Wednesday, Oct. 9
Matthew 5:1 – 6:24 Read it here
You could easily find hundreds of sermons based on today’s reading (much of which is a sermon itself) without finding two that have the same exact focus—and each could be meaningful.
This is a rich body of teaching that covers significant areas of life. If taken seriously, it defines those areas of life in ways that challenge how the world views them.
To help organize your thoughts as you read it, and, I hope, re-read it many times, this section can be broken down into four parts.
First it has the passages we call the beatitudes.
I remember seeing a book my mother had called the “Be Happy Attitudes.” I never read the book, which was written by Robert Schuller, but the title was a play on words using the beatitudes as a guide to happiness. I don’t know if the book was any good or not, but the title stuck with me as a clever reminder of how the beatitudes show that happiness can be built on unlikely foundations like mourning, meekness, hunger and thirst, persecution and a poor spirit.
But they are more than a guide to positive thinking. The beatitudes show us that the values of the kingdom of God look different from the values of our everyday world. They show us that happiness has its roots not in abundance, but in need. It is those who see the poverty of their spirit that find the kingdom of God, those who acknowledge their grief who find comfort, those who humbly recognize their weakness who find strength, those who know they lack righteousness who attain it, those who forgive who will be forgiven, those who seek to make peace who find peace, those who are rejected by the world who will be embraced by God. Our satisfaction grows from our dissatisfaction and the seeking it prompts.
It also has several passages about righteousness going beyond action and into mindset. The command to not murder doesn’t just refer to the act of killing someone…it starts when we devalue them. Similarly, lust isn’t just dangerous for the acts it can lead to, but for the attitudes it creates. The righteousness Jesus calls us to isn’t just good behavior, it is thorough love.
In 5:13-16 and in the verses starting in chapter 6, we read a lot of practical admonitions for holy living, which continue with tomorrow’s reading.
Along the same theme, but worth noting separately, is the introduction to how to pray, when Jesus shares what we call the Lord’s Prayer.
It provides five points to include in our prayers—points that we often forget in our rush to ask God for the things we want.

• Start by acknowledging that God is God. This is where the 10 Commandments start. This is where holy living starts.
• Pray for God’s will to be done. This is a reminder that prayer is to find out what God wants from us, not to tell him what we want from him.
• Pray that God will meet today’s needs. Remember the lesson of the manna—trusting God is a one-day-at-a-time proposition.
• Remember that the grace we show to others will become the grace God shows to us.
• Pray for freedom from temptation, and deliverance from the evils that come our way.