In the last of the eight BE-ATTITUDES, Jesus tells us in verse 10, ” Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This one sounds tough, doesn’t it? How can we feel blessed while being persecuted and mistreated? The qualifying thoug
I am going to ask something that sometimes is rare in our culture (this applies to me also). We live is a hustle bustle, “let me scan the book for the bottom line”, “let me hear the highlights kind of world”, don’t we? This journey that we are on with Jesus in studying
Life is NOT about the QUANTITY of things we do, the “exploits” we have, and the pleasures we keep pursuing. It IS about the “QUALITY” of our daily walk in life and our daily walk with God. And this, I believe, is so much what the Beatitudes are all about. You’ll notice that
When Jesus is the foundation of our lives and when we lay the bricks of these foundational attitudes–the Beatitudes–we are promised blessedness. Jesus provides answers to conditions in our lives that we so often can’t figure out. Why does it seem that happiness and fulfillment are so har
As we continue to study the Kingdom of heaven/The kingdom of God, we will look at Jesus teachings concerning religious hypocrites. I want to point out that in Matthew 23, Jesus was not talking here to the Jews (though the Pharisees were Jews). He was talking to the Jewish religious leaders and thos
Let’s take a step deeper and look at what it means to be “poor in spirit”. As we have already seen, being “poor in spirit” is recognizing our total dependence on God–acknowledging that without Him we are nothing. It is not a weakness in the sense of weak and pitif