Disciples of Grace Today

  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy - Matthew 5:7 Jesus has an uncanny way of staying focused even as He shifts gears just a bit. Thinking back to the 10 commandments we see the same. The first 4 deal with our relationship with God and the last 6 deal with our relationships with each other. Our love and treatment of one another flows from our fear and obedience to God. Jesus Himself gives an excellent example of this in His parable on The Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18:21-35. Parables are stories with earthly settings to speak of a spiritual truth. In short in this parable a man owed a king a large sum of money, which he could not pay. He begged the king to have mercy on him and the king being merciful forgave the man his debt, but this same man went out and found his brother who owed him a few dollars. The brother could not pay the debt and begged for mercy, but the man would have none of it! He threw him into prison until the debt was paid. This naturally ...

  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied - Matthew 5:6 Someone wrote a song about not being able to be satisfied no matter how hard he tried. That seems to be the anthem of life sometimes doesn’t it? We fill ourselves with so much and we are still empty. We chase the rainbows of our dreams only to find there is neither a pot of gold nor a pudgy leprechaun waiting for us. We climb ladders that promise success only to find there’s no one up there and we’ve burned people, not bridges, to get here. Just like happiness, we all want a satisfying and fulfilling life and that’s exactly what Christ is promising us here in this statement. Now, before all my Reformed Theology friends think I’ve lost my mind and gone all prosperity-preacher remember what Jesus is doing here. He has climbed this mountain and is giving the people the heart of The Law. The Law was given to show the way we were to live and flourish and worship God. The law was to...

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth - Matthew 5:5 My Grandfather would often say, “Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean that you should.” At the time I had no idea what he was saying to me but as I’ve grown, and particularly as I’ve grown in Christian Faith, what he said makes perfect sense, especially in regard to being meek. Meekness is not weakness. Meekness is strength under control. But how is it that those who are poor in spirit and mourning over sin have strength? How does the eternal worldview play out in the area of meekness and inheriting the earth? This statement is extremely nuanced because it carries with it a humble submission that defers to another. Remember this entire sermon is a description of how people of God are to live in relation to God, each other and those around us. Our meekness towards others stems from our submission to God. The first act of meekness is to lay our rebellion down. We have all sinned against a Just and Ho...

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted –  Matthew 5:4 As we continue our walk through the first blessings and promises of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we want to make sure that we keep the entire sermon in mind. This sermon spans 3 chapters in the Gospel of Matthew (5-7) and even though chapters and verses make it easier for us to find things, it may also contribute to our picking out parts and parcels and forgetting that Christ is conveying a central idea in this sermon, and that overall idea is the heart of the law and the prophets. He summarizes this in Matthew 22:37-40, where He says the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. In these two commands hang all the law and the prophets. Here, he is spelling out what that love looks like and He starts with God. We started this by defining blessing as being happy, content, satisfied and prosperous; with that in mind how is...

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. – Matthew 5:3 This is the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on The Mount. It is so simple that a child can grasp its points and so profound that it has perplexed theologians and scholars for centuries. My aim here is not to enter the fray of the theological and scholarly debates, though I commend them to you, but rather to encourage you if I may, with that perplexing child-like understanding that produces an absolute dependency upon The Holy Spirit to speak to us individually and as One Body in Christ. Everyone wants to be happy. We seek it out and sacrifice for it in a myriad of ways, and contrary to popular preaching, God wants us to be happy, but that happiness is not to be found in our 21 st century Western Worldview, for that is ever changing and those things which promise it perish with the using. God intends for us to find our joy in Him. He wants us to be eternally happy and that’s the whole point of the first 12 ...

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.      And what does the  Lord  require of you? To act justly and to love mercy      and to walk humbly with your God. – Micah 6:8 As Christians I don’t think we have a problem with loving mercy and walking humbly but that act justly or in other translations do justice is what trips us up. I hate that words like “Gospel” and “Disciple” are being used in such a way that they are robbed of their authentic power and meaning. The Gospel is the good news that God sent His Son Jesus to pay the penalty for sin that should have been borne by us, for we have all sinned and thumbed our nose at a just and gracious God, and were it not for His love and mercy toward us while we were still rebelling against Him we would all get what we so justly deserve, an eternity in hell. We can’t even come to Him on our own we need the Holy Spirit to open our eyes. It’s the Holy Spirit who convicts of sin and ...

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make straight your paths - Proverbs 3:5-6   Photo by  Mark Neal  from  Pexels This is a familiar passage and that makes hearing hard and if hearing is hard faith is difficult and if faith is difficult then transformation doesn't happen and if transformation doesn't happen then it's easy to call God unfaithful. We must first remember that transformation is a slow process so we have to be all in with God through Christ by the Holy Spirit, which is the first part of this passage. Trust. Trust implies that we submit to the lordship of Christ through obedience to God's commands as The Holy Spirit enables us. I'm hounding away on the Trinity up front because no amount of white knuckled discipline is going to bring this pass. The laws of God cannot be kept by sinful men. They were meant to show us our need for a savior, which we have only ...