But it's to orient your life on an upward trajectory and then at each step along the way, to work for the highest good. Now, I agree partly, but I'll put a twist on it from the lenses of faith in Christ. See, with faith in Christ, it's not that we're just orienting ourselves to a higher good. We're actually orienting ourselves to the kingdom of heaven. We're pointing our lives to focus on his kingdom and to say, I want to work to see his kingdom and to bring his kingdom here on this earth.

And so I submit myself to the way of life that that kingdom has. And Jesus spells that out here in the beatitudes and the rest of the sermon on the mount. So today, I would encourage you that throughout this week, you would spend some time in Matthew, chapters five, six, seven, reading the entirety of the sermon on the mount, but also look at the beatitudes specifically, because each beatitude has what I might call an exit ramp or an off ramp. In other words, each beatitude, it has this. Almost a threat that you might say, I'm getting off here.

I can't quite get through this one, or I can't quite. Maybe I don't understand it. Karen and I were talking earlier about one of these before service, and it's like. She's like, I'm having trouble understanding this part of it. I'm like, yeah, me, too.

I wish I had the full answer. And I kind of tried to stumble through one. But the idea is, you know, we get to a point where we say, okay, I'm good. I can accept this. But to the limit of my understanding, I might not be able to live it out.

And we're tempted at times to give up and to say, I'm not going to climb to the next ladder rung or to the next beatitude in my life, because I don't fully understand it. And so which ones of the beatitudes are the exit ramp that you find yourself at?

We're going to look today at the next three beatitudes, and we're going to read them in Matthew, chapter five, verses seven through nine. Matthew five, seven, nine. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. And blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.

Let's pray. God, we thank you for your word. We thank you, Jesus, that you have spoken these things. We might call it a message or a sermon, the sermon on the mount. But, Jesus, this is you.

The second member of the Trinity, speaking to your disciples and recorded by human beings in this book, preserved by the Holy Spirit given to us today so that we might hear your words, dwell on them, meditate on them, allow your spirit to interpret them to us, to teach us from your words and to show us how to live it in our lives. God, as I speak, may you enable me to say the things that you would have for me to say. May you give me a the wisdom as I speak to know what to say and what to leave behind. But more than anything, may our ears and our hearts be receptive to the message that you have for us today. In Christ's name we pray.

Amen. It's important as we look at these, to understand a couple things. One, we looked at how they're each one is a ladder rung, one on top of another. For instance, the last one from the last time I preached was hungering and thirsting for righteousness. You can't fully understand how to be merciful to people if you haven't first understood hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

We talked about how righteousness is the sense of justice of God in this world. It's different from social justice. It's not the same as what a lot of people would try to think of or speak about when they talk about social justice. The righteousness of God is his sense of justice in the world, which is also played out by the mercy that we see from Jesus Christ on the cross. And we'll get to merciful here in just a second.

But before we can understand that mercy, we have to understand what God wants to see in this world, that the sense of his righteousness isn't just an outward focus of our, let's say, avoidance of sin. In other words, God isn't just trying to get us to avoid sin and therefore be considered as righteous. Righteousness is more to do with our hands and feet than it is to do with the things that we avoid as sin in our lives. For sure, righteousness or holiness involves that. Holiness is a concept of purity, and so it definitely involves having pure hearts and pure hands.

As far as the things that we don't do, you might say, well, there's a list of sins, I don't do those things. There was a young man that approached Jesus with that, and he says, well, I've followed those commandments since I was a little boy. So what's the issue then? And Jesus says, well, sell everything you have and give to the poor. See, that's God's sense of justice.

Now, he doesn't say that to each and every one of us. If everybody sold everything and gave to the poor, I mean, isn't that kind of the marxist ideal? You know, like, that doesn't work too well. It's never worked. The problem with communist structures in the world is everybody that tries it in another country says, well, going to do it right this time.

