This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Hi, this is Pastor Tom and I want to welcome you to our study of the book of
Matthew. We're in week four of that study, day one of that week, and we're going
to be looking at chapter five this week. Remember I told you last week together
that we were going to take two weeks each on chapters five, six, and seven, the
Sermon on the Mount.

Even that won't be enough. This amazing, greatest sermon ever preached, this
message of Jesus to our hearts and lives. As we've been walking through the book
of Matthew, we've talked together about the fact that the story of Jesus is to
become the story of our lives, and as we look through the Sermon on the Mount,
we're going to be reminded that the teaching of Jesus is to become the truth of
our lives.

The Bible says in Matthew 5, 1 and 2, "Now when he," Jesus, "saw the crowds, he
went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began
to teach them, saying," and then there's this incredible message that rolls out,
the Sermon on the Mount. Now as we walk through this, I want to help you to
think through it in maybe a distinctive way, a different way.

In this sermon, Jesus is going to talk about your life, how to live life, how to
live the kind of life that he's made for you to live, how to live with the kind
of joy he wants you to have, the kind of relationships that he wants you to
have, the kind of attitudes that he wants you to have. So in many ways, I've
always liked to call the Sermon on the Mount Jesus' Life Management Seminar.
Today, a lot of people teach Life Management Seminars, here's how to do it,
here's what to do.

Well, Jesus is the one who knows. He's the one who knows. And as he teaches us
how to live life in the Sermon on the Mount, he begins with the truth for all of
us.

The truth that the management of life begins with the management of your
attitudes. In your life, intelligence and emotion, those are the motors of your
life, the things that keep you running, then attitudes are the gas. And
everybody knows, you can have the greatest motor in the world, but if you've got
no gas, you're not going anywhere.

And this is why some people in life who have the greatest intellect aren't that
successful or even destructive sometimes, because they don't have the attitude,
they don't have the right attitude. These are the B attitudes we're going to be
talking about that Jesus shared with us. And if you want to just play with the
English in it, they are literally the B attitudes.

They are the ways that we're supposed to think. Now, actually, the word B
attitude means blessings, and this is how to live with blessing, how to have a
healthy heart, how to have an inner peace, how to have a positive direction in
life. Blessedness, living with God's blessedness makes you truly happy, not
temporarily happy, not happy in the world's way, but truly happy about life.

And we're not going to look at all of these today, we're going to look at them
throughout this week, but I want to begin by reading these blessings of Jesus,
these B attitudes of Jesus. Beginning in verse 3, "Blessed, Jesus said, are the
poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who
mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who
hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the
merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the
peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are
persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

" Those are Jesus' B attitudes. Those are Jesus' definitions of the kind of
attitude you and I are to live with in everyday life. And we're going to walk
through these together this week, beginning with verse 3, where Jesus says to
us, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

" So the first of these B attitudes is be poor. Be poor, Jesus said, be poor in
spirit. And as we begin to look at what Jesus taught us here, a question behind
this you might is, how do you respond in your life to your feelings of
inadequacy?

How do you respond in those moments when you feel like I may not measure up or
I'm not feeling like I'm measuring up? Some people respond with anger. Some
people respond by being resigned to defeat.

A lot of people respond with fear. Some people respond with overwork. But Jesus
said, here's how I want you to respond.

Respond by knowing that you're poor in spirit. Now when he talks about being
poor in spirit here, he uses a very strong word for poor. It's the idea of
somebody who is begging and bowing to get what they do not have on their own.

And Jesus says, I want you to give me a new way of thinking. When you feel like
you're inadequate, here's an idea. Just admit that you are.

Just admit that you don't have what it takes, because we don't without God. Now
he's given us a lot. God has created us wonderfully.

He's given us a wonderful mind, wonderful emotions, wonderful direction in life,
wonderful abilities and skills. But to be all that he wants us to be, the only
way to do it is with his strength. And the only way to get to God's strength is
to be poor in spirit.

When you're poor in spirit, then you open up your life to his riches. It's an
attitude of depending on God that results in real victory in life. I was reading
back this week in some quiet time notes of mine from several years ago on this
particular verse.

And I wrote in those notes that day, Lord, I feel the temptation to get stuck on
negative feelings about myself these last few days. Instead of trying to build
myself up and make myself feel better about myself, this verse invites me to
take a different path. Just admit I certainly am poor in spirit, as we all are
without you, and glory in the fact that you desire to meet my needs and will
meet those needs in ways beyond what I can see in the here and now as I turn to
you.

So what I'm saying to you is the first step to happiness is to be humble. The
first attitude is this attitude of humility. To depend on God, you have to be
humble.

