Who Am I Before God?

Introduction

Matthew 5. Matthew chapter 5. If you have one of our church Bibles, this is on page 809.

If you're new to reading the Bible, the big numbers are chapter numbers, the small numbers are verse numbers. This morning we're going to be looking at Matthew chapter 5: 1 through 5.

As you turn there, I'm going to pray for us once more.

Lord Christ, we are grateful and eager to come before your word again. We ask that the truth we see in it would be embodied in our lives, that it would be our eager aim to live out every element of what we see Christ preach here in Matthew 5.

To that end, Lord, we pray that you would give us a right estimation of ourselves, of our weakness, of our frailty, and of your great power and holiness.

May your word clarify for us who you are and who we are before you. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.

Sermon on the Mount

We're starting this morning what will probably be four months through the end of November, through the sermon on the Mount. Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It says the sermon on the Mount in your page there most likely as a heading. That's not scripture, that's just a heading humans have put in later.

But it is a fine heading. It's a heading we've used for many centuries now, since probably the third or fourth century when Augustine claimed that this was the sermon on the Mount. And to call it a sermon is right.

You'll notice at verse one here, Jesus sees crowds, he goes up on a mountain and he sits down, his disciples come to him, like a teacher, a rabbi would in those days and he opens his mouth and he teaches them. And that's what these chapters contain. An important body of Christ's teaching.

It's familiar to you even if you're not aware of that. You'll know parts here and there even if you didn't know your Bible well. In fact, culture and ordinary people day to day have picked up turns of phrase from this chapter, like, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." And "the salt of the earth" and more.

It is the most written on and taught section of all of the Bible. Because the sermon on the Mount speaks with extraordinary power and relevance to us as Christians today. As all of scripture does, there are things that the sermon on the Mount just puts its finger on. And Jesus says so clearly and corrects our often wrong understanding of And when we understand the sermon on the Mount, we really understand Jesus himself.

We understand Jesus himself as he displayed himself in his earthly ministry in the sermon on the Mount. That he is savior, yes, and Lord, that he is redeemer and he is teacher. That he is the one who saves but also the one who calls us to obedience and sanctification. We should not take Jesus ever and divide him.

To take something we like and leave the rest. Jesus is an all or nothing zero sum game. You get all of him or you can't take any of him. Jesus can't be divided. The forgiven life, the life that is characterized here in the teaching on the sermon on the Mount, is a holy life. Being forgiven and being holy, Jesus will make clear, are two sides of the same coin. They again won't be separated.

And so this is a teaching of Jesus that is deeply theological and yet practical, and we should be not surprised. Jonathan Edwards said, well, that of Christ's, his doctrine was all application and his application was all doctrine. And that's what we encounter here.

Before we look at the first few beatitudes this morning, and verses 3, 4, and 5, I want to lay the foundation for understanding the sermon on the Mount a bit. This might take up to half our time this morning. I'm not entirely sure. You never know when you write a manuscript out.

But I want to just make four observations about the sermon on the Mount as we go forward so that you can understand it somewhat in context and as it's meant to be taken.

Four Observations

First, I want you to understand, and so there's like two sets of points this morning. Just about the sermon on the Mount in general, and then later we'll look at the three beatitudes. The first thing I want you to understand is, like I've said, this sermon, these verses in scripture are relevant for us today.

Jesus answers for us important questions in this sermon. Questions like, what does it mean to live as a Christian with a Christian lifestyle and a Christian worldview in our age today, which is pluralistic, anything goes and anything gets to live side by side in a secular age that has forgotten God altogether in an individualistic world where we think we can do everything ourselves? How do we live as a Christian today? And not take on any of that cultural baggage, but live as Christ intends us to. The sermon on the Mount answers that question.

It answers the question, how can we be a city set on a hill that cannot be hidden? How do we be the salt of the earth but not lose our saltiness? How do we accomplish the purpose for which Christ has made us? How is it that one lives in the world in such a way that God is glorified and people are pointed to Christ through you?

Are our Christian life and faith as obvious as Jesus would make them seem to be in the world around us? It answers the question, what is Christian character? How does it affect our standing before God, our relationships with others and even the things we do and say? It answers questions like, what is the place of the law of God in the Christian life? How does one pray? How does one go about their spiritual life in a way that honors God and not themselves? How can we escape anxiety in an ever-increasingly therapeutic and an anxiety-riddled world?

Jesus answers all these questions and more. Basically, what Jesus is showing us is that this is the policy of the kingdom of God. What does the kingdom of God and its realities look like lived out in a life?

