Meek Not Weak

 “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matt. 5:5)
If we are to understand what this verse is all about, we must also consider what it is not. I think we have been conditioned by television, movies and all of popular culture – and maybe even by the demeanor of some Christians – to equate meekness with weakness. We are being programmed to think, “Well, if I’m going to be a good Christian, I’d better just let everybody run over me. I’ll just forget about standing up for myself or for what is right. I don’t want to offend anybody.” You have as much right as a Muslim to stand up for what you believe. Being a Christian does not make you a doormat for everybody else. If other people get mad when you talk about Jesus, you should get just as mad when they defile His name. But some people expect you to put up with the blasphemous tirades of the wicked and slither off into a corner rather then express your displeasure when your beliefs are ridiculed. It’s time we started to understand that when God speaks in this verse of being meek, He is not talking about being weak. Another popular misunderstanding in this passage is that many of us equate meekness with timidity. The world so often tells us, “You can go ahead and believe what you like, but don’t speak up and try to force it on us.” So we are essentially put in our place, and we have gotten comfortable with that. I am not suggesting at all that you be unkind or uncouth, or that you cram your beliefs down someone else’s throat. The Bible never teaches that. But we have lost something in our society in that we have stopped taking a stand for Biblical Christianity. The Bible tells us to be bold and proclaim our faith. We used to sing that old hymn, “Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross.” The sad fact today is that our lives more accurately reflect the words, “Sit down, sit down, be quiet; don’t talk about Jesus.” There used to be a different mindset in society. You can say what you want, but it’s a fact that this country was better off when prohibition was the law of the land. Crime was down, domestic abuse was down, and most families’ finances were improved. Much was made of Al Capone and his ilk, but aside from a few specific urban areas where organized crime was active, most of America was better off when booze was harder to come by. The prohibition laws would never have come about except for men like Billy Sunday who stood up and said, “Booze is killing our kids. We need to do something about it.” Imagine if that great evangelist had listened to people who said, “Mr. Sunday, it’s all right if you believe that, but you need to keep it in the pulpit.” We have no problem today yelling about sin in the church, but we seem to hesitate to yell about it out in the world where most of the sin is actually taking place. We’re allowed to have our religion in church, but God forbid we bring it with us to work or (gasp!) into politics. I received an e-mail recently with a photo of a 2008 presidential candidate who appeared at a function dressed in drag because he was pandering to gay, lesbian and transgender voters. I don’t want a male president who dresses like a woman or a female president who dresses like a man. I’m going to support a righteous person in any political campaign. I would rather lose with a righteous person than win with a compromiser. I have more respect for a Catholic priest who preaches his doctrine without hesitation than a compromising Baptist. I would prefer that America be led by a rank liberal who supports killing babies and a Sodomite lifestyle than a so-called conservative who capitulates and compromises. Maybe then as we head down the path of destruction we could have the hope that God would send revival. We have been told to stay in our place. As Christians, we need to get out of that place. If the Sodomites can come out of the closet, so can the Christians. I am sick of being timid. If meekness is not weakness or timidity, then it certainly is not cowardice. We need to be afraid of what Jesus thinks and not what the world thinks. We should be afraid of what we will hear at the Judgment Seat and not what someone might say down at the coffee shop. We must be more concerned with what the Bible says and what has been handed down to us over the years from men and women of God than what is said by modernist, liberals and anyone else who hates God. “But I don’t want to offend my friends,” you say. Well, all of them are going to Heaven or Hell, and you owe it to them to stand up and tell them what is right. Another popular argument is, “You don’t have the right to say your way is better than anyone else’s way.” The Bible says in Prov. 12:26, “The righteous is more excellent than his neighbour: but the way of the wicked seduceth them.” Now I’m no better than anyone else in that we are all sinners. But the way I have chosen is better than the way you have chosen. “Who are you to tell me that your way is better than my way?” I am a born-again, blood-bought child of God, washed in the blood of Christ, saved by the grace of God, and I’ve got the Bible to prove it. I can’t make you live right, but I can tell you what the Bible says about how you should live. “My way will get me to Heaven just as good as your way.” Your way will get you somewhere, but it won’t be to Heaven. Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” A lady ran into Curtis Hutson one day at the post office after hearing him preach on the radio. She said, “Dr. Hutson, you preach about Jesus and all that, but you have your way to Heaven and I have my way – just like we came different ways to the post office today.” Dr. Hutson thought for just moment and quickly replied, “Ma’am, you are correct about getting to the post office. But when you die, you don’t go to the post office.” So if meekness is not to be equated with weakness, timidity or cowardice, what is the Biblical definition of meekness? It is very simple. Meekness is submission to God and His plan for your life; it is accepting that the hand of God at work in your life is for His glory and your good in everything. When you commit to walk down the path that God has chosen for you, and you realize that whatever happens is not the intent of God to hurt you, but is for His glory and your good, then you are practicing the art of meekness as outlined in His Word. Gen. 50:20 says, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers after being thrown into a pit. He was bought by Potiphar and worked as a servant in an Egyptian house, until he was lied about by an adulterous woman and thrown into prison. All of this began when he was a teenager. I marvel at how teenagers can say it is impossible to go against the crowd and live for God in today’s society when I think about what Joseph went through.  Now Joseph stands as the number-two man in all of Egypt, and his brothers stand before him hoping to avoid starvation. Most of us, in Joseph’s place, would have smacked those men down in an instant, thrown them into prison so they could experience what they did to us. But Joseph looked at them as said, “Fellas, it’s all right. God had a plan all along. Now I can spare your lives.” Remember Joseph’s dream? Here it was coming to pass. God had a plan when he was in the pit, when he was a servant in Potiphar’s house, and when he was in that Egyptian prison before moving to the palace. Neither Joseph nor his brothers knew this plan, but Joseph submitted to the will of God for his life. All those years he would rather have been back home sitting at his father’s table, but he knew he was fulfilling a purpose for God’s honor and glory, so he did his best to honor Him. What a wonderful example of total submission. Another example is Job. To say he had a bad day would be the understatement of all time. In a single day he lost his wealth, his children and his health. His wife turned on him and said he should curse God. He replied, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21) We have nothing to complain about. Everything we have was given to us by God. If He wants to take something away, it’s OK. Nearly every one of us, in Job’s place, would be moaning and groaning constantly. As a father of four, I can say without hesitation that I would be questioning God if I lost my children so suddenly. As close as I am to my wife, I can’t imagine how Job felt to have his wife desert him when he needed her most. She told him in no uncertain terms that she wished he were dead and he should wish the same thing, because she wanted no part of whatever God was allowing to happen in his life. I don’t know of any man in the Bible who was a better Christian than Job. If anyone had a “right” to complain, in my earthly view, it would be him. God took everything away to prove a point about Himself, and Job proved Him right. That is total submission to God. Could any of us have that kind of attitude when things aren’t going so well? Jesus said in Matt. 11:29, “Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly.” In the Garden of Gethsemane, He showed total submission to God when He said in Matt. 26:39, “Let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I wilt, but as thou wilt.” He didn’t want to face the cross, but He knew that it was important for the entire human race to have the opportunity to know God through Christ than for Him to avoid it. As a sports fan, I have learned not to be a big fan of a particular team, because that team can be overrun with wicked people who just happen to be great athletes, and I want my children to learn not to look up to that kind of behavior. I’m a fan of people. My favorite football team in recent years has been the Indianapolis Colts because of my great admiration for their head coach, Tony Dungy. A fine Christian man, he wrote a book entitled “Quiet Strength” that was a huge blessing to me. In 2005, a little over a year before Dungy’s team won the Super Bowl, his 18-year-old committed suicide. To this day, the family is not sure why he did that. This young man was a Christian and all of his friends described him as an upbeat person. This tragedy in Tony Dungy’s personal life came after a series of professional setbacks, as he had many good teams in Tampa and Indianapolis but couldn’t seem to get over the hump and win the big games, especially in the playoffs. Dungy wrote in his book that his attitude was, “I’ll not change anything. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, but I’ll do it a little bit better, because I know I’m doing right.” When he and his wife flew to Tampa to begin making funeral arrangements, he saw thousands of people participating in the procession and expressing their condolences. “I can’t explain it, but I still believe that God has my best interests at heart,” he wrote. So after years of being hammered in the press and by fans for being too passive or too “Christian,” after being pressured to make changes in certain areas, he decided that he was going to stay the course. After winning the Super Bowl, the first words out of his mouth were in praise to the Lord Jesus Christ for giving him this opportunity. He did not talk about being the first black coach to win the Super Bowl or reflect on his long and storied career, but he praised God above all. Since then, he has used his status and his circumstances as a platform to share his testimony in print and in person around the world. He could have quit on God after the death of his son but he didn’t, and God honored him for that. Meekness is the ability to praise God in the best and the worst. It is thanking Him when things are good, and also thanking Him when things are not so good. But there are some problems associated with our view of meekness. One of them is an improper view of the Person of God. The reason that we don’t accept God’s will so many times is that we have the wrong view of who God is. Often I encounter people, especially teenagers, who think that God hates them. You would be shocked at how many young people have this attitude because of what a parent or someone they know has said or done to them. When awful things happen in their lives, they think, “If God loved me, He wouldn’t let this happen to me.” But the Bible says plainly in I John 5 that God is love. That passage goes on to say that you don’t know how to love is you don’t know God. Those of you who think God hates you have it all wrong. God loves you, and He did not do to you what you think He did to you. Instead, it is our own free will combined with Satanic influence in our lives – the choices that we make and that others make for us – that has resulted in whatever is going on around us. God does not want you to be a robot. He wants you to love Him by choice. Many things that we think God simply allows to happen are things that He did not want to happen, although He knew before the world was formed that they would occur. God is not at fault in these circumstances; you or someone in your life chose to disobey God. Most of the heartache in our lives would not exist if people followed God’s plan. Many people who go around singing, “God is love,” while painting flowers on Volkswagens and smoking various forms of plant life also have an improper view of God. Yes, God is love, but He is much more than that. Preachers are roundly criticized for preaching so much about judgment, but if you only get the love of God you fail to see His holiness, which is the greatest underlying aspect of who God is. His love can manifest itself because of His holiness. The Bible says in Ps. 99:9, “Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy hill; for the Lord our God is holy.” Just as those who think God hates them have an improper view, so do those who think that because God is love there are no consequences to our actions. As I Pet. 1:16 puts it, “Be ye holy; for I am holy.” God’s holiness says, “I made everything, so I make the rules. This is in bounds, and this is out of bounds.” God is going to judge sinners who violate His holiness. Psalm 7:11 says, “God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day.” He will judge those of us who are saved according to how we lived after we were saved, and He will judge sinners who do not accept Christ. I was talking with an eight-year-old boy about sin and he said, “A pinch is a handful.” I thought he had lost his mind. “Preacher, a pinch is a handful, he kept saying. I was still in the dark, until finally he said, “A pinch of sin is just as much as a handful of sin.” That’s when I got it. That young boy had been taught that, no matter how small you think your sin is, in God’s eyes it is a big sin. They are all the same to Him. God judged His own Son who was nailed to a cross for our sins. Do you honestly think He will let you slide for what you have done? You will either accept or reject Christ, and God will judge you based upon that. Another view of God is that He loves you and wants you to be saved but how you do it is your choice. I John 5:10-11 says, “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” People do not understand God’s will because they have an improper view of what it takes to get to Heaven. When you say that you will go to Heaven because of your good works or your church membership or some religious ritual, you are saying that God is a liar. Because the record says that Jesus is the only way to Heaven, if you say that anything else is acceptable then you are calling God a liar. You might call me a liar, but would you really call God a liar? “This is my plan,” God has said. “Anything outside of my plan will not work.” So if you don’t believe God’s plan or think you’re doing it another way, you can just go ahead and tell God that He is a liar. You are offending the very One who has your soul in the palm of His hand. The Bible says in Matt. 10:28, “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.” A Christian professor was teaching a class in basic Christianity at a secular college out west. He could never get his students to take his class seriously. For years he tried to explain Christianity to these young people and get them excited about it but he could never get through. One day a big, strapping 19-year-old named Steve entered his class. He was a good-looking kid who as a freshman was the starting center on the football team. The professor also learned that he was a very committed Christian who loved the Lord, and he asked him for his help in a class experiment. “How many push-ups can you do?” the professor asked. “I do 200 every night before I go to bed,” Steve replied. “Do you think you could do 300 at one time in sets of ten?” He paused and said, “I think so.” That Friday Steve came early for class and sat on the front row. The professor brought out a large box of delicious donuts. It was an early class and many students had not eaten breakfast. “Would anyone like a donut?” the professor asked. Nearly every student in the room raised a hand. The professor approached a young lady on the front row, and when she said she would like a donut, the professor turned and asked Steve to do ten push-ups so that she could have a donut. She started to protest, but the professor said that he would decide how the donuts were distributed. Steve did the push-ups quickly and was back in his seat. The same thing happened for another girl, and she was not as pleased to receive a donut when she saw someone else doing the work for her. When the next girl politely refused a donut, the professor asked Steve to do ten push-ups for her even though she did not want one. He sat the donut on her desk and moved down the aisle. He came to a young man who said he wanted to do his own push-ups for a donut. The professor would not allow it and asked Steve to do ten more for this student. As the demonstration moved through the classroom, some of the female students began to cry as Steve started having to work harder on his push-ups once he got past the 200 mark. On top of that, students from outside the classroom began coming in when they heard about the free donuts. Eventually Steve got up to 350 push-ups and was quite tired. Some students were weeping and others angrily refused their donuts. The professor was unmoved. “I bought and paid for these and I will decide how they are given out,” he said. “I’ll just leave mine on my desk,” said one student. “Fine,” said the professor. “But Steve is doing the push-ups for you, so you might as well enjoy the donut.” When he finished the last set before time ran out in the class, Steve had to be helped back to his seat because he was wiped out. But a smile was on his face as he knew where the experiment was going. The professor proceeded to explain to the class that, while they wept over a simple donut that someone else did push-ups for them to have, Christ died in their place so they could have everlasting life and they still reject Him. They had a misunderstanding about who God is. His grace has already been given and the price for their sins has already been paid, regardless of whether they choose to accept it. The meek person says, “I may not understand everything about God, but I see that this is His plan for me and I accept it.” That kind of total submission to God is exactly what He is looking for, and it leads to a fulfilling life on this earth and eternal life with Him after that.