The problem is there's no right way for communism to work. There's no right way for Marxism to work. And I'm not trying to say that capitalism has everything figured out, because there's a lot of greedy, selfish and stubborn people that use their wealth for the wrong things. And I'm not here to tell you what to do with wealth. I'm here to tell you what to do with your heart.

And when your heart is oriented towards others, towards this true sense of God's justice, is to look out for those who can't look out for themselves. That is when our hearts are in the proper alignment with the heart and will of God. And so that's what it means to hunger and thirst for righteousness, is to have such a desire, a hungering after God's righteousness in this world, that that would lead us and guide us for sure. Jesus didn't tell everyone, like this young man, that they had to give away everything. He pinpointed in that one man, what was wrong in his heart, that this young man clung to his wealth as if it were his idol or his God.

When we were in the airport headed out of town, there was a girl that we were walking off the train that takes you to the terminal at Tampa airport, and everybody's in a rush to get through the security checkpoint, and this girl drops her phone. Or a young woman, I'm getting old and I call everyone a girl these days. I apologize. This young lady, this young woman, she drops her phone and she says, oh my God. Because I pointed out to her that she dropped it.

And she said, oh my God. And I said, without even thinking or checking myself, I just said, no, it's just a cell phone. But you might treat it as if it's a God. And that was just funny to me. I hope you catch my joke there.

But it's like, no, don't. Don't use God's name that way. But also, it was just kind of this recollection for a moment. It's like we treat these things like a small g God, don't we? It's an idol that we worship.

If you have an iPhone, I don't know about you people that still use an Android, like, I don't know how they work anymore. I forgot I've been using an iPhone for a long time. And so it's like, I know how it works. And an iPhone has this thing where you can check out your screen time and it'll tell you not just which apps, but you know, how much you've used it overall every day on average, and it might shock you just how much you actually use your phone. It'll tell you how many times you picked it up.

It'll tell you which apps were the first app you opened after you picked it up. For most of us, it's probably going to be text messaging or something like that. And you'd be shocked how many times you've picked up your phone also, that it can track that with its, like, you know, motion sensors and all that is amazing. But it's like, we have no idea just how much we're attached to these things. So I thought that was quite, quite fun at the airport there.

But what we're looking at in this sense of this ladder of the beatitudes is looking at how we can move from one to the next. And I don't think you can skip rungs on it. I don't think Jesus set it up that way. I think he set it up so that we would move from one, work on it, allow the spirit of God to minister to us before we can finish that lesson and move to the next one. It's kind of like grade school in that way.

You can't go from grade one to grade two unless you finish grade one. So we're looking today at blessed are the merciful. The idea of showing mercy to someone is exemplified throughout the Bible. It's exemplified by the righteousness of God. You see, the righteousness of God actually demands justice.

It demands that we would be held accountable for the things that we do and the things that we don't do. It demands that we would be given the proper recompense for our actions. And yet there's a price that that eventually weighs out, and that price is our death. Throughout the Old Testament, God gave them laws about sacrificial offerings that he would accept on their behalf as a payment in place of their death. It was a substitutionary atonement.

But then eventually what he had promised was that his son would show up, that Jesus Christ himself would be the substituting atonement on our behalf, and that Jesus Christ would satisfy both the need for God's judgment, but also the love of God that desires mercy and forgiveness, and that in Christ, the judgment of God and the mercy and love of God were met together in his death. But praise God that death couldn't hold him, and that Jesus Christ has risen so that we might also have his new life by the power of the Holy Spirit. So that is the mercy of God. And he says, blessed are the merciful. Blessed are those of you who show similar mercy.

Biblical examples of mercy actually show up in how people would live, who, for instance, had landowners that had maybe fields or crops of some kind, fruit bearing trees or olive trees, wheat and barley fields, things like that. And what they were supposed to do in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible, what the Torah commanded them to do was, when it was harvest time, that they weren't to harvest 100% of their crops. Whether that was the wheat and barley fields, they didn't harvest all the way to the edges of them so that the poor among them could come in and harvest the grain that was left, or whether it was fruit trees or olive trees, they weren't allowed to go through them. More than one time. They could harvest the first time, and then after that, it was as the last remaining few percentage of fruit would mature or ripen.

