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I want you to be the happiest people on earth.
Are you unhappy, bored in life, or generally unsatisfied? Are you frustrated with your progress in spiritual growth? Do you sometimes wonder why some people just can’t get their act together? Do you read news stories about bad things happening to people, and not feel anything?
Today’s Bible passage has a remedy. It has a guide to being blessed.
This blessing is not getting rich. It’s subjective (joy) and objective (favored by God).
Jesus lists some characteristics of his followers that lead to blessing. What characteristics in Jesus’s followers lead to blessing? Jesus mentions three characteristics in his followers that will lead to blessing. First, he says…
(Matt 5:6 ESV)
Righteousness has many meanings in the Bible. It has a semantic range.
The emphasis is on the third in v. 6: personal righteousness. Jesus is speaking to his disciples (v. 1–2). That makes imputed righteousness less likely. The characteristics mentioned in the Beatitudes are deeply personal, and they have to do with the character of the Christian disciple, so that makes social righteousness less likely.
Do you want to know what righteousness looks like? Study the Son of God! Jesus is God Himself, the second person of the Trinity, who took on a human nature. Jesus is the perfect example of righteousness. He:
Jesus is what righteousness looks like—it’s both internal and external obedience: perfect obedience to God’s rules, living in a way that is perfectly in line with God’s character and desires. That is what God requires of us: to be like Jesus.
The bad news is that none of us does this. The good news is: we don’t have to, to get this blessing. The text does not say, “Blessed are the righteous.” It says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” It’s the longing, not the righteousness, that leads to blessing in this verse. The condition for the blessing is to want to be different.
Why are people who hunger and thirst for righteousness blessed? “They will be satisfied” (Matt 5:6 “ESV). Who’s doing the satisfying? God. That’s not explicitly in the text, but it’s what people call a “divine passive.”
What will we be satisfied with? Personal growth in righteousness. God will give you what you seek. Scripture says, “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess 4:3 ESV). If you want to become the kind of person God wants you to be, don’t you think God will help? He will! He gives good gifts. God gives us what we want, when we want what He wants. God satisfies the hungry.
You must be hungry if you want to grow. If you’re not growing, could it be because you’re not longing for righteousness?
I want to make three qualifications.
First, personal righteousness requires imputed righteousness. If you have not ever trusted in Jesus, given your life to him, you’re spiritually dead. Growth in this kind of righteousness requires an inward change, kind of like being born a second time, but spiritually rather than physically. Come to Jesus. Trust him as your rescuer and your king.
Second, personal righteousness should promote social righteousness—justice, fair courts, protecting the unborn. This isn’t Marxism, critical theory, or anything like that. It should bother us when God’s law is broken, whether in ourselves or in others. The psalmist says, “My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law” (Psalm 119:136 ESV).
Third: Those who long to grow in righteousness will be satisfied, but they’ll never be fully satisfied in this life. The idea that you can be perfect in this life is both harmful and wrong.
There will come a day when we are in the new heavens and new earth, and we will be fully satisfied. You will be completely morally righteous. You will never sin again. You will do what is good, say what is good, think what is good, and want what is good.
How is your appetite? Do you long for righteousness? Do you hunger and thirst for it? Do you see it as something as basic as food and drink for you?
Avoid things that will take the edge off your longing, things that will dull your spiritual hunger and thirst.
We’ve talked about how people who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed. There is a second characteristic in Jesus’s followers that leads to blessing.
(Matt 5:7 ESV)
John Stott says, “Mercy is compassion for people in need” (The Message of the Sermon on the Mount). It is both an attitude and an action. As an attitude, we are to love others who are in need. As an action, we are to try to meet the need. Mercy tries to relieve misery.
This is a little different from forgiveness, although it can include forgiveness. I’m not going to focus much on forgiveness right now. The pastors will discuss it when they preach from Matthew 6.
An example of this is in Genesis. God clothed Adam and Eve with animal skins. “And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21 ESV). God knew that some loincloths made of fig leaves weren’t going to cut it outside of the garden. Even though they had just committed treason, and He was about to kick them out of the best place in the world, he had mercy on them.
Let’s say you have a relative who has gotten himself or herself in a lot of trouble. He or she has made a lot of bad decisions, and is now reaping the consequences. You could say, “I told you so,” and refuse to help. That’s an unmerciful response. The merciful response is to have compassion, and offer to help.
At church or a youth group meeting, talking with someone who might be lonely is an act of mercy. This might mean spending less time with your friends.
Why are merciful people blessed? “They will receive mercy” (Matt 5:7 ESV)
This sounds like works-righteousness, but it is not. We are made right with God by faith, by trusting in Jesus. God credits Jesus’s righteousness to our account. However, being entirely unmerciful shows that you have not understood or experienced God’s mercy. The grace that forgives us also changes us.
God has been merciful to you. He sent Jesus to die for sinners.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:4-7 ESV).
Have you ever recovered from a fever? Has your body worked to heal a scrape or broken bone? There are secondary causes of your recovery like biology or medicine, but God is the primary cause. Did you wake up this morning? Every one of these is an expression of God’s mercy. Every breath you breathe is God’s mercy.
God is merciful. How can we not be?
You may have objections:
“The person doesn’t deserve my compassion or help.”
Did you deserve God’s compassion or help?
“The person has brought this upon himself.”
Didn’t you bring trouble upon yourself when you sinned against God?
“It will cost a lot to show mercy.”
Wasn’t the gift of God’s Son for you costly?
If you want to grow in your awareness of your need for mercy, try reviewing your day as you go to bed each night. Identify God’s mercies and thank Him.
