A Blessed Life - Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. This has a wonderful characteristic called bluntness.

The man is blunt. Remember when Nicodemus the Pharisee first came to meet him? Nicodemus has shown him tremendous respect and Nicodemus was likely the lead teacher in the Sanhedrin as a Pharisee about Old Testament truth. And he comes to Jesus and he says, we know that no one could do the things you do unless you're sent from God. You know, and that's really, you know, he's sort of really given Jesus a lot of accolades. You think Jesus would say some nice things back and Jesus just looks at him and says, unless you're born again, you can't see the kingdom of God.

I can't imagine what Nicodemus thought. Here he was this deeply respected guy, but that's Jesus. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana. Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again, he shows us how God's word meets our world. Today, I'm going to start a new sermon series on what I would call the most disturbing sermon in the word of God. We call it the Sermon on the Mount. And I believe what happens to us is we're so familiar with it. And we think this is just a really nice sermon that Jesus preached.

It was anything but that. What Jesus is preaching is disturbing, confrontational. He's just got his ministry going and he decides to shock everybody there.

The original audience that heard him speak, I'm pretty sure didn't agree with anything that he was saying the whole time he was preaching, because nothing they had ever learned for generation after generation after generation spoke to this at all. So I'm going to invite you to open your Bibles to Matthew five. And as I've said in the past, Matthew is a I would call a bridge book. Matthew is the book between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The New Testament really gets going more in Mark. Matthew decides that he will be the bridge between Malachi and the New Testament. The theme of the entire book of Matthew is that Jesus Christ is the Davidic king and he's messianic.

And he does a great job with this. In the first chapter, Matthew decides that he wants to show us where the king came from. And he shows us a genealogy there that's not what you'd expect. It's not the genealogy back to Abraham. It's not the genealogy back to Adam. It's the genealogy back to one of Matthew's favorite expressions, the son of David. That means he's the Davidic recipient of the Davidic Covenant.

He's Israel's Messiah. Chapter two, you see, you have the whole story of the birth of Christ. The baby grew in chapter two. You have the Magi coming from the east, and that's perplexing in its own way.

And then you have them going to Egypt. Chapter three, you have the fathers pleased. The father says, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. He begins his ministry. Chapter four, he goes to the temptations door.

He said he's being tempted by Lucifer. And at the end of chapter four, you'll notice down at verse 18, for the first time, Jesus picks disciples. In 18, it says, Now as Jesus was walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, Follow me and I'll make you fishers and men. So those two take off. Verse 21, going from there, he saw two other brothers, James and the son of Zebedee and John's brother, in the boat with Zebedee, their father, mending their nets. And he called them and immediately left the boat and their father and followed him.

It must have been an amazing scene. I mean, to me, you're Zebedee, you have two sons who are going to inherit the business. You're mending your nets. A guy comes walking up, says, Follow me.

Your two sons just drop the nets and go and follow them. I mean, that's just an amazing thing. Well, then it says in verse 23, Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in the synagogue, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, healing every kind of disease, every kind of sickness among the people. And news about him spread all over Syria. And they were brought to him all who were ill and suffering various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics. And he said, and he healed them. Large crowds followed from Galilee to Nicopolis and Jerusalem and Judea and far beyond the Jordan.

Crowds came from everywhere. Jesus then goes to Capernaum, northern part of the Sea of Galilee. And there is a at that part of the Sea of Galilee that from the sea level, it rises up. It sort of goes up a plane like this, not real mountainous, but he's likely at the height of one of those rising areas in the Sea of Galilee. And that's what we call the Sermon on the Mount.

I don't believe he's on the mountaintop when he did it. He was just simply right there. Jesus saw the crowds. He went up to the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and he began to teach.

This is interesting. He sees the crowds he's going to teach and he sits down, which is what all rabbis do. A rabbi doesn't teach standing up, a rabbi teaches sitting down. So Jesus sits down and he's about to teach. And it says he opened his mouth and he stunned the crowd.

It would be just the opposite of what you and I would think you should handle. Jesus has just come on the scene. He knows who he is.

No one else does quite yet. He's starting his ministry. Crowds are coming. He's healing people, performing miracles already. And now he's going to speak for the first time in a large setting. And what he says is shocking.