What Are We Mourning Over?

“Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.” (Matt. 5:4)  When I asked you at the beginning of the last chapter if you knew what it meant to be poor in spirit, many of you may have readily admitted that you had no idea. But you probably think you have a better handle on what we are talking about in this chapter. We all know what it means to mourn. Each of us has mourned over the death of a loved one; you may have grieved as a child over a lost pet. We normally associate mourning with the pain that comes when you lose something you love very much. “I’ve been hurting for years over this situation,” you might say. “So I know exactly where this verse is coming from.” I wish that were true, and I don’t mean to diminish your pain. But that is not the type of mourning that Jesus refers to in this verse. He is talking about those who mourn over sin, not over loss. Many people are sorrowful for things they have done. We read in the Bible about the many people who came to see Jesus and inquire about His kingdom. There was one man in particular, a lawyer, who “went away sorrowful: because he had great possessions” (Matt. 19:22). He went away sad because of that one sin – greed – that kept him from what Christ would have him do. We can all relate to the emotional high that often accompanies a sin, followed almost immediately by the sickening feeling that you know you have done wrong. Some people try to show how sorry they are after a particularly sinful weekend by going to church on Sunday to get religious. They aren’t changing their lives; they’re just adding religion to help them feel better about whatever they feel bad about. Mourning, as presented by Jesus in this verse, is not just feeling sorry for your sin. It also is not vain repentance, like the Pharisee practiced in the presence of the publican. How many people have gone to the altar in a church service to ask forgiveness for something they did the week before, only to go back home and make absolutely no effort to re-order their lives and keep it from happening again? They fall under conviction from a Biblical message, run down the aisle and tell God how sorry they are, but never change the environment that leads to those sinful thoughts or actions. So they leave church and eventually have the same trouble again. Vain repentance is represented by a change of mind that does not result in a change of lifestyle. Many of you don’t like church, even though you attend regularly, because it is not a joyful experience for you. You spend your time feeling bad about something, you pray for forgiveness but don’t change your lifestyle, and you come back the next week feeling bad again. If you make decisions at the altar but don’t make changes in your life, you have wasted altar time. Mourning is not regret. King Saul expressed regret in his words to David after he had tried to kill him, acknowledging that he never should have done it. But he didn’t feel bad enough about it to stop, as the Bible shows nearly a half-dozen attempts on David’s life at the hand of Saul. You have probably felt regret hundreds of times in your life for various things, such as words you said to your spouse that you wanted to take back. Mourning is not remorse. Judas was remorseful after he betrayed Jesus, and he tried to give back the money he was paid, and the hypocritical men who had paid him refused, saying that they could not touch “blood money.” Judas threw the money in front of them, ran out and hanged himself. There have been times when I felt so bad about something I did that I wished I were dead. You may have felt that way also. I have prayed a few times, “Lord, just kill me before I mess up that badly again.” Actually, dying is the easy way out. It is the coward’s way out. Judas felt bad, but not bad enough to change anything. He just felt bad enough to die, so he wouldn’t have to face anything like that again. So what exactly does Christ mean when He says, “Blessed are they that mourn”? It is the attitude that causes us to, upon the slightest detection of sin, immediately confess and forsake it. Notice that there are two parts to this process. The other examples we have looked at may have included confession, but they did not include forsaking. Reformation is where one forsakes without confession and tries to reform oneself. The correct method is to acknowledge that you are helpless by yourself and can only change your life with God’s help. You may have gotten yourself in a mess, but you cannot get yourself out of it. Long before there is a sinful action, there is a sinful thought. You have meditated on it, mulled it over and considered the possibilities. That’s why making a decision at the slightest detection of sin means doing it at the very beginning. It is harder to get right with God when you are in the middle of something than it is before you ever start something. Too often, instead of confessing our sin when we first think about it, we allow it to take root in our lives and cause ourselves great problems. It’s a lot easier to kill grass before it has a chance to grow than to kill it while it’s growing. When we wait too long to confess and forsake sin, it gets its hooks into us and changes our thinking. Sin will always change your thinking; it takes that which is evil and makes it good, and vice versa. Before long, you’re wondering if it’s really such a big deal in the first place. Those who mourn according to Matt. 5:4 have such an effective sin detector in their lives – the Holy Spirit – and have such a good relationship with Him that they begin at the earliest opportunity the process of confession and forsaking that sin which grieves the holiness of God. There are several marks that prove one is living according to this verse. First, are you repentant of your sin and have you turned to God through a relationship with Jesus Christ? This is about more than knowing God, going to church, or being moral. It is a realization that your sin violates God’s nature to the point that He separates Himself from you. You have no way to get to God because your sin has separated you. That barrier between His holiness and your vileness cannot be taken down until the sin is taken care of. If all you had to do to remain close to God was be good and go to church, why did Christ have to die on the cross? If you could do anything about your sin by being moral or religious, then Christ’s death for us would have been unnecessary. Mourning over your sin gets you to the point that you realize, “Christ died on the cross for one person: me.” There is a difference between knowing that Jesus died for the sins of the world and understanding that He died for your sins. A friend of mine was saved recently, and she told me, “Preacher, I’ve known all my life that Jesus died for sinners. But I finally realized that I am the sinner He died for.” That’s the point I’m trying to make. It’s not just that He died on the cross, but that I put Him there. Forget about the debate over whether the Jews killed Jesus or the Romans did. I killed Him. You killed Him. None of us actually beat Christ or physically nailed Him to the cross, but our sins were vile enough to put Him there. He died because none of us are good enough, or moral enough, or religious enough to get to Heaven on our own. Until we understand our role in His death, we are not truly mournful over sin. Here is another question. Do you constantly seek to restore your broken relationship with Christ? To be saved is to be in the family of God, but even within the family you can have a strained relationship. After you repent of your sins and trust Him for salvation, you will still do some sinning. If you get saved at 8:05, by 8:10 you could be doing something you shouldn’t do. I love my children dearly, but I will spank the fire out of them when they disobey, because that is a violation of my rules. But I don’t kick them out of the house or disown them, and I could never do that as long as I live. They will always be my children, and that can never be changed. As my wife will tell you, I hate it when I have to discipline them. I love it when they come to the realization on their own that they have done wrong and they take steps to correct it. But that doesn’t happen very often. If my son remembers that he failed to put his clothes away, then decides on his own to go back and pick them up off the floor and put them away, there is no need for me to correct him. But usually I have to tell him to do it or else, and I might even have to discipline him because he still doesn’t do it. But once that particular disciplinary action is over, it’s over. As born-again Christians, we all mess up from time to time. Sometimes you will sin and then say, “I messed up. Forgive me, Lord. I need to fix that.” Then God says, “OK.” But there are times when we don’t do that. The Lord keeps reminding us about it, but we put it off until we forget about it and just go on with our lives. But when we let that sin build up, it can