It was time for the poor in the land to come through and be able to pick from that, and so they would have something to support themselves. This was God's way of providing for the poor among them, but it was also a way to show mercy. It was a way to show the mercy of God, because what God was doing was when these landowners were truly generous from their heart, and it showed in how they, for instance, in the wheat field, somebody that left a real narrow strip didn't have much faith in God, but people that left wider and wider strips of unharvested grain so that the poor could have more to gather, God blessed the portion that they had left. We can see this today in the way that we give of our offerings, our tithes. It seems like the more that we give God, it would seem like we have less left over for our own personal use.

But it seems like the more that we give God, he blesses what's left and stretches it farther and farther, and we have more blessing in our lives. We don't just give so that we can get, but we understand that the more generous we are towards others, the more generous God is towards us. And he can do math that we can't figure out. He can do math that our checkbook doesn't reflect. He can do math that when you start adding up on your bank account, if you reconcile it online, it just doesn't seem to make sense.

That is the mercy of God, and it's a reflection of God's righteousness. The Torah also talked about this idea of the year, of Jubilee, and how every 49 years after that, there would be a reset where those who had gone into debt and had to mortgage their land or borrow money against what they owned, that it would be forgiven, that all the books were wiped clean. Now, the interesting thing here is there were people that were attempted in, like year 46, 47, 48, you know, of the Jubilee year. They're like thinking, I'm not going to get this all repaid. Can you imagine if it's year 48 and you're like, I'm going to go buy a new car?

Because the bank's going to have to forgive this in next year? The bank would say, we're not lending you money on this car. It's twelve months, you know, 18% interest or something like that. They would just try to really rake you over the coals on it. And so there's no way that our banks today would do these things.

But this is how God set up for his people to live. He said, you must live in this type of mercy. And the more God blessed those who were able to lend money, the more they had to give. Like, the more they gave, the more they had, and they were able to continue this blessing. But of course, they had a hard time keeping these laws, these rules.

The good Samaritan is a parable that Jesus told. And somebody wondered, well, who is my neighbor? And he said, he says, well, basically, through telling this story, he says, basically, the one who you like the least seems to be the one that you should show the most mercy to. In other words, the Samaritan and the jewish man who had fallen to the hands of robbers had the least likelihood of caring for each other, and yet the Samaritan cared for this jewish man who was left on the side of the road for dead. I.

And in so doing, in doing this, what Jesus is saying is, there's the heart of the Torah that says that we should have mercy on others, even when we have the capacity or the desire not to. In other words, when we think that we shouldn't have to do this, God is telling us that's specifically the person you go to. My father in law was telling me while we were visiting them that there was a preacher that had mentioned something that he said that he said just really kind of stuck with him. And he said, you know, the person you like, dislike the most or like the least, God loves them exactly the same as he loves you. And so why should you look down on them or avoid showing mercy to them or showing love for them?

You must show love for them. So how do we play this out practically in our lives? Like, how do we. How do we live out this merciful lifestyle in our own lives? There's lots of things that we can do.

For instance, you can work with any number of different organizations that are looking out for people that have the least capacity to look out for themselves. Things like anti human trafficking initiatives. We've got some set up on the table in the lobby with, like this. Got a green cloth on it. You can't miss it when you go out the door.

There's things like pregnancy care centers or fostering and adoption centers, there's homeless centers and. And drop in shelters and things like that that we can work with. There's all kinds of different things, different initiatives you can work with to say, okay, this is how I can show God's mercy, but you can also vote for political candidates who are going to do the most good that our country can do. Now, I'm not suggesting that we got to go out and fix all the world's problems. I'm kind of tired of trying that.