It's just shocking. And there's no way that they couldn't have responded in a very hostile way to what he was saying. The key verse in the whole Sermon on the Mount is 5.20. Notice what Jesus says there.

For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. I believe when he said that, women fainted. I think women cried.

I think men shook their fist in rage. It's unbelievable what he just said. No one who heard it could have believed anything that he said right there.

You can't. You see, the scribes and Pharisees, especially the Pharisees, they're the most respected people in the land. Now, they have bad PR now on this side of the cross in the church.

But at the time of Christ, I've said this before, but if you were parents, you would pray your daughter would marry a Pharisee. No one respected them more. They're probably the most religious Jews who ever lived. They not only tried to abide by the 600 laws and ordinances of the Old Testament, they added hundreds of their own. And so the whole idea was with them, we respect these people more than anybody. Imagine a setting where someone come in and you were a room full of devout Roman Catholics, and I said to you, let me start out by telling you this first thing. Unless your righteousness is greater than any cardinal or pope, you have no chance of ever going to heaven.

How would you respond? Wait, if we're not greater than the carnals and the pope, we're not gone? No. See, no one would have believed that. I mean, that from their point of view is amazing, but Jesus has a wonderful characteristic called bluntness. The man is blunt. Remember when Nicodemus, the Pharisee, first came to meet him? Nicodemus has shown him tremendous respect, and Nicodemus was likely the lead teacher in the Sanhedrin as a Pharisee about Old Testament truth. And he comes to Jesus and he says, we know that no one could do the things you do unless he's sent from God.

You know, and that's really, you know, he's sort of really given Jesus a lot of accolades. You think Jesus would say some nice things back? And Jesus just looks at him and says, unless you're born again, you can't see the kingdom of God. First word, if you're not born again, you're not going anywhere.

I can't imagine what Nicodemus thought. Here he was this deeply respected guy, but that's Jesus. So he starts this sermon out by telling them something that they find is extremely difficult for them to believe.

And notice what he says. I say that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you're not getting in. I say. I didn't say God said.

I said I said. I mean the authority. Like, who is this rabbi? He says this is what he's saying.

Now, we end up knowing what's really going on here. Jesus knows what the enemy is. And that's what's going to play out in Matthew five, six and seven and this whole sermon. Jesus is speaking out so bluntly against religion. Jesus is saying that through any means of religion, you'll never, ever have an eternal relationship with God.

You can't and you won't. No one will remember religion is external. Religion is a list of the things I do.

And the things I don't do in the belief system of religion is if I don't do these and I do these, God will be so impressed with me that he'll gladly welcome me in. That's what religion does. That's what religion has always done since the Tower of Babel.

Way back in Genesis, we'll build a tower so high we'll walk into heaven. That's the birth of religion. And that's what religion does. And Jesus is going to confront that. The Pharisees have turned that into an art form.

This whole idea of our religious zeal. That's going to do it. And Jesus said that's not going to do it at all.

It's not going to work that way at all. In fact, what Jesus is going to say is that you can never start your relationship with God by doing things externally. You can only start your relationship with God not based on what you do but who you are internally. You have to be a certain person internally before you can have any relationship with God at all. Then after you have that relationship, there are certain ways you'll...

There are things you will do but only after you've established the relationship. And so what he wants to do here in the beginning of 5 is he gives us what we call the Beatitudes. That's what they've always been called. I heard a pastor about 20 years ago, he called them the Be Happy, the Be Happy-tudes. I don't think that's exactly what he means but it comes from a mistranslation of the word blessed.

However, he's going to give us eight characteristics here of what a person is like on the inside who has a relationship with God. And it won't make sense to the Jews, especially it doesn't make sense to the Pharisees. They hate everything he's saying. It really doesn't make sense to a lot of people in our country now for different reasons but it's not sensible to us.

It's not the way so many people as an American see the way things work. I'll explain that a little bit later. So Jesus starts out with these, what we call the Beatitudes. And he says in verse 3, the very first one, he says, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They're written like proverbs.

Each one of these is a proverb. It's not like the rest of the sermon. He's basically saying by generalizations, let me tell you what it is to relate rightly to God. That's what he's trying to say.

I'm going to give you generalizations. So this one, blessed is the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The word blessed is markios. And a lot of translators say, well, it means happy.