cause us to lose the joy of our salvation, and as Peter says, you can even forget that you’ve been washed in the blood of Christ. A Christian who mourns is one who keeps short accounts with God. The moment you have a problem, you deal with it. People wonder how good Christians can get into such bad sin. It’s because they don’t take care of the little sins and confess them when they are small, so they grow into big sins. A Christian who mourns has this attitude: “I can’t let the world become comfortable in my life. I can’t let the things I do become so anti-God that I don’t realize at the moment they happen my need to confess and forsake them.” You say that you try to keep a close relationship with the Lord. Here is a test for you: How close is your relationship with other Christians? How often do you communicate with them? If you are not right with other people, you cannot be right with God. When there is a problem with another person, the tendency can be to just let it go. But you need to correct it before it becomes a big deal. If you are truly mourning as a Christian, you are reordering your thinking about sin. I Cor. 2:12-16 says, “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? but we have the mind of Christ.” II Cor. 10:3-5 says, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” These passages convey the message that, as Christians, we are not supposed to act like the world. We have been so infiltrated with the thought processes of the world that Christians now have the world’s reasoning that they use to solve their problems. Lester Roloff, who died in 1982, said in one of his final messages, “Forty years ago [the 1940s], two things happened that are destroying America. One is the invention of television, and the other is the introduction of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Those two things together have killed the church.” Roloff said that the RSV was the first version that began the “dumbing down” of the Bible to man’s way of thinking. The Bible is a holy book, he said, and it should not be a “Reader’s Digest” type of book. As for television, every one of you reading this book can attest to its influence. Think about the things that you may have partaken of that were wrong, but you saw them on television long before you did them. I remember my military days in the late 1980s, when everyone on the base knew what was happening on certain soap operas. We would come off the flight line every day and tune in. I have never committed a murder in my life, but I’ve seen hundreds of them. I bet you have never actually been to an autopsy, but if you watch any of the most popular shows of the past few years you’ve seen dozens. When I was a kid I had no idea what a homosexual was, but now we watch them together as families and chuckle at how cute and funny they are. Long before I drank my first beer, I knew what “Miller time” was. It’s called desensitizing. The devil is a genius; he stops attacking head-on and comes in from a different direction. He didn’t worry about our parents and grandparents, but he decided to work patiently toward grabbing hold of the future generations. When television was first introduced, people still were active outdoors more than they stayed inside. Then they focused on the housewives during the day. There was a time when all of the prime time shows portrayed couple in separate beds. Now our kids know more at age 14 than we knew when we were 24. There are words I never heard of until I got into the military, and now I hear my nine- and ten-year-old nephews saying them. Long before the church fell into the state it is in now, Christians were at home being desensitized. Today, everything goes when it comes to television. It has brought about a change in thinking. Many of you probably think that separation is abnormal. Going to church every time the doors are opened, dressing modestly, and guarding where you go and what you do are considered abnormal behavior in our present day. “They’re just church people.” Well, isn’t that what all of us are supposed to be? As those passages in I and II Corinthians state so clearly, there is the church and there is the world. The church is to win the world but not become part of the world. We have to reorder our thinking. My hope is that people will get to the point that they are sick of “church lite” and an anything-goes philosophy, and sin will once again become something they hate. I want that to be true in my life as well as in yours. I’m thankful that I don’t know what is popular in the world as well as I used to, but I still know more than I should. If true revival is going to come and our churches are going to be what they should be, we must stop thinking like the world. Finally, we should recognize our own sin as well as the sin of others. Our own sin should certainly grieve us, but so should our nation’s sin. The Lord has impressed upon me that, while we continue to preach about sin from the pulpit, the church should mobilize somehow and deal aggressively with sin in the community. I want my church to be confrontational but I’m not even sure what to confront. I don’t know how effective it would be to just picket downtown with signs that read, “We hate sin.” But there is so much out there that we need to be aware of. A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that the sin of abortion has not really been tackled by the church as it should have. If you found someone trying to kill a friend or a family member, you would use force if necessary to stop that from happening. So what do you do when you know someone is killing babies? You shouldn’t bomb a clinic, of course, but you should do something. When was the last time you considered the fact that more babies have been murdered through abortion than in all of this country’s wars combined? The blood of millions of innocent babies drips from America’s conscience. Many of us in the church don’t bother to face it until one of our own daughters becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Sadly, there is often a battle within church families over whether a teenager should deliver her unborn baby. We don’t grieve over our moral sin in this nation. We hear about another homosexual march and we say, “That’s their problem.” I’m not in favor of going out and fighting them or being obnoxious, but we should share the truth in love and stand confidently for the cross. How often do we grieve (in a non-judgmental way) over a dear brother or sister whose life is a mess because of some bad choices? We would rather condemn or judge than consider how that sin grieves God and hurts the cause of Christ, not to mention their families. We must recognize in a deep, meaningful way what sin is doing to ourselves, our nation and the church. The problem with this Beatitude is that we still delight in our sin too much. Sin is pleasing and pleasurable for a season, and until the consequences come we just enjoy it. We delay getting right not only because of our delight in sin, but because God delays His judgment. Sometimes we wish that He would strike everyone immediately when they deserve it, but then we reconsider upon the realization that we would receive many thunderbolts. We love God’s mercy, but we often keep ourselves from right because of it, thinking we’re OK since God hasn’t done anything to us. Most families that come to me for help as a pastor don’t seek me out until after the crisis has hit. Occasionally they will come before the crisis and get things right, but not too often. Sin deceives us that things will get better. We have all awakened at some point and thought, “How in the world did I get here?” We got there because Satan kept telling us, “It’s not that bad. It’s going to get better.” Countless gamblers have started out by losing their first 10 dollars, then bet the next 10 to get it back, and eventually end up broke or in debt. They keep thinking, “I’ll hit the next one.” But it never happens. That’s how sin works. Sin never fulfills its promise. It always deceives. The promise of Matt. 5:4 is that those who mourn will be comforted. This comfort is in God’s assurance that we will have His presence and blessing. Most of us think that if we give up something we won’t have anything, and that’s why we are hesitant to give up our sin. But God says that when we mourn over sin, He will be our fulfillment. We will be so full of God that we won’t miss whatever we thought we couldn’t live without. I don’t miss my old lifestyle or its consequences because God has replaced it with something much better. We must agree with God and ascertain the root of our sin, whether it be anxiety, pride or whatever. It is often more than just the behavior itself. We must also apply Biblical principles in our lives, beginning with salvation. Once you become a child of God, be obedient to His plan. No one has ever failed when faithfully applying the Word of God. You don’t always have to understand His ways. Just do what He says. I promise you that it will work.