That's just me personally. I don't know if that comes from scripture. That's me. This is like the apostle Paul when he wrote in one of his letters, he's like, this is Paul talking, not the Lord. You know, he's like, this is just my opinion I'm sharing with you here.

But, you know, the thing is, whatever you think you believe, you might be shocked. Who aligns with that, whether it's on the state level or the presidential level. There's a website called eyesidewith.org dot. I think it's dot. Is.com dot.

I definitely. Yep, it's definitely.com dot. I've got it in my notes. I should have gone with that, isidewith.com, and we'll put that as a link when we send out the text message with the sermon recap. But I encourage you to go there and take the time to click through these things and click on what answers you agree with to these different topics.

And then once you're all done with it, you submit it and see who, which presidential candidates you align with the most. And then you can click on each one of them and see their answers to the different things and see how those are important or not to you, it'd be pretty amazing how you find what your christian beliefs line up with, regardless of what your, let's say, party affiliation or party leanings might be. And so I just say when you do that, as far as I've always been able to tell, it seems to be a kind of a pretty, you know, pretty bipartisan effort of this website, from what I can tell, to just kind of help you see who it is that you might agree most with and then vote. That way, you don't have to say, oh, well, I've always voted this party or that party, and I got to go with that. Listen, especially in this season with all the weird stuff that's been going on, especially with the Democratic Party encouraging their candidate to pull out, that everybody, you know, had voted for him to be the nominee again.

And then they just kind of say, here, here's your candidate, you vote for her or nothing. I don't know. Like, that's so weird. I've never seen anything like this. And so I'm just saying, you know what?

You don't have to go with whatever a particular party says. You go with whatever your biblically, biblically guided conscience says and say, okay, and so that website helps you figure that stuff out. And so one of the things that, that's one of the things that we can do. And you might think, well, I might vote and it might not matter. Probably not.

I don't know. I'm pretty cynical about these things. I also know that once we vote some of these people in, they're really not going to do what they said they're going to do, especially when they first get voted into office with high hopes and say, I'm going to change the system. And then they find out they can't, you know, oh, well, that doesn't mean we lose heart and it doesn't mean we lose hope. If the evangelical christian church will all get out and vote, we can sway the politics of this country.

Whatever direction we biblically see it needs to go, but we have to do it. And if we don't get out and vote, we can't complain about what happens. If you do get out and vote, keep complaining. But you can also complain by calling them up and leaving some input, because believe it or not, these elected officials don't know everything, and they need our input and they need our guidance and they need their constituents, whether they voted for them or not, to say, here's what my godly, you know, my biblically minded conscience says that we should be doing. And I, and I hope you'll hear my voice whether you do what I ask or not.

At least hear my input on that. So I'd encourage you to do these things. This, when we start, when we have a hunger and thirsting for God's righteousness is the only way that we can begin showing mercy. If we haven't first desired to see the reign and rule of God or his righteousness in this world, we can't progress to the latter step of showing mercy. And the beautiful thing is, Jesus says, when you show mercy, you will be shown mercy.

In other words, we have to be able to understand how to give it before we can understand how to receive it. Well, moving on to the second one, and quickly, we have, blessed are the pure in heart. Now, being pure in heart, we already mentioned that purity is quite related to holiness. The nazarene church, of course, talks a lot about holiness. And I think we've kind of got a multiple personality disorder when it comes to understanding entire sanctification and the message of holiness.

I think we've had a long history. And for those of you who don't know, blessings to you, you're doing great. Then those of us who have been part of the Nazarene church for a long, long time have seen the message on holiness or on entire sanctification shift so many times throughout the years. And so many times it's fallen victim to whatever the social things of the day are, rather than what the mandates of scripture would tell us it should be. And I'm still working through that.