The Kingdom of God

Because number two, the sermon on the Mount is not just relevant for us today, but number two, the sermon on the Mount is about the kingdom of God. That's the big and large context that this sermon sits in. Notice with me what Jesus says in Matthew 5:3. "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

If you see kingdom of heaven throughout the Gospel of Matthew or other places, understand what is meant by that. The kingdom of God is meant by that. I want you to just think about an illustration to understand the kingdom of God with me for a moment. Picture this scene with me. There's a father and a son. They're covered in grease. It's dim lighting. They're there in the garage and they're hunched over the block engine of just a 1969 Ford Mustang, like the holy grail of Mustangs.

It's a little banged up, but by and large, it's been kept well. And they've spent the last 12 hours. They started at 6:00 AM, the sun has now set, it's 6:00 PM, and Father and his little son had been just looking at this car and doing whatever they can to it. And the father looks over at his son at some point and he says, "Hey, you know this is all going to be worth it because it's going to be yours someday." The son's eyes light up, and it's like his mouth is watering and he's picturing himself as soon as he gets his driver's license. He's driving the car.

You can picture what that son thinks. He thinks that car is his. The title's in his dad's name. It's sitting in the garage. It's there, and he's like, "That's going to be mine someday." And he's living as if it's his. And he's living with the reality that he can take ownership of this thing and and sit in the driver's seat and and press the buttons and figure out certain ways that it works, even if he's not driving it himself, even if it's not fully completely his today.

Think about that illustration with me and think about the kingdom of God. When we understand the kingdom of God, we should understand it in a paradigm of already and not yet. Through Christ's death and resurrection, he has inaugurated the kingdom. It has begun. The kingdom of God is present.

And yet it's not completely present. You and I live in a broken world. There's hostility. You have frustration in relationships with other sinners on a day-to-day basis if you're anything like me. We experience so many of the blessings of the kingdom, but we don't expect the experience the full kingdom of God yet. And and Jesus came preaching this kingdom. Listen to this in Matthew 4:23, just above the text we're in today.

Jesus came and went all throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom of God, the good news of the kingdom of God. He says in Matthew 4:17, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The message that Christ proclaimed was, "This is what it means to repent and belong to the kingdom of heaven." That's what the sermon on the Mount is.

Think about the kingdom of God even from a step back even further and look at the whole picture of scripture. I'd submit to you that the kingdom of God is the meta-narrative, the storyline that goes from first word to last word in all of scripture. There are other important themes and important topics and aims, like the glory of God and the glory of Christ, and Christ himself as savior, being the center of the storyline.

But if you just traced it from beginning to end, you'd see kingdom present. Think of Eden with me. God creates mankind. He creates a perfect creation. There's no sin present, and he tells them to be fruitful and multiply and rule on my behalf. Kingly language. Be a vice regent and ruler for me, he says to mankind.

Everything's perfect in Eden. Adam and Eve walk in the garden with God in the cool of the day. There's no separation there. We know Genesis 3, everything changes, sin enters the world, Adam and Eve don't trust God, they want to take some of his kingly authority for themselves and overstep their bounds and they don't obey, they sin. And everything since then has been a longing to get back to Eden.

To get back to what God originally intended. You can think of the kingdom of God defined as this: God's people in God's place under God's rule and blessing. That's not a definition that I have come up with myself. Theologian Graeme Goldsworthy coined that phrase, God's people in God's place under God's rule and blessing. You can see it in Eden. God's people, Adam and Eve, they're in God's place, the garden he's created for them, perfectly under his rule and blessing.

And you see the kingdom pop up in various places throughout scripture. You see it as God creates a people through the Exodus and brings them into the land in Joshua. You see him fulfill promises, you see David become a king representing God to the people. You see Solomon come and kingdom blessings ramp up even more as even the nations are blessed. And you wonder, could this be the kingdom? And yet it's all lost.

Sinful kings lead God's people astray. And there's a recognition even from the earliest books in the Pentateuch that there's something more needed for God's kingdom purposes to be had for us to return back to that perfect fellowship and perfect rule in the beginning.

The New Covenant is a proclamation of Christ coming as king to rule and reign and establish blessing for his people. And so you can see pictures in the kingdom of God break through even on this side of heaven as we're in the kingdom of this world and Satan rules over so much of it. You can think of the church as an outpost of the kingdom of God, an embassy, so to speak, where God's people are present, redeemed by him. We're here in his place, gathered together and we sit under his rule and blessing as we submit to Christ as Lord and as his word as the scepter by which he rules us.