More Stuff Christians Should Stop Doing

Part II from Cary Schmidt- More Stuff Christians Should Stop Doing

Stuff Christians Need to Stop Doing

Great articles by our friend Cary Schmidt- Stuff Christians Need to Stop Doing

27 Reasons We Need Revival

A lady in my church sent me this and I thought it was worth passing along.

1.     When we do not love Him as we once did.

2.     When earthly interests and occupations are more important to us than eternal ones.

3.     When we would rather watch TV and read secular books and magazines than read the Bible and pray.

4.     When we have little or no desire for prayer.

5.     When we would rather make money than give money.

6.     When our Christianity is joyless and passionless.

7.     When we know truth in our heads that we are not practicing in our lives.

8.     When we make little effort to witness to the lost.

9.     When we have time for sports, recreation, and entertainment, but not for Bible study and prayer.

10.  When we do not tremble at the Word of God.

11.  When we seldom think thoughts of eternity.

12.  When we are more concerned about our jobs and careers than about the Kingdom of Christ and the salvation of the lost.

13.  When Christian husbands and wives are not praying together.

14.  When our children are growing up to adopt worldly values, secular philosophies and ungodly lifestyles.

15.  When we watch things on TV and movies that we would not show in church.

16.  When our prayers lack fervency.

17.  When our hearts are cold and our eyes are dry.

18.  When our singing is half-hearted and our worship lifeless.

19.  When we aren't seeing regular evidence of the supernatural power of God.

20.  When we are bored with worship.

21.  When we are more concerned about what others think about us than what God thinks about us.

22.  When we are making little or no difference in the secular world around us.

23.  When we are unmoved by the thought of our neighbors, business associates and acquaintances going to hell.

24.  When we have ceased to weep and mourn and grieve over our sin.

25.  When we aren't exercising faith and believing God for the impossible.

26.  When the fire has gone out in our hearts, our marriages and our church.

27.  When we are blind to the extent of our need and don't think we need revival.

Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit

“And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt. 5:2-3)  I don’t know about you, but I remember reading the Beatitudes over the years without really giving serious thought to what these phrases such as “poor in spirit” really mean. A few years ago I finally realized that, if I want blessing that is promised in a verse such as this, I need to fully understand the principle that God is teaching here. The verses in Matthew 5 contain important principles for every believer; one might say that the Beatitudes are actually a series of “attitudes” that should “be” in every Christian’s life. I could stand in my pulpit next Sunday morning and tell the congregation to go out and be “poor in spirit” during the following week. Most of them would leave wanting to do just that because of the blessing of God that is promised in this verse. But if I asked each person in that congregation exactly what it means to be poor in spirit, I imagine I would get a lot of blank looks and shrugged shoulders. The majority of us would probably have a hard time defining it. But if God wants us to practice it, doesn’t He want us also to know what it means? After all, He promised a fantastic blessing along with it. Let’s look at what it means to be poor in spirit, starting with what it is not.  The particulars First of all, being poor in spirit does not mean one is poor financially. There is a lot of confusion today regarding Christianity and wealth or poverty. Both of the extreme views are wrong; just as there are those who incorrectly believe in a prosperity gospel, there are others who incorrectly believe that a Christian should own almost nothing. In fact, God has ordained varying levels of material success in people’s lives. I know some great Christians who have very little and some great Christians who have a great deal by the measure of this world. So if you think to yourself, “I don’t have a dime in the bank. I must be poor in spirit,” that’s not necessarily the case. Being poor in spirit does not mean one is poor-spirited. If you watch almost anything on television or in movies these days, you will see a Christian portrayed usually as either a wild-eyed fanatic or a weak, milquetoast personality. The same goes for many people’s perceptions of television evangelists and preachers. A lot of unsaved people view the typical pastor as a stiff guy who resembles a funeral home director. These extreme personalities are not what God intended to represent His people as a whole. Being poor in spirit does not mean one is poor spiritually. Some people try to justify their lack of spirituality by telling people that they know they are not what they should be and that’s just the way they are. They never try to improve their spiritual lives. Confessing what you don’t do does not make it OK with God to keep on avoiding what you know you are supposed to do. The Lord doesn’t want you to make excuses for being a weak Christian; He wants you to become a strong Christian through Him. So what does it mean to be poor in spirit? Simply put, a person who is poor in spirit is someone who is completely emptied of self and ready to be filled with Christ. This is a person who can truthfully say, “Not my will, but thine be done.” I know very few people who are bankrupt of self and filled with the Spirit of Christ. The blessing contained in this verse is rarely received because the requirement is one that very few people attain. The Bible says in Rom. 13:13-14, “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” To put on Christ, we must take off self. To have the Spirit’s fullness, we must be empty of vain and selfish desires to fulfill our own flesh.  The proof Most of us, if we are honest, already know where we stand in this regard, and what areas should be marked “pass” or “fail.” We can all probably think of categories in our lives that we should surrender fully to the Lord and have not. But for those of you who say, “I think I’m poor in spirit,” here are some questions to ask yourself. Do you have a daily walk with God, where you spend time with Him in prayer and He spends time with you through His Word? You cannot know the mind of God until you invest yourself in the Word of God. If you neglect that regular time spent with God through Bible reading and prayer, there is no way you can know His will for your daily life because you have not gotten your instructions from Heaven. Do you easily become frustrated and angry when things do not go your way? Notice that I did not say “ever” because it happens to all of us at one time or another. I’m talking about those who routinely have the two-year-old temper tantrum at the age of 32 or 42. I know people who cannot function outside of their controlled environment. As long as they know what is coming and their expectations are met, everything is fine, but when one curve ball is thrown into the mix they come unglued. That’s a sign of childish immaturity, which is really just the flesh taking control. A toddler is supposed to act in the flesh because there is no knowledge of how to walk in the Spirit, but when a supposedly mature Christian throws a fit it’s a different story. Do you become hostile when criticized? That is a tough one. No one in their flesh wants to be criticized. How many times have each of us when someone dared to tell us what we should do or not do? I believe that we see an example of this with Peter, who repeatedly grew agitated at certain things said to him by Christ and others. It wasn’t until he completely surrendered and dead to self, which came after the Resurrection, that he got over that. No one likes unconstructive criticism, but even that can be helpful. Of course, many people do not even like constructive criticism. I am amazed at how often people will come to me for counseling only to get mad at my counsel – when they sought me out in the first place. All I did was give them something from the Word of God. Husbands and wives often have trouble talking to each other because one gets so offended when the other suggests that they need to talk about a problem area. When I perform a marriage ceremony, I think neither the bride nor groom has any idea what they are saying when they repeat the “for better or