If you're depending on yourself for everything, you're not humble. You may talk
quietly, you may be real nice to everybody, but if you're depending on yourself
for everything, you're not humble. You think you can do it all, but God made you
to depend on him.

Humility and happiness, they go together. And if you want to have lasting
happiness, you have to learn to be humble. How does this work?

How does humility increase my happiness? Well, humility reduces stress because I
realize I'm doing it in a relationship with God. Humility improves my
relationships because all of a sudden I'm working with other people rather than
against other people or above other people.

And humility releases God's power in my life. So that's the first attitude,
that's where you start. This attitude of be poor, this attitude of humility,
this attitude of depend on God.

And then in verse four, Jesus says, here's a second attitude to live life with.
If you really want to have the right attitude toward life. Verse four, he says,
blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

So the second thing Jesus teaches us is be sad. Be sad. The truth is happy
people have learned to cry.

Because what does it mean to be mournful in your life, to have this attitude?
Well, to mourn is to have honesty in the face of tragedy. Not to escape, not to
pretend, but to be honest.

This hurts, this makes me sad. For many of us trying to keep up a front that
everything's okay, that's what's holding you back. You need to just mourn.

You need to mourn the hurt that's come into your life or somebody else's life.
You cannot manage the hurts of life by holding them in or by hiding from them.
You have to be honest about them.

Until you admit the hurt, you can't heal of the hurt. Now the thing that if I
look at my own life and many people I know that I'm often trying to do most is
to avoid God's path to real comfort. He says if you mourn, you'll be comforted.

But the truth is I don't want to feel bad. I don't want to feel bad about this
world. I don't want to feel bad about my faults.

I don't want to feel bad about the hard work I have to do. I don't want to feel
bad about having to break that habit. I just want to feel good as soon as
possible.

And if we take that path, our path to comfort and hope, we just write down the
word escape. It's drugs and alcohol, it's gambling, it's shopping, it's sex,
it's entertainment, it's self-pity, it's anger, it's food, it's work, it's
whatever you want to put in that box of I'll escape as quick as I can to my
role, my place of comfort. All the things that I think will give me comfort,
they only give me momentary escape, no comfort.

And they often leave me addicted to that thing, trying to get out of that thing
what it cannot give, going back to it again and again and again and again. And
the truth of the matter is even if it seems to be working for you, many of us
have discovered that a comfortable life will not comfort your soul. It can look
good on the outside, but you know what's missing on the inside.

So God says I have this different path to comfort and hope. Mourn. Be honest
about the fact that there are hurts in this world and hurts in your life because
of your sin, because of this sinful world, because of what others have done to
you and what you have done to others.

God's path to comfort and hope realizes that I must feel worse many times in
order to get better. Sometimes I've got to be honest about my sin. I don't feel
good about that, but when I'm honest with God about it, then the joy comes.

God's path to comfort and hope realizes that I must feel grief in order to
experience joy. If I try to pretend that the grief isn't real, then I don't open
myself up to the joy that God has to give. And God's path to comfort and hope
realizes that I must feel weak in order to receive God's power.

That when I realize how weak I am, I've got a lot of strengths, you have a lot
of strengths, but when I realize when it comes to eternity, when it comes to all
that God wants me to be, all of who God is, I feel weak in light of that. And in
light of that weakness, then I'm open to God's power. So what we're seeing here
is that Jesus, in many ways, he turns happiness upside down.

The deepest happiness, the deepest blessings in life comes sometimes from the
things that I don't want to be a part of my life, the things that I would never
choose for my life. It's not just a matter of having bad things happen. It's
your attitude.

It's a matter of choosing to mourn. It's not just a matter of you not having all
that it takes sometimes. It's a matter of attitude.

It's a matter of choosing to realize I'm poor in spirit. I need you, God. This
world does not hold all the hope that I need.

And so where do I look? I look to God for comfort. I look to God for hope.

Let's take a minute to pray together. Let's look to him. Lord, the truth is we
don't always want to mourn, but we do want to be comforted.

And more often than we want to admit, mourning is the only path to true comfort.
So help us to be willing to be sad about our sin, about this world, about the
hurts around us. But not just sad.

Help us to bring those sadnesses, that mourning to you, and in that to find your
comfort. And Lord, when it comes to who we are, help us to realize that we are
poor in spirit. And we come to you as beggars.

We need you. We need your strength. And you're willing to give it.

You've promised to give it. So we depend on you. We do this in Jesus' name.

Amen. Join us tomorrow. We're going to continue to learn from Jesus how to be
truly blessed.