The sermon on the Mount is all about the kingdom and how you and I live kingdom lives in a fallen world. How do we represent ourselves as the people of God? How do we display his rule over us? How do we live what we'll see here over and over and over, a blessed, divinely happy life that displays God's rule over us?

Jesus as King

So the sermon on the Mount is about the kingdom of God. That's the big picture. This sermon, number three, over and over centers us on Christ. So this sermon is for us and practical today. It is in the grand context of the kingdom of God and how we live as kingdom representatives, and it centers us, it points us continually to Christ.

Jesus as king is the theme of this gospel, the gospel of Matthew. You can think of Matthew chapters 1-4 as Jesus beginning to proclaim the kingdom and identify himself as the king. You can think of the middle section all the way through chapter 16, with what we're in now, as Jesus fulfilling his kingly authority, displaying it through his teaching, through his deeds of grace and his power, and his call to enter the kingdom and live in the kingdom.

Then chapters 16-28, Jesus calling on the imagery of Isaiah, appears as the suffering king. The one who's crucified for his people, but overcomes and conquers death and sends his messengers out into the world and into the nations to help gather them into his kingdom.

Everything in Matthew is centering on Jesus and everything in the sermon on the Mount is also centering on Jesus. And this is good for us. As Thomas Brooks, an old Puritan, once said, "Christ is light to enlighten us. He is life to enliven us. He is riches to supply us. He is raiment to clothe us. He is a staff to support us. He is a sword to defend us. He is bread to nourish us. He is water to refresh us, wine to cheer us. What more could we have?"

It should be then a joy to enter into the sermon on the Mount and study it and have our eyes fixed on Christ and his teaching for us. And may it increase our love for Christ and point us to him, not ourselves. It's deeply practical. There could be a temptation there to say, "I'll live this out. I'll do it," and "Look at me," when it's meant to direct your gaze to him who is all and all and all we need.

So, if we listen properly to the sermon on the Mount with willing and open ears and ready hearts, I think we'll discover a lot about Jesus and will be wrapped up into greater love and devotion to him.

Submitting to Jesus' Authority

Fourthly, final observation about the sermon on the Mount, kind of set the stage for us. Living this sermon, living out this teaching of Jesus, means bowing to the authority of Jesus. To live this sermon out is to bow to the authority of Jesus.

You cannot live out these words without a right relationship to Christ. It is not possible. The sermon only begins to change us when we have submitted to his sovereign rule, his sovereign and gracious reign over us.

We must believe in him, trust in him, receive him. And as evidence of that, then live for him. But you don't live for Christ so that he is yours and he is your savior. You live for Christ because he is your savior. The kingdom that Christ preaches and proclaims belongs to him, the king. And so we submit to him. We submit to his word.

And we believe the words of first John 5, that what he commands of us is not harsh but loving and gracious. Not too hard for us but enabled by him to obey. So what does it look like to live a kingdom life in a fallen world? What does Jesus have to say to us as a church? Starting in Matthew 5:1-5, really looking at verses 3, 4, and 5, we see three character realities that draw us into thinking about who we are before God. Who am I before God?

Christ calls us to poverty, to mourning, and to meekness.

The Beatitudes

1. Poor in Spirit

Number one, we're poor before God. Look at verse 3. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." That first word, blessed, is repeated over and over eight times here, and it would be good for us to understand it. To be blessed, and this word, blessed, should hearken your mind back to the Psalms, at least. Psalm 1, "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night. Blessed is the man." Psalm 32:1 begins as well, "Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven against whom the Lord does not count his iniquity."

This is language used time and time again, not just in the Psalms, but throughout the Old Testament, as God establishes his covenant with his people. He tells Abraham, "I will bless you." And the people of Israel all throughout Deuteronomy 28, as God renews the covenant with them that began with Abraham and continues on through Moses, contains all of God's promises to bless his people for their obedience for submitting to his rulership.

Blessing can be defined as this. This biblical blessed state is divine happiness. True happiness, not the fleeting feeling or emotion of happiness, but settled happiness, settled joy, fellowship with God, the experience of knowing God and having his covenant promises and faithfulness over you and to you. The reality that God states of his people, "I will be your God and you will be my people." That's the blessed state. A right relationship with God and enjoyment of him.