worse, in sickness and health, for richer or poorer” vows. They don’t understand the hard times that are coming just as they have for every married couple since the dawn of time. But a few months after they meet at the altar they have issues that bring them nearly to blows. A married person, man or woman, should help his or her spouse become more like what God intended, and that is not always easy. As a pastor, I don’t tell people things to make them feel good. I try to help them. Sometimes I will get onto a person who has been out of church for a month because I know that person needs to be there, even if he doesn’t realize it. But there are some members of my own church that I approach with fear and trembling because I know how they will react to me before I even open my mouth. So many people have left a church over something so small because they were hostile to any type of criticism. If I can’t call one of my best friends and expect that person to be honest with me, there’s not much use to having friends. I don’t need a cheering section all the time. I need people who will tell me the truth and help me. The final proof of a “poor in spirit” attitude is this: Do I thank God for what I have or complain to God about what I don’t have? Someone who is poor in spirit will say, “Well, I don’t have much but, thank God, I have all I need.” A person who is not poor in spirit can drive a Mercedes, live in a $500,000 home and wish for something else. Someone who is poor in spirit will look at the old car in the driveway and the next week’s menu of beans and rice (which is the same as last week) but just praise God for everything in life and not want to trade places with anyone. A person who is not poor in spirit will – after acknowledging that the family eats out too often, spent too much money for Christmas gifts and just has it better than their parents in every material category – pray for enough money to have that one more thing on the wish list. Being poor in spirit means being satisfied. It means that you are thankful for what you have and what you don’t have. We all complain about things from time to time, but there are those who complain constantly about what is not being done for them or what they don’t have. A person who is poor in spirit says, “Lord, I have all I need. Thank you for what you do for me.” If more of us were poor in spirit, we would be less in debt to Visa and Mastercard.  The process James 4:5-8 says, “Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw night to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.” The first step in the process is to relinquish control of one’s life to God. Since I finally gave everything to Him, there have been so many miraculous things done in my life, but while I still tried to control things I just drove them farther and farther into the ground. I didn’t listen to wisdom and instruction from my father, my pastor or other people who loved me, but I paid too much attention to the world’s influences and went deeper into the pit. If I were not a preacher today, I would be a bus driver. That is a noble profession and one I have enjoyed in the past, but it is not what God had for my life. For me, it’s much better to be a preacher than a bus driver. So how did I become a preacher? I just said, “Lord, here is my life. It’s not much, but take it and do what you want with it.” From there, He directed me to go back to school, and I wound up at a school I never thought I’d attend – up north in the cold, a run-down campus – after God arranged a trip for me to visit and spoke to my heart about it. But at tiny Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan, I was able to rub shoulders with Dr. Tom Malone, a giant of the faith, in his last years on this earth. I had the privilege of working for him on his staff for a year, and from there the timing was right for me to answer the call at my current church in Texas, where I’ve been for more than a decade. When you surrender your will to God, He does things you can’t imagine. Before I became a preacher, all I did was drive buses and dig holes. Now that I am a pastor, I can still drive a bus if I want to (I have no desire to dig any more holes). The second step in the process is to resist the devil. Resisting means that you are not inviting but you are pushing away. Some of us have a lot of trouble spiritually because we are letting in too much worldly influence and it weakens the spiritual influence in our lives. Not everything we do for amusement or entertainment is wrong, but we must limit what comes in so there is not a constant feeding of the flesh. We have to concentrate on feeding the spirit; the flesh is always there. Anyone who looks, talks and acts like the world is probably controlled by the world. So if something is obviously of the world, we should desire to get as far away from it as we can. That is how you resist. The third step is to have a relationship, as illustrated in the phrase “draw nigh to God.” When you find yourself a long way from God, you purpose in your heart to do what He wants you to do and take a small step toward Him. In return, He takes a giant step toward you. That passage in James promises that, when we make an effort to get close to God, He will do the same. The journey from our flesh to His holiness is an unattainable goal. But it is one we are to strive for. Many people say, “I can never be as good a Christian as so-and-so.” That is not the goal. We are to be as much like Christ as we can, and every time we take a step of faith in that direction, God takes a much bigger step to meet us where we are. When I gave my life to God, I was a million miles from Him. But He was just a couple of steps from me. All He wanted me to do was turn toward Him and then He closed most of the distance between us so that I could walk with Him. But He did most of the walking. The fourth step is repentance of sin. You cannot expect to walk with God and keep a close relationship with Him while you’re also keeping unconfessed sin. The closer you draw to God, the finer the examination becomes. After the “big” sins are put away, and you grow deeper with Him, the “little” sins bother you even more. The problem in America is that we have dumbed down Christianity to the point that sin is not pointed out in churches anymore and we feel comfortable in our condition. Years ago people who were living in sin were convicted of it whenever they went to church. Today they can go to church every Sunday and feel good about what they are doing. The fifth step is to have some reality in your Christianity. I would rather you be openly hostile to the things of God all the time than to be that way during the week and then try to come to church on Sunday pretending as though everything is all right. When I was in high school, I was part of a group at my church that wasn’t considered the best-behaved teenagers, to put it mildly. There were several of us who were on the “do not date” list of many parents with teenage daughters. This was fairly well-known. But at the same time, there were some who sang in the choir and did all the right things at church on Sunday while hanging out with us on Friday night. Many of us who did not pretend to be anything but what we were back then have become hard-core fundamental Christian adults because we were so far gone that we knew we had to get right. But some of those who put on a show at church have drifted into liberalism because they kept pretending – they just carried it to an extreme level. Don’t try to do it halfway. Either get in all the way or get out. Lose the double-minded attitude and get real.  The promise For this we go back to the text verse, which ends with, “for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” This does not mean that being poor in spirit will get you to Heaven. The only way you go to Heaven is by trusting Christ and being born-again of the Spirit of God. This verse is not talking about what you get when you die. Instead, it refers to the reality of living on this earth in a place where Christ rules and reigns in all of your activities. No matter what your physical address is, you are living in a place where you always know that God is on the throne and in control, regardless of what happens to you. You recognize His divine hand in every aspect of your life, and you have a peace that passes all understanding. When are fully surrendered to God and completely empty of self, He will make certain that nothing happens in your life that is not for your good and His glory. That is what being poor in spirit is all about.

