Last weekend we were wrapping up the Beatitudes as the introduction to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. It ends with a statement of blessing over those that have experienced persecution as a result of following Jesus. While our study is taking us through Matthew, Luke captured this telling of the description of persecution: 22 “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! 23 Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets ..read more

We often read Jesus’s intro to the Sermon on the Mount as a list of things that you must do in order to be blessed but what if that wasn’t Jesus’s intention at all? Our cultural mindsets are very geared for a transactional lens in which to view the scriptures. If we do ____________, God will give us ____________. It’s so easy to read through the Beattitudes with just this filter but what if Jesus wasn’t offering conditions for a blessing and instead was proclaiming who was already blessed? If you have been following us through Jesus’s longest and most famous sermon, you’ve already noticed that ..read more