Greetings Glen Mar,

When was the last time you looked at the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12? How about the entire “Sermon on the Mount”? As our resident Bible scholars are aware, the Beatitudes kick off Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which covers chapters five through seven of Matthew’s Gospel. The teachings in these chapters are widely regarded as Jesus’s core lessons for the Christian life, and some are not easy to swallow. Even so, we need to chew on them since they are so important!

Take, for instance, the command in Matthew 5:44 to not only love your neighbor but also “…love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” On the surface, that sounds impractical at best, and downright foolish at worst! “Love your enemy”…but won’t they defame you, hurt you, or even kill you? Read on in the next verse, and we find a promise attached to the command: “That you may be called children of your Father in heaven.” And then you realize, wait, isn’t that exactly what Jesus did? Wasn’t that what Jesus showed us when he prayed over his perceived enemies found in the centurions, religious leaders, and other scoffers from the cross, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?” You see, Jesus didn’t just tell us to do this, but did it himself! The promises and blessings of God are not just for this world, but have an eternal reward to them that is recognized in this life and the life to come. The sooner we realize this, the easier it is to truly follow Jesus.

There are plenty more lessons in the Sermon on the Mount, so many that I believe if we focused more on these, even just the Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon, we would have a real spiritual revival on our hands. But, for now, I just commend these chapters for you to read, review, and pray over. Perhaps there’s a lesson in loving your enemy that you need to re-learn, or maybe the lesson lies in some other teaching found in these chapters, but either way, you can be sure that God is still speaking to you through the Holy Spirit as you read the Scriptures. My prayer is that we would all have the ears to hear and the eyes to see what God is doing and calling us to individually and collectively, as Glen Mar Church.

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Chris