I'm still trying to figure that out myself, because it means I have to shed a lot of teachings that have come and gone over the years, but that are still kind of in the back of my mind. And I have to come with a fresh perspective, put on those lenses and look through the scripture and say, okay, lord, what is your idea of holiness that we can live? What's your idea of what it means to be entirely sanctified or set apart for you? One of the things that Jesus talked about was the emphasis of the purity of our heart over our outward actions. Now, heart will always inform our actions.

But Jesus had these groups of people, such as the Pharisees, who were so intent on their outward actions, but their hearts were cold. Their hearts were so intent on making sure that their hands were physically clean, that they followed all the, all the laws and the scriptures. Like, they would wash their hands, they would only eat certain foods, they would only talk with certain people and be in the company of certain people because they didn't want to be around unclean people or sinners. And yet Jesus said their hearts were dead and full of maggots. Their hearts were like whitewashed tombs.

They looked good on the outside, but on the inside, they were dirty and rotten. Jesus was more worried about our heart because our heart will actually inform our actions. Some of the biblical examples that talk about this is, for instance, Ezekiel 36 26, where he promises that God is going to one day give them a new heart, not a heart of stone, but a heart of flesh. Jeremiah 31 33 echoes a similar thing. And he says that, you know, the heart that's within you is dead.

It's not beating. It's not even capable of being resuscitated. You need a heart transplant. You need a fleshly heart. Put in a job talked about himself having a pure heart and pure actions.

The story of job. We don't have time to get into the whole thing, but job, he goes through all this ordeal, and then on top of that, his friends come and just kind of really drag him down, even worse, accusing him of wrongdoing and sin. And he finally insists, very adamantly. I think it's around job, like, 27 and 28. He insists very adamantly about his conduct and his character.

He says, I haven't sinned. And he gives all of the things that he has done, such as, I've cared for the poor. I've cared for the widows. I was a comfort to them on the dying. You know, where their husbands were dying.

I was there, and they would take comfort in me knowing that I was there and would help them. He said, the orphans. I wouldn't let an orphan lie on the streets at night. I would take care of him. I would bring him into my own house.

My servants were well cared for. He says anybody around me was blessed when I would show up. He wasn't bragging about it. He's just simply saying, these were my actions. But then he talks about his heart.

He doesn't just talk about, you know, could he follow the laws of God or follow these actions. He talks about his heart. He says that he carried himself with integrity, that there was no deceit found in him. He talked about how he would not lust after a woman. He said he protected his heart from that.

Folks, just those two things alone are huge in our world today. I mean, the idea of deceit, it's everywhere. It's around every corner. I mean, on the personal, like, small level, we're tempted to lie about things all the time because it makes ourselves look better. This is what Rob talked about last week with this self preservation.

It's telling these little lies that we think are good, but really they're just crafted to make ourselves look better. But it's still deceitful. And a deceitful mouth comes from a deceitful heart. Or lust. Jesus talked in the rest of this parable or sermon on the mount, he talked about lust, and he says, lust doesn't only show up in the act of committing adultery.

You might think you're good because you haven't done that. They showed up in front of Jesus with a woman that had been caught in the act of adultery. In John chapter eight, they bring her before Jesus, and they say, look at this woman. We caught her in the very act of adultery. And he ignores them, and they keep pushing.

Cause they're trying to trap him, and they want him to say the wrong thing. There's no right answer in this. Cause either he's gonna condemn her to death, or he's gonna set her free, and then he condemns the law, essentially. And Jesus refuses to do either one. And he just simply says, if you haven't committed sin in this matter, then go ahead and throw your rocks.

Throw your stones at her. And they all were at least guilty, I would guess, of the sin of lust. This is literally a naked woman before them that they watched in live pornography. Essentially, they watched her in the act of committing adultery. They drag her before Jesus.