The Beatitutdes- Living For Christ In An Un-Christlike World

Last night I saw some very vile things written about a conservative leader in our nation.  It started me thinking how hateful and angry the attitude towards truth is in this country and reminded me of Jesus teaching on the Sermon on the Mount.  The following is the first in a series of articles on The Beatitudes!

“And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,” (Matt. 5:1-2)  This is the beginning of the longest recorded sermon of our Lord in the Bible. Because of this, I believe that we should pay special attention to what He is trying to say to us in these verses and the ones that follow. I am so glad that we can find a self-help book within the Bible. You can go to the bookstore today and find the shelves overflowing with books on how to achieve your goals and follow what they say are the right principles. People are making millions of dollars by telling other people how to live. This is true in secular as well as Christian bookstores. But right here in the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is telling us, “Here is how you should live. This is what you should do.” The greatest way to help yourself is to realize that you cannot help yourself; you need to allow Christ to work through you so you can be what God wants you to be. God has better plans for you than you have for yourself. When you lead your own life you will go right into a world of trouble, but when you let the Lord take the reins of your heart and lead your life He will take you to places that you never dreamed or imagined. In these passages that we will be studying throughout this book, God is simply trying to get you to give Him control of your life. “What will happen if I do that?” you might ask. I cannot answer that question for certain, but I can tell you that your life will turn out much better with God in control than if you try to control everything yourself. As we look at the introduction to this great sermon there are a few things we should consider. First, let’s look at the preacher. The opening verses of Matthew 5 use only the pronoun “He,” but we learn in verses 24-25 of the previous chapter that the speaker is the Lord Jesus Christ. This is not just a prophet or preacher, but the Preacher’s Preacher and the Prophet of His own church is the one speaking here. It’s one thing for me to tell you something, but it’s a whole different ballgame when God says it. If I tell you something from God’s Word, you are not accountable to me for how you respond to it; you are accountable to Him. But in this passage we have the very words of Jesus from His own lips. If you have a red-letter edition of the Bible, virtually three entire chapters of the book of Matthew (chapters 5-7) are printed in red. I believe that all of the Bible is the inspired Word of God, but I also think that we should pay special attention to the actual words of our Lord that are spoken directly to us from His earthly ministry. This was not just any preacher. In Christ we find the wisdom of God. Matt. 7:29 says, “He taught them as one having authority, not as the scribes.” When Jesus spoke on a particular subject, you literally had the mind of God on the matter. You knew what God was thinking, because all of the wisdom of God was personified in Christ. So if you have a problem and you want to know what God thinks about it, look in the Word and see what Jesus said about it. I am amazed at how often we will listen to Dr. So-and-so or some “expert” and take their word as gospel without ever consulting the true Gospel. We believe without reservation the words of someone who has a TV show. But if Christ said it, we can rest assured that it is the wisdom of God. When you hear what Christ said, you are hearing what God wants you to know for your life. In Christ we see the Word of God. John 1:18 says, “No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. You say, “I haven’t seen God.” Neither has Oral Roberts. No one living today has seen Him. But the people listening to this sermon saw God when they saw Jesus. It is so hard to wrap our minds around what God is. He is the eternal self-existent One. We cannot comprehend that because everything we understand has a beginning and an end. The human mind is controlled by time; all that we do must have a start date and an end date. We cannot comprehend Someone who has no starting point or ending point. Did it ever occur to you that nothing ever occurs to God? We smack ourselves on the forehead and say, “Wow, I didn’t know that.” God has never done that. He has never been surprised by anything. Since we cannot ever understand the bigness of God, He personified Himself in the form of a man when He sent Jesus, so we could better understand His love for us, His ministry, and His desires for us. We can look at Christ and see all that God wanted to reveal to man. In Christ we see the work of God. The Bible says in Rom. 1:4, “And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.” When Christ arose from the dead, He proved Himself to be not just another prophet, but the eternal Son of God. So when looking at Christ this way, is there any question about the importance of what He has to say? I submit to you that we will never experience the fullness of life until we find out what God says, what He wants us to do, and we begin to live as He instructs us in His Word. Every person reading these words can have the fullness of blessing, the promises of God, and the exciting Christian life that God wants for all of us. We can have joy in the midst of trials and hope when there seems to be no hope. God has a plan and a purpose for your life, but until you find and follow God’s plan you will never have the benefits of God’s plan. In Matthew 5 as Jesus sat down to teach His people, I believe with all of my heart that it was one of the most powerful times God and man have ever enjoyed together, because the Lord was declaring His very heart to the multitude. While we did not sit on that Galilean hillside and actually hear the tone of the Master’s voice as the words spilled forth from His mouth, we have His words and His teaching with us in the Bible. Christ came so that we can have eternal life, but He also wants us to have abundant life. I feel so sorry for those who struggle through the Christian life while fighting and refusing to fully surrender their lives to God. They get just a taste and know there is something more, but they never get completely into what God has for them. They live their whole lives in a kind of hit-or-miss Christianity and they miss the fullness of blessing. Now that we have examined the preacher, let’s look at the place. No one knows exactly which mountain is the one described in Matt. 5:1-2. Scholars have determined that it is in the Galilean area, and some have called it “the New Testament Mt. Sinai.” We all know that Mt. Sinai is the place where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. Look at Ex. 19:10-21. “And the LORD said unto Moses, Go unto the people, and sanctify them to day and to morrow, and let them wash their clothes, And be ready against the third day: for the third day the LORD will come down in the sight of all the people upon mount Sinai. And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death: There shall not an hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man, it shall not live: when the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come up to the mount. And Moses went down from the mount unto the people, and sanctified the people; and they washed their clothes. And he said unto the people, Be ready against the third day: come not at your wives. And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount. And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice. And the LORD came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and the LORD called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up. And the LORD said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.” On this occasion, God gave Moses the very letter of the law carved in stone. I have noticed several parallels between Mt. Sinai in the Old Testament (the letter of the law) and the Mount of the Beatitudes in the New Testament (the spirit of the law). In the Old Testament, God said, “Thou shalt not.” In the New Testament, Jesus told us why. In the Old Testament, God said, “Don’t do that.” In the New Testament, Jesus said, “This is the better way.” In the Old Testament, the Lord came down to the mountain. In the New Testament, the Lord went up into the mountain. In the Old Testament, He spoke with thunder, lightning and smoke. In the New Testament, He spoke with that still, small voice. In the Old Testament, the Lord warned the people to keep their distance and not even touch the mountain lest they die. In the New Testament, the Lord invited the people to draw near to Him. In the Old Testament, the law was given in stone. In the New Testament, it was given in