gospel, but he's so humble. He's humble before men, but not
before God. The only one who is humble before
God is the one who pleads Christ and his blood and his righteousness
as the only ground of salvation. So even though Satan can mimic
these, and these are qualities that the world by nature will
not recognize. Remember 1 John 3, he says, the
world won't know us. Give you an example of it. The
Lord stood before the Pharisees and he looked at them and he
said, you poisonous snakes, you vipers, you hypocrites. Now let me ask you, did the Pharisees
recognize that as being good for them? Now, they thought he
was mean. I can remember when I first started
hearing Brother Mayhem preach the gospel, I thought he was
the meanest preacher in the world. I did. I told my mother going
home one time, I said, I think that guy's mad at everybody. And I hated what he was telling
me. But he was telling me the best
thing that he could tell me, even though I didn't recognize
it until God gave me eyes to see and ears to hear. blessed
me in that way. So understand that. Now, each
one of these Beatitudes has a reward. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
They shall be comforted. They shall inherit the earth.
They shall be filled. But again, just like the blessing,
it's not an earned reward. It's not something we earn from
God. It's like in Romans 4, that's
what I've got cited here. Abraham, when he was justified
before God, he says this. This is a principle laid down.
If it's something that God owes you, then it's not grace. If
you do something and put God in a position where he owes you
anything by way of blessing, it's not grace. The only thing
God owes a sinner is damnation. The wages of sin is death, but
the earned wage of grace is the gift of, no, the wages of sin
is death, but the gift of God is eternal. So the reward here,
it's a reward, but it's the reward of grace that we have in Christ,
evidenced by that blessedness, which comes through in that character,
you see. And that's what Christ is showing
these people. He's showing them that this is the kingdom of heaven. This is the way it is.