And he's saying, your hearts are not pure in this matter alone. And so because of this, Jesus is showing us in his teaching and in this interaction and in others. He's saying, lust is something that is in your heart, and no one else can see it necessarily, but it'll take over your entire life and your entire being, and it'll destroy you. Those are just a couple practical applications, just from the story of job that we can see about how he lived towards others, but how he lived within his own heart. We must avoid these types of things and allow the holy spirit to cleanse our hearts.

Once we've done that, we have begun getting the ability to see God through a pure heart. In other words, we get to understand God's heart for the world.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Our next one, the last one for today is blessed are the peacemakers. And the idea of peacemaking, I would say, is not something that's very, very. It's not given much importance in the world today, not in this country and not in many other countries. It seems like about every few weeks or once a month or so, there's another country that's shooting rockets at each other.

That's, you know, attacking leaders of countries. I mean, good grief. Like peacemaking, we can't even figure that out on a national level between two opposing political parties. They seem to be more at odds than ever before, and increasingly so. The political attacks are quite ridiculous, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.

I really don't. I don't know if there was ever a good era of politics. They've always, it's always been a dirty game. But at the same time, it's like we can't even have a sense of peace when we talk about things we disagree about, let alone have peace on a scale of national, like weapons and things aimed at each other. And I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I'm about ready, despite all the other issues, I'm about ready to just vote for anyone for political office who will commit to not taking us into another war or funding another war through another country as a proxy for the battles that we don't have the gumption to fight on our own.

And I'm not suggesting that we go do that. I'm just saying to hide behind another country and defund their wars is absurd, and I don't like it. That's me speaking from the word of God. All I can tell you is that's what peacemaking looks like now. Peacemaking is an entirely different effort.

It's an effort that involves coming to the table and talking with one another. It's an effort that involves saying where you've done wrong, where you've transgressed a boundary and said, you know what? We told you we weren't going to do that, and we did it anyway. And you know what? That's on us.

So what can we do to make up for it in return? It involves perhaps treaties of peace. It involves promises. Of course, the problem with the politics in our country is every other president from every other party that keeps getting elected, one after the other, keeps trying to undo what their predecessor did. They keep trying to undo the promises that that president made.

And so they withdraw from all these accords and these treaties and these promises. We've seen times where there were presidents that tried to make peace with certain nations around the world or broker peace between different nations. And then later on, within two decades, we'll see us now aiding that country in breaking their promises and in fighting against it. Jesus talks about peacemakers as if it's something that takes a special person, someone who's been able to show mercy on a personal level, somebody who's been able to have their heart purified by the Holy Spirit of God, and now they're able to work in this world as peacemakers. Now, that can take place on a small level, on a personal level, it can take place as we maybe work to end a feud between a family member or neighbors or something like that.

It can involve, again, back to the voting booth. Voting for candidates who are more prone towards peace than violence. It can be involved in several different ways, but I think first we have to be able to recognize what that looks like. So often, all we see is the violence and the anger. Just within the last two weeks, just scrolling through YouTube, I've seen some of the worst that humanity has to offer.

Always seems to be around road rage incidents. I don't know why this one thing of just driving our cars is such an inflection point where things flame up and people turn into violence, hitting each other, attacking their cars, shooting each other, and it's caught on dash cams and all these things. And we just watch it and it should shock us, it should disgust us. And instead we watch it as if this is part of life. That's not how Jesus calls us to live.

That's not how Jesus calls people to be peacemakers. Peacemakers check themselves first and say, okay, where is it that I'm wrong? Where is it that I have. Have done the wrong thing or avoided doing the right thing and it's caused this situation to increase? Where can I take responsibility for my own heart and my own actions and then allow God to work through that?

Where can I be a person of peace in this world and set an example for others to follow where they would say, I want to live like that guy? It was funny. I walked into a store that my aunt runs in Illinois, and she hadn't seen me in a while. And I've been growing my hair for a year now. I haven't had a hair cut in a year.

And some of you are like, yeah, I noticed. And I don't know what the point is. I don't have a reason. I just. I've never done it.