It does, but it doesn't. Happy is not a bad translation, but when the Greeks used markios, they didn't mean happy like you and I mean happy. It's a different kind of happy. Happiness in English, as you can see by the root word, is based on what happens. You see, if certain things happen, then you're happy. You see, that's happy.

You can see it's totally circumstantial. Certain good things happen, I'm happy. Markios isn't a word like that. It means happy in Greek. It means joyful in Greek. But maybe even more than that, what it really means is that you have a peaceful right relationship with God.

That's what markios means. Because I have this right relationship with God, I'm joyful and I am happy. He said, blessed are the poor in spirit. What an interesting term to use. We have a lot of poverty today, probably nothing like what they had at the time of Christ. When we think of poor, I think often what you and I think of is just economically.

People are poor, and there were a lot of really poor people at the time of Christ. What's interesting, too, is that there's two Greek words for poor, and this is the word takis. And takis is the second word, and it's an interesting word.

Takis means bankrupt, nothing. If you have nothing, that's what he means. And he said happy, blessed, joyful are you if you have nothing in the spirit. Wow.

See, that's not the kind of thing people get excited about. You know, the point of it is, though, when you think about it, he's saying poor in spirit, bankrupt would be a great English synonym, blessed are the bankrupt in spirit. Notice then, and he even says it. He said four, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. First step if you're going to have an eternal relationship with God, are you bankrupt in your spirit? See, when you're really poor and you're bankrupt and you're a beggar, how much power do you have? None. How dependent are you on others to live?

Totally. Jesus said that's a great thing for you if you're bankrupt in your spirit. In other words, what do I bring to the table to offer God? Nothing. What do I have to offer God?

Nothing. I don't have anything. You see, I'm poor in spirit.

I don't have anything to offer God at all. It's amazing because if you think in our culture, how many times do we ever advocate in our culture, it's great to be poor in spirit. I mean, we're a culture of, we like to do TV specials on what we call self-made people. He rose out of the ashes. He came out of poverty and now he owns a hundred and fifteen coffee shops.

And he's a multi-billionaire and he rose to it. That's the American way. Jesus didn't force self-made men at all here.

He said that's not the way it works. See, the Jews would feel the same way. Why are the Pharisees so respected? No one works harder at religion than they do. Nobody does. You see, they work so hard.

They go, as you'll see in the sermon in the weeks ahead, they go out of their way to impress everybody publicly just how religiously dedicated they are. Jesus hates that. You see, he says that's not the case at all. He's trying to show a complete difference in the way they see things and the way he does.

Let me illustrate. Go to your place here and go with me to Luke 18, Luke chapter 18. And here's a perfect illustration of what Jesus is talking about. Jesus tells a parable and you've got to love verse nine. Peter comes to him and says, and he said a parable about themselves and they were righteous and viewed each other with contempt. And then he goes on and talks about it. Peter wants to ask him, like, what do you mean by what you're saying? And notice what Jesus says in verse 10. Two men went up to the temple to pray. One a Pharisee and the other a tax gatherer.

The Pharisee stood as he was praying and here's his prayer to himself. God, I thank you that I'm not like other people. Wow. Swindlers, unjust, adulterers, even this tax collector. Notice what he doesn't do. I don't act like those people, especially that guy. He said, I fast twice a week and I pay tithes on everything I get. Notice what he doesn't do. Notice what he does. And God, I thank you that I'm that way. Does that sound poor in spirit to you?

You see, it's not at all. A man is filled with arrogance and pride. Now, notice next then the tax gatherer standing some distance away was even unwilling to lift his eyes to heaven, beating on his breast, saying, God, have mercy on me, the sinner. Tax gatherers considered what? With prostitutes, the worst kind of sinners in Israel. These are people who betrayed their people, got rich off of their own people, had loyalties with Rome.

They're detested by everybody. Jesus then says, I tell you, this man went up more justified rather than the other. He said, everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. Everyone who humbles himself will be exalted. There's poor in spirit. He won't even look up to God. He said, have mercy on me, God. That's being poor in spirit.

That's bankrupt. But notice the Pharisee doesn't see himself that way at all. The Pharisee sees himself as proudful. Look what a religious man is. Look what I do. I take your list of do's and do them.