spirit and in truth. In the Old Testament, the letter of the law was emphasized. In the New Testament, the spirit of the law was emphasized. It does not do you well to keep the letter of the law and have the wrong spirit about it. The Pharisees kept the letter of the law, but Jesus rebuked them sharply as they were xxxx sepulchers. Look at 2 Cor. 3:6-9. “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious? For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory.” The Lord is telling us that while the Old Testament way was good, now we have something great. Now you can understand the spirit of the law and know how to have liberty as a Christian. You are not bound by the law; by grace you get to keep the law – not as a way to get salvation, but as a byproduct of having received salvation. This place is not a place of bondage. If you in your Christian life have never gotten past the rules, you have never gotten into the spirit. You must get to the point that you serve not just to please God, but because you see it as a privilege to know God. We’ve got too many people who look at the Christian life as nothing more than drudgery and duty. You’ve got to move past that into the joy of liberating service. How can do anything but serve Him after all He has done for me? The very least I can do it give back a small portion of what He has given me. So many of us look at the Christian life as a long list of DOs and DON’Ts to keep us miserable, but those of us who serve in liberty and grace realize that the letter of the law protects us from losing the glorious liberty of living as Christ wants us to live. It’s not to keep you from having joy, but to keep the devil from stealing your joy. I know some men and women who wish they had kept some rules in the past so they could have the joy they once had, but they let some things go and lost the spirit that they enjoyed in the past. Real bondage is not living in the will of God for your life, and real joy is living in the spirit of the law – not being so upset over the things we can’t do, but being thankful that God has put some boundaries in place to help us be what He would have us be. Some of the Old Testament rules look pretty good now. I’m sure there are moms and dads who sometimes appreciate the one that says a teenager is to be stoned for sassing his parents. But that law also said that whoever takes the name of the Lord in vain should be stoned to death. All of us who have done that at some point are suddenly glad that rules is not enforced today. The Old Testament law emphasized immediate death for many forms of disobedience. The New Testament talks about grace and mercy, and how Christ is ever interceding for us. So many verses talk about forgiveness and help that we find when we seek His face. I’m so glad for that mercy and grace in the New Testament. Now let’s consider the people Christ saw in this place. There were so many people here; the Bible does not say, but it could have easily been in the tens of thousands. There were at least three distinct groups of people in this multitude. The first group came to see the man. “I’ve been hearing about this Jesus,” they said. “Let’s see what all the fuss is about. Let’s check out the show.” Some of these people were no doubt in attendance because they had heard about this man raising people from the dead. If you heard today of someone who actually did that, you’d go see what was going on. If you knew there was actual healing of afflicted people at these meetings, and not just some of the nonsense you see on television, you’d want to see it. The second group in attendance wanted some of these miracles performed on them. There were likely a large number of blind people in the region who went to their friends and said, “Please take me to that Galilean hillside where this man Jesus is speaking today. I heard of another man who had his sight restored by Jesus. I’d sure love to get close enough to get some of what Jesus has.” The third group was comprised of people who wanted to hear his message. They had heard that He claimed to be the Son of God. They had been looking for so many years for that Old Testament prophet who would pave the way for the redemption of Israel. Their hearts were excited because this man Jesus brought the message of salvation. There are similar groups in your church every Sunday. Some are just there to see what church is all about, because their friends invited them. Maybe they saw a change in their friend’s life and it made them curious about what was happening at that church. Some people are there because they need something desperately. They need the hand of God to reach down and provide a healing touch. It could be a bad marriage or family issues; perhaps there are serious financial difficulties. Maybe there is a health crisis. You just want God to touch your mind, your heart, or your family in a great and mighty way. It’s good that those two groups are there. But there is a third group that wants to get past the hand of God and find the heart of God. They want to get as close to Him as possible. Just like on that mountain, where eight of the 12 disciples wanted to be close to Jesus (one of the 12 was lost), but there were three who wanted to be right at His side and under His breast. We should all strive to move from the periphery to the inner circle and straight to the core. No matter what our reasons are for being there, all are good reasons. Someone might show up at church just out of curiosity or looking for a miracle and go home with Christ Himself and a new life. When Zaccheus heard that Jesus was coming down the road, he couldn’t get near enough to see from the ground so he climbed into a tree. Jesus looked up and said, “Come down. I’m going to your house today.” By the time dinner was over that night, Zaccheus was a completely different person. Finally, let’s look at the purpose for the Sermon on the Mount. In the Old Testament, a rabbi would sit, not stand, when teaching a group of people. A lot of Jesus’ teaching was done as He and another man or small group of people were walking from one place to another. It was very informal and practical, very similar to the way many of us mentor other people today. But on this particular occasion, Jesus found a place to sit down, encouraged others to do the same, and began teaching in earnest. It was as if He said, “Listen carefully. This is very important.” These were not casual comments, and Christ wanted the audience’s complete attention. By sitting down to teach them, He emphasized the purpose of His sermon. I have found three places in the Bible where the Lord works as He sits. One of those is Mal. 3:3, which says, “And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness.” A refiner works to remove dross and other imperfections so that only perfect silver remains. Of course, a purer metal is much more valuable. The refining process is a long and repetitive process. Christ’s sermon was a kind of purifying process as well. Through His words, He was showing His disciples and others in the crowd how to live pleasing, holy and acceptable lives before God. He wanted to refine them, and take out the things that did not belong in their lives. He began with the Beatitudes, showing them what they should be and could be for Him. The Christian life is a constant purifying process. If you think you’ve made it, I’d like to meet you and learn how you did it. I’ve never heard of someone getting to that point. There will always be trouble spots and stumbling blocks along the way. It’s a constant battle, and the closer you get to Jesus the more detailed the refining process is. Another example of the Lord sitting is in Ps. 9:4. “For thou hast maintained my right and my cause; thou satest in the throne judging right.” He is a sitting judge. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ took the time to explain what we should do so He might not have to judge us on some of these things later. Isn’t it a good God who gives you the answers to the test before you take the test? The third time the Lord sat down was as the rabbi or teacher. Isa. 54:13 says, “And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children.” There is a lady in my church who has taught children for decades and still receives great joy from it even in her later years. I love the idea of taking someone who doesn’t know something and watch that person “get it.” God does not expect you to automatically know what to do. That’s why Jesus came to teach us. If you go through life trying to figure everything out on your own, you will never get it. There is no such thing as a self-made man. If you think you are, your life is probably a mess. It is not the goal of a teacher to see the student fail. Nearly every teacher wants his or her students to succeed more than anything. So Jesus sat down to teach us how we should live. He doesn’t want you to fail. Listen to the Teacher. If you have a question, ask Him – or open up the Book.