We’ve talked about two characteristics in Jesus’s followers that lead to blessing:
First, people who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed.
Second, merciful people are blessed.
Third…
(Matt 5:8 ESV)
If someone shows his emotions all the time, he wears his heart on his _____ (sleeve).
If someone gets dumped by her boyfriend, and she’s sad, he broke her _____ (heart).
Biblically, the heart isn’t just our emotions. It’s what we think, and our emotions, and what we will (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature). It’s who you really are (in your heart of hearts).
What does it mean to be pure in heart? When we talk about purity, we normally think about sex.
I grew up Catholic. We had a practice of going to a priest to confess your sins. (As Protestants, we believe that every Christian is a priest: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood” [1 Peter 2:9). As a teenage boy, I went to confession and said, “I’ve had impure thoughts.” It’s a very “confessiony” thing to say. He said, “I can tell you’ve done this before.”
Purity is broader than sex, though. Purity of heart can certainly involve sexual matters, but it doesn’t have to. Purity has more to do with being free of contamination. Suppose you’re at a Fourth of July party, and someone spits in your ice tea. It’s no longer pure.
Purity is about being morally pure (A Greek-English Lexicon). The ICC commentary on Matthew says, “So purity of heart must involve integrity, a correspondence between outward action and inward thought…a lack of duplicity, singleness of intention…and a desire to please God above all else. More succinctly: purity of heart is to will one thing, God’s will, with all of one’s being.” (Davies and Allison). Be single-minded in your pursuit of God
When you invest your money for retirement, you want to invest in more than one kind of stock or bond. That’s so if one of them loses value, you don’t lose all your money. It’s called diversification. Diversification is great for investing for retirement. However, when it comes to investing our spiritual allegiances, diversification is an awful strategy. It’s a losing strategy.
The world of advertising is spending millions of dollars to make you believe you need all sorts of stuff to be happy. You don’t! Be like the psalmists:
“One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4 ESV).
“Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25 ESV).
Set your whole life pointing in one direction, to live to please and enjoy and know and glorify God. Let your thoughts be of Him. Let your goals be for God to be glorified. Let your conversations be about Him.
It’s not wrong to talk about other things or think about other things—we have to work, and we have to talk through practical matters sometimes. I’m a programmer, and I talk to my programmer coworkers in programmy language. However, often we talk about other things because that’s where our heart is. It really excites us to talk about other things: games, sports, work, finance, hobbies, movies, etc. Ideally, our thoughts and conversation would gravitate towards the Lord like things gravitate towards the earth when you drop them.
Why are people who are pure in heart blessed? “They shall see God” (Matt 5:8 ESV).
This requires some explanation, but I can’t tell you everything you might want to know about this. TheBible says in some places that we can’t see God: “…who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16 ESV). Romans 1 mentions God’s invisible attributes, and Jesus says God is Spirit in the Gospel of John.
The Bible also says of Isaiah, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1 ESV). There are a few other places in Scripture like this. What did Isaiah see? I have no idea. Christ, before He had taken on a human nature? I’m not sure. We call these theophanies.
There is a sense in which we cannot see God, and a sense in which we can. For us, in this life, we see God (in a sense) by faith, not sight. Think about the beauty of God’s character: compassionate, kind, good, merciful, holy, wrathful against evil, and just. Think about what He is like in His being: eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, as much as it makes sense to talk about the physical location of a spiritual being He is all-present. He is self-sufficient: He depends on no one and nothing for His existence.
Think about Christ, who represents God so well that Jesus could say, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:8-9 ESV). Think about how he is a merciful and faithful high priest. Think about how he loved you and gave his life for you. Think about how he intercedes for you right now in heaven.
What will we see in heaven? I’m not sure. John Owen says that we’ll see the risen Christ, and that this is how we’ll see God. Other theologians have other opinions.
Regardless, we’ll see much more clearly, and we’ll be enthralled. Wayne Grudem says in his Systematic Theology, “When we realize that God is the perfection of all that we long for or desire, that he is the summation of everything beautiful or desirable, then we realize that the greatest joy of the life to come will be that we ‘shall see his face.’” This is the “beatific vision.”
There are some things so beautiful that you just want to look at them. You can’t help but look at them. In seventh grade, a friend told me that people couldn’t see my eyes when I wore my glasses. Maybe it’s because the lights created a glare. In my 12-year-old wisdom, I believed him. There was a good-looking girl in my social studies class, and I spent a long time just looking at her because I thought she couldn’t see my eyes through my glasses. Looking back now, I’m sure she noticed.
What is it for you? Is it a person, sunset, waves on ocean, view from top of a mountain?
Beholding God will be far, far better. It will satisfy us forever.
Some of you are looking forward to seeing Superman this weekend than you are looking forward to seeing God. It’s like spending all your time at the Grand Canyon playing video games in your car. You’re missing out!
We’ve talked about three characteristics in Jesus’s followers that lead to blessing:
You might be feeling discouraged right now. You realize how much you need to change. I have three pieces of good news:
First, the Gospel gives hope when we aren’t who we want to be. We were sinners when Jesus saved us. His love for you has not cooled off one bit over the last 2000 years. God knew everything about you when He sent Jesus to die for you. In Christ, you are completely forgiven.
Second, the Gospel gives power to change. John Piper says the same faith that justifies also sanctifies. The Holy Spirit lives in you, and can empower you to change.
Third, Jesus says that if you long to change—long to become holy—you’re blessed! Trust in this promise.
Here are some ways to apply the sermon:
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