Genesis 2:3, at the very beginning there, God blesses his creation. To be blessed is to be divinely happy. To be happy in God. And so we want to get the beatitudes correctly. They are not mostly focused on what we do. They're not. The beatitudes aren't so much about us as they are describing the blessings, the grace, and joy that belong to those whose lives show the marks of the kingdom of God.

And every beatitude, Jesus explains the blessing and the reason for the blessing. And so what does God tell us is blessed in life? How do we live a blessed life? How do we embody the hallmarks of the kingdom of God?

These beatitudes are not for special Christians. This blessedness is not for some Christians who have a certain temperament or disposition and not others. No matter the type of Christian or the personality or the background, every faithful Christian is to embody these beatitudes.

We all want to be those kinds of Christians who embody these. And we can look at like those people you and I know who say, "I'd like to be just like them someday. I want to grow into that kind of Christian. Happy. Divinely happy." The first beatitude is, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Being poor in spirit is not a financial condition. It has nothing to do with your money. In fact, it's not even a depressed state, as some have mistook it. It's not dealing with the outward realities of your life at all.

It's not even dealing with your outward countenance. Some Christians have sold everything, trying to obey this verse, and yet they still lack being poor in spirit. Some have thought in themselves as so lowly and pitiable worms of people, and they've just sought to be the lowest of the low in the sight of all.

And yet perhaps they've lacked truly being poor in spirit. To be poor in biblical terms, in an Old Testament imagery is to belong to a set of people who recognize that they themselves are bankrupt in the world and they must rely on the grace of God for all their needs and anything they have.

Psalm 34:6 talks about a poor man who called on the Lord and was heard and saved. So poor and destitute, the only place he has to turn is God. Psalm 40:17 says that the poor and needy ask God to think of them and deliver them. The poor, the weak, the helpless are the ones who lack every resource to help and save themselves, and so they seek God as a refuge and strength.

So that's poor. What about being poor in spirit? The one who is poor in spirit is the person who sees his spiritual bondage to sin, is aware of his sinful guilt, and knows that he in himself has no standing before God. He's dispossessed before God.

There are no Christians without the Spirit that says, "Lord, I have nothing in myself. I need your mercy." The poor in spirit cry out for the mercy and grace of God. We are the ones like the prodigal sons who come to the very end of ourselves, once proud and self-assured, now bankrupt, having nothing. Like the prodigal sons, we see ourselves and our situation clearly.

We come to God, emptied of pride. Completely empty-handed, "Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling." Nothing to boast of, everything to beg for. And we know the words well. "Naked, come to thee for dress. Helpless, look to thee for grace. Foul, foul we are but to the fountain of Christ's blood we fly, and like we sing the blood of Christ washes over us. Wash me, Savior, or I die."

The one who is poor in spirit has no argument to make against the God against God's verdict over him. The verdict that Paul makes very clear in Romans 3:13-17, where he says, "There's none righteous, no, not one. None who understand, none who seek after God. All have turned aside, each to their own way. We are worthless. We do no good, not one of us." That's the descriptor over every human post fall.

Do we agree with God's verdict of us? His judgment of who we really are when laid bare before him? Poverty of spirit comes difficult to most of us. Many of us can attest to having to be drugged to the cross and to see ourselves for what we really are. The Lord having to humble us. We are prideful, perhaps most shown in our readiness to share our opinion over and over and over again.

We boast even if only in our hearts so often like the Pharisee that stood on the street corner and prayed, "Thank God that I am not a sinner like that man." When in reality to be poor in spirit is to be like the tax collector, bare and on his knees, "Lord, have mercy on me a sinner."

Our hearts rise up and want to justify us over and over again, don't they? Our sin comes out clear to someone, it's exposed. We want to say, "Oh no, no, no, I didn't mean that," or, "You're just mistaking it." But we can't justify ourselves.

The poor in spirit, though poor in spirit, can be rich because it says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." If you would become rich and possess a kingdom, then you first lose everything. Everything. Yourself, your self-confidence, so that we'd be poor in spirit.

2. Mourning

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And then in verse 4, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." As we look here and we see this, "Blessed are those who mourn," and the call to be mourning, this is not a statement of general comfort, even though Jesus says, "they shall be comforted." It's not a statement that don't worry, time heals wounds and at some point you'll find yourself out of mourning.

Eventually you'll be okay. As we look at, "Blessed are those who mourn," we begin to see that these beatitudes are connected. Jesus is speaking about the kingdom of God. Our poverty is not in our pocket, it's in our spirit. And so also this mourning, what could rightly be described as grief and sorrow is over one's sinfulness. The poor in spirit understand who they are before God and it produces real sorrow for sin.

