Blessed Are The Poor

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So today we begin this series. And we use the word blessed quite often. How often have you all heard the word blessed, right? Not that often. It's more of a southern term, I think, in the United States. And sometimes we say it. And the meaning of blessed can be very ambiguous, like, you know, bless her heart. And you're really basically undercutting her opinion and saying something totally contrary to bless her heart. And then you've got preachers in the United States. I don't know if this is occurring in Europe, or I know it's occurring in other continents, but kind of who say, God wants to bless your life, right? And you can have the blessed life. And what they mean by that is you can become rich. And then they go on to say, this is how you become rich, by tithing to my ministry. That's the blessed life. I think we're going to find something a bit different in what Jesus says, because we're going to take his words for it, what the blessed life looks like, okay? And we're going to take his words from probably one of the most famous pieces of literature in all of human history, the Sermon on the Mount. And we're looking at the Beatitudes at the beginning of that, these blessed statements. There are nine of them. We're going to only cover four of them in these four weeks. And these are going to be our three points that we're going to have. We're going to cover them one at a time. But the three points are three words. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon when I was a kid. I went to church a lot, okay? Always have. And I cannot recall a sermon growing up that used any of these words for what Jesus was saying and what the life is about. But these are the three words that we're going to have. And that is that Jesus' words are offensive, Jesus' words are counterintuitive, and Jesus' words are revolutionary. Those were three words that were never used in a sermon in the church I grew up with. But I think they characterize what Jesus is getting at in this text. And first of all, we're going to look at the fact that these words in the Sermon on the Mount are offensive, okay? They are offensive. So don't think that the Beatitudes, maybe you've seen them on a plaque on a wall in a house somewhere, you know, cross-stitched nicely. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you go like, aren't they nice? They are not nice. They are shocking. They are counterintuitive, revolutionary, but they are offensive. They're shocking. I mean, who can consider being poor, whatever way you want to define poverty, whether it's spiritual, emotional, financial, psychic poverty, whatever way you want to say, well, try to define what Jesus is saying when he says poor in spirit. Who says that's a good thing, you know? That doesn't sound like a good thing at all. What are you telling me? And that's the first word in the Sermon on the Mount, and it doesn't get any easier after that. Consider the fact that who believes that really loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you is the way to live. I even see many Christian leaders across the world and in the United States, sadly, who believe in pummeling their enemies and pillorying them, maybe not physically, but definitely verbally, and assaulting them and castigating them and calling them the worst things, you know, like othering them, to dehumanize them in order to get my point across and to assert my political power. Do you understand? That's going on even within Christianity today, and they might say, well, you know, it's the only way we can get our godly agenda done in the United States. This is the way it really works in the world. Well then what is Jesus talking about, stuff that doesn't work? Is he talking about just ideals that don't really matter? Or is he talking about how life really can be, and that it does make a difference in this world? That's the question you have to answer in this, you know? But these words are offensive, fascinating. I read an article, I could probably send it to you all if you want. It's not too long. Virginia Stems-Owen was an English teacher, and 30 years ago, she's an English professor at Texas A&M University, which, if you know Texas A&M, it's a pretty, it's not University of Texas, okay? It's more of a conservative kind of bastion, you know, lots of ROTC is big there, all that type of stuff, right? She had in her class, her freshman literature class, when she was talking about rhetoric, she did an experiment and had the students read the Sermon on the Mount, and then to respond to it. And she was surprised. This is back in 1987, I believe. I'd say the responses today would even be stronger. This is what she found from the students at Texas A&M. She was astonished. One student wrote, th...