I take your list of don't do's and I don't do them. And look, that makes me. Now, think about it, though, from another point of view. How many of us are all people from Jesus' point of view are poor in spirit? All of us. Is there an exception?

None. All sin falls short of the glory of God. There's none righteous, no, not one. Every human being is poor in spirit. But does he admit that? You see, one of the ways you have to come to Christ is you have to come and say, I can't bring you anything.

You see, I can't bring you anything. I know that my sin has separated myself from you forever. And I can't say that I don't sin a lot because the word of God says if I break one aspect of the law, I'm guilty of the whole law. Jesus took it even further and said, not only what you do, but let me put it this way. If you've ever thought a sinful thought, you're a sinner. Because he said, you say you shall not murder.

I say if you've ever been angry at anyone, you're a murderer. You say you should not commit adultery. I say if you ever looked at a woman with lust, you're a sinner. See, there are no people who have anything in their spirit to offer Christ but poverty. And that's the first step in being right with God. And Jesus says it.

If you see yourself as poor in spirit, yours is the kingdom of heaven. He goes on then and says, blessed are those who mourn, for they'll be comforted. How many of you got up today and said, well, I'd like to mourn today? In fact, some of you remember that the mourning periods of your life were the worst periods of your life. Mourning, the loss of someone you love, something like that. Jesus says, blessed, marqueos, happy and joyful are those who mourn. See, this is contradictory to human nature and certainly religious human nature.

It's very hard to figure out. And the idea behind it is mourn what? Their sin. It separates them from the holy God.

It's disappointing. Remember Romans chapter 7, the apostle Paul was writing? He's writing his mourning. He was mourning. What do you say? Look, I find myself doing the very things I should not be doing.

I also find myself not doing the very things I should be doing. At the end of the chapter, he said, oh, wretched man that I am. He's mourning. He's mourning his own shortcomings before God. You see, he's mourning that. That's how serious he takes his own sin.

I'm mourning my sin. It bothers me. And I don't know about you, but I know it bothers me. It bothers me that I fall short of what God's expectations are of me.

Not only that I have fallen short in the past, but I'm still falling short. And that really bothers me. Well, if I'm mourning and it bothers me, what is it I need? Comfort. What does God offer me?

Comfort. See, it's an amazing thing. We acknowledge our sins.

First John one nine, he is faithful and just to forgive us for our sins and he cleanses us of all unrighteousness. Wow. Thank you, Lord. See, I don't enjoy my sin.

I've heard of people talking. I call them grace abusers. Well, all my sins are covered by grace. The more I sin, the more gracious. And so I don't mind sinning at all. God just gives me more grace.

I'm suspicious of your relationship with God. You don't mourn. You don't celebrate. You see, you celebrate sin. No, that's not the case. I don't know.

I feel bad that I fall short of not only God's expectations of me, which I know pretty well, but I often fall short of my own expectations of me. You see, that's the idea that he says. It fits. Notice the first one was a present tense. Yours is the kingdom.

The second one is a future tense, for they shall be in the future comforted by God if you mourn. Blessed are. The New American Standard says gentle. The King James says meek. I think meek is probably a better word here. It's meek. Blessed are the meek. How many of you prayed and hoped as a teenager and then through your early years and your 20s that one of the things you really hope you acquire in your life is that you'll become meek? I really want to be meek.

Well, Jesus said that's what you should do. See, what happens when you and I think of meek? Weak. That's what meek means. No, that's not at all what meek means. This Greek word is an interesting word for meek.

One of the Greek writers said, I'll tell you what is meek. He said, if you took a tremendously beautiful, powerful, and a very highly spirited horse and a rider completely controlled him, that horse evidenced meekness. It's power under control.

You see, this horse submits himself to his owner, to his rider. He has power. And it's not weakness at all. I mean, I'll give you three men from the Bible who are very meek.

Moses, Abraham, and David. Now would you say they're weak? These are weak men. There's nothing weak about any of these men. But they are meek. He said blessed are the meek.

Because the idea, even with my own strength and power, I am under control. And he said, and you will inherit, he says, the earth. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts, or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called OnePlace.com. That's OnePlace.com, and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

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That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for, or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online, or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all of this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt, thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word.