Not worldly sorrow. Real sorrow, godly sorrow. Paul distinguishes between the two in second Corinthians 7:10. He says, "Godly sorrow leads to repentance that brings salvation." But worldly sorrow brings death because worldly sorrow is only worried about what others see and getting out of its state.

Godly sorrow is a real recognition of sin, a mourning over sin, which does not excuse sin, which will never belittle sin, which does not create excuses when our sin is exposed. Godly sorrow, this kind of blessed mourning it owns the reality of our sinfulness and our sin when it shows up in our lives.

The one who is blessed and mourning because they're poor in spirit, doesn't try to weigh in the balance their better qualities to cancel out some of their sinful tendencies. You can't balance the scale against your sin. That's not God's economy. Fruitfulness cannot scrap any immorality in your life. The "Oh, I've sinned, Lord, I'll do better and I'll do more" is not godly sorrow and godly mourning.

The poor in spirit instead find his words with Paul in Romans 7:24 and 25. "Not, I will deliver myself," but, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?" And where does the comfort for the mourning come from? It comes from the next sentence in Romans 7:24. "But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord who offers deliverance and comfort."

So that Paul can then say in Romans 8:1, "There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." We need to get this principle rooted in us. That our sin and understanding our lowliness before the Lord and truly feeling it is not a lost state. We can see our sin at times and perhaps delve into not even a worldly sorrow or a godly sorrow, but just a self-sorrow where we go deep into the pits and we're still looking at ourselves instead of to Christ.

But it says, not, "Blessed are those who mourn and stay there." Blessed are those who mourn and think that they're the abject worst and love to live a life of self-pity. No, blessed are those who mourn, for they'll be comforted. We have to get this principle rooted in us. It is the delight of Christ to give poor sinners an interest in himself. In Matthew 11:28, he said, "Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest."

He is not only able to do it, but it is Christ's delight to save sinners. Christ's soul is this, to save pitiable sinners. And it is a true and clear sight of God and a true and clear sight of Christ that makes us mourn for our sin, but grace enables us to have comfort. Grace enables us to mourn and see our sin rightly, and mourn over it in a godly way, but then experience this blessed comfort of being forgiven by the very same grace.

Psalm 32:1, "Blessed is the one who is forgiven against whom the Lord does not count his iniquity." Jesus is the king over his kingdom, but he's not a harsh ruler. He's the comforting king who takes the weak, the destitute, the ones who find themselves in the gutter, in the streets, who don't even feel like they belong, and he raises them up, comforts them. And the kingdom is theirs.

Mourning for our sin, real sorrow over sin, actual understanding of our sin, not just our position before God but our actual sin, is one of the first steps in understanding the comfort of the gospel. Jesus fulfills what the prophet Isaiah says of the coming king in Isaiah 61. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted. To comfort all who mourn. To grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes. The oil of gladness instead of mourning. The garment of praise instead of a faint spirit." Jesus raises up the weak.

So we don't have to pretend to be strong. Jesus comforts the mourning, so we don't have to pretend like nothing's wrong. Jesus is the comforting king.

3. Meekness

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." And verse 5, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." If we're poor in spirit, we understand our spiritual bankruptcy before God. If as an effect of that and realizing who we are before God, we are the kind of people who mourn over our sin but are comforted by the grace of Christ, what does that flow into by way of practical character in our lives? How does that shape us? What kind of person will I be?

Meek. It's been said that the mercies of God make a sinner proud. "Oh, look at me. I've received mercy." The mercies of God make a sinner proud, but a saint humble. And so this meekness could be described as humility, not weakness, not timidity, not frailty, meekness, humility, even accompanied with strength, reliance on God, not ourselves, whose power is made perfect in our weakness.

Meekness is the humble strength that belongs to the one who has learned to submit to difficulties, maybe even people and circumstances, knowing that in everything, God is working for his good. We've learned to submit ourselves to even difficulties, even at the hand of God, and to submit ourselves to God, knowing that he is working everything out.

Did you know that Moses is a biblical example of meekness to us? Moses, in Numbers 12:3, is described as the meekest man of his day. Have you ever thought of Moses that way? I didn't very often. I only thought about it this week. The meekest man of his day.

Moses wasn't always meek, though. God had to work meekness into Moses. When Moses first encountered hostility of the Egyptians toward God's people Israel, he thought, and he started to sense God's call on his life, that he would be the avenger and that he would save God's people from their oppression. He slew an Egyptian, and he supposed, Acts 7:25 says, that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand.

