The Missing Attitudes of Today

For the last few months, I have been looking once again at Matthew Chapter 5.

Herein are the ‘Beatitudes of Jesus’, or as some have said, ‘The Sermon on the Mount’.

These principles are missing in our churches today. I say this regardless of troubles and afflictions that surround us. Also, this is regardless of relationships twisted and broken among us. This is regardless of any excuse we can cook up! This is regardless of how busy the world outside has made us.

Very few Christians I know can really live up to them. But to the generation of today these sayings of Jesus seem so strange. So very strange!

I have begun studying them all over again. As I am doing this study afresh, I realise my own inefficiency in carrying out all that Jesus teaches. We miss so much at times.

From my personal perception, the ‘Beatitudes’ are the core, the quintessence and the beating heart of true, early and living Christianity. Without these you cannot be true disciples!

I have read some commentators who claim that they are ‘rules’ that Jesus gave in these teachings to show us an ideal. And that no one can achieve these ideals. Balderdash! I don’t believe Jesus had this in mind when He sat with His disciples on the Mount overlooking the sea. He was speaking to His disciples and not just those who were looking for healings and freedom from demonic possession. Jesus was building a powerful foundation. He was beginning His ministry here on earth with foundations that can never change. He was imparting to them a solid lifestyle for true discipleship and an ongoing generational responsibility of passing down these trues to their children’s children.

The Beatitudes teach us that peace comes from peacemakers who are characterized by their own poverty of spirit. They who understand their own inability to mourn for the world. They who have their own lack of attachments and still cling to their personal rights and opinions. They who understand their own emptiness for the healing of the world. They who realise and struggle with their own mercy extended even towards their worst enemies. And they who personally battle with their own purity of heart.

I know that change comes first from the inside of us, then it exudes from us to the world outside. No one is persecuted for Christ’s sake because of their political ideology, or their moral position on some behaviour. Jesus was not a thinker and theorist like Ayn Rand or Karl Marx and true Biblical Christianity is not just another system of morals.

Start living the Beatitudes.

The Beatitudes are revolutionary.

They have an antithesis to conventional wisdom and common sense in our present culture.

Challenged?

So am I!

Let’s begin living them then, by the power of the Holy Spirit and the revelation of God’s Holy Word.

Blessings.