Not his hand, God's hand, his hand, Moses's hand. Not exactly seemingly like the meekest man there. But then God brings Moses out of Egypt and into a desert. 40 years of loneliness, tending sheep, not shepherding God's people to prepare Moses to be used by God. And then he encounters the burning bush. 40 years of shepherding. Think about that, out in the pasture, in the desert, in the field, should have afforded Moses plenty of time to think about himself, his frailty, his sinfulness, to mourn it and to learn patience and submission to God.

Moses understood generally what he was meant to be when he slain the Egyptian, and he waited for 40 years to be humbled for God to raise him up. Friends, he did not start meek, but he became meek and was the meekest man of his day and all of Israel. You can learn meekness.

This is not an ingrained personality trait. This is not just for the quiet and introspective. This is not just for those that appear meek on the outside. Meekness is something that God can help you learn. Are you willing to learn humility? Are you willing to be humbled by the Lord, even when it's uncomfortable and patiently be shepherded and guided by his good hand?

To accept adversity, to accept difficult people, to accept waiting on things that you think God would have you do or is calling you to. Would you patiently wait on God and have him transform you and develop within you this meekness? Christ was also meek. He's described in Matthew 11:28 as gentle, meek, that is, and lowly of heart.

The comforter of the weary and the heavy laden. If Jesus is meek, we can think of the words in Isaiah 42. "He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice or make it heard in the street." That means he does not draw attention to himself. And it says, "A bruised reed he will not break. A faintly burning wick he will not quench." Meek Jesus. Yes, king Jesus. Yes, victorious Jesus. Yes, bold Jesus. But Jesus also who is perfectly humble and models that for us.

And this is why Philippians 2 says, "Have this mind among yourselves in Christ who humbled himself, even to the point of death on a cross." I think generally we all know what true meekness and humility looks like. We all know the refreshing and beautiful reality, the attractive and endearing life of meeting someone who is truly humble, who is not occupied with themselves, but just seems to breathe the life of God upon all those around them. Who's not interested in themselves but is interested in you in such a way that it spurs you on.

Might even make you think you're their best friend or you're special. We've all seen meekness. It's encouraging. It's perhaps the most admirable and beautiful trait that a Christian can possess. In God's economy, those who inherit the earth, those who have the kingdom of God, embody as well what we learned in James 4.

God opposes the proud, but to whom does he give grace? The humble. And so in God's economy, we go down in order to go up. We recognize who we are with nothing in our hands in order to be blessed by God, comforted. How do these traits of being poor in spirit and mourning and meek become present in the Christian life? What's the key to growing into this character, the character of a kingdom citizen, the character of Christ embodied in us?

How do we heed Christ's words? These realities only come to play in our lives as we come to know God and his presence and begin then to discover who we really are. We need to know who we are in the sight of God and see our frailty and respond to it in the right way. That's what these are, the right response to who we are before God.

Then we can embody the beauty of the character that Christ says defines us. How do we embody these? We come nearer to God. James 4 also told us, "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you." Come near to him and see him and then see more clearly yourself. There's not a day that should go by where you do not come and sit at the foot of God and look up at his grandeur, at his beauty, at his glorious majesty and therefore see yourself rightly.

Not even in an effort to see yourself, but in an effort to see him. To look to Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith, to gaze at him. Poor in spirit, mourning and meekness are not navel-gazing people. These are Christ-gazing people. Those kinds of people who are not looking down at themselves, but are looking to our glorious and risen savior. And then are lifted up with him.

Are you near Christ today? This week, were you there, present? Or had you walked off and gotten near to other things and looked at other things? Looked at yourself. Are you seeking out the Lord? Is there devotion evident in the fruit of your life? Do you let God's word, that scepter by which Christ rules us, search your heart?

Dig up the things that are uncomfortable. Know it. Do you want Christ? Is God your treasure and your aim? We should draw near to God so that he will draw near to us. Let's pray.

Prayer

Lord, mold us and shape us by your word, through the power of your Spirit into a people that are poor in spirit, that know our spiritual bankruptcy. No, the kinds of people that mourn our sin, that don't excuse it, that embody true repentance and humility, that are eager to be refined in your fire.

And Lord, make us meek and humble. For those of us who are more brash, try to make a name for ourselves. For those of us who simply look to ourselves too often. Lord, humble us. We pray that you would do what you must in our lives so that we would see less of ourselves and more of you. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.

Amen. Please stand with us to worship in our response.