So I like it for now. My wife hates it. Just to be on record with that, my daughter recently came on board. She would say she didn't like it, and she'd point to old pictures and say, I like that hair, dad. But just recently, she said that she.

That she likes it and that I shouldn't get a haircut. And also, I told her that I was feeling kind of fat. And she said, no, you look like a good size for your age. And I said, you know what? This is my favorite person right now.

I love this girl so much, you know? So anyway, yeah, this is good. This is good. Beware of people that tell you what you want to hear, though, you know? So anyway, it can be a trap.

And so I walk into my aunt's store, and she says, whoa, Jesus. You know, like, she was, like, saying, I look like Jesus with the hair and everything. And I was thinking about that, and I was like, man, it took not cutting my hair for a year for somebody to have that reaction to look at me and say, oh, that's Jesus right there. Now, believe me, I'm not trying to, like, be Jesus, but I want people to see Christ in me, in the way that I live, the way that I work, the person of peace, that I can be the person of calmness. And it took growing out this hair to say, oh, I see Christ in you, folks.

I think if we all could live as peacemakers, if we can climb the ladder to this point and say, I just want to see the peace of God in this world, that people would see Christ in us. You know, the earliest christians, they were called christians as a term of mockery, not as a term of endearment. They accused them of being little christs like, you people are just like Jesus, that guy that we killed. And they said, great. In fact, when they identified so much with Jesus that they were martyred for their faith, these people, they took it proudly.

They worshiped God for the fact that they were considered good enough or most christlike enough to be killed for their faith or to be persecuted for their faith. Peacemaking isn't necessarily the thing that we. It doesn't necessarily end up being the thing that we might want it to be. A lot of times, the peacemakers are the ones that are ridiculed the most. They're the ones that are told that they don't have a spine, that they're.

They're not willing to do what needs to be done, that we need to be strong. Listen, I'm all for having a strong military, but I'm also all for not using it in places where it shouldn't be used, where diplomacy works, have diplomacy. And so I think that we need to give that a go again on a national level. But Jesus didn't preach to the national level. He talked to us as individuals.

Where is it that you could be a person of peace in this world. Ultimately, Jesus is the peacemaker. You see, where he stood in the gap for our sins, where we were at odds against God and at war against him. He stood in the gap. He died in our place on our behalf, and he has made peace between us and God.

You see, as we embody this beatitudes lifestyle, it all centers on what Christ has done for us and how he has modeled this lifestyle and how he says, you can live this as well. Mercy, purity, and peace. There's steps on this beatitudes ladder, and we can embody these in our daily life. But as I mentioned before, each one, each beatitude has its off ramps. There might be a place where you say, I can go this high, but after that, it's like a game of shoots and ladders.

I'm just going to slide down from here. I can't climb this ladder anymore at this point. I just can't quite get there. Don't fall for that. Study through them.

Look through them and say, God, where is it that I struggle with the most? Or where am I tempted to try to jump rungs and skip one of these because I don't want to take the time. There you see, this sermon series might only take four or five weeks, but this might take you months or years to live out. It might take you buying books or studying or reading blog posts or whatever it might be to get fully in a place where you can understand this. It might take you a while to be able to live this out and allow the spirit of God to work on you.

But don't quit, don't stop, and don't slide off the ladder, or don't stall your progress. Because the ultimate goal as we climb this ladder is to see into the kingdom of God. And then once we see into the kingdom of God, you know what I think happens? We kind of start all over because we realize just how spiritually hungry we are. We realize just how broken we are, and we realize we're still so poor in spirit, and we start at the bottom and work our way through it again, over and over and over again until Christ returns and we see him here.

So seek God's help to stay on the path to kingdom life. Accept Jesus offer of salvation as well. If you've never done that, you can't see his kingdom without it. You can be next to people who see his kingdom, but you'll never see it with your own eyes unless you've accepted the work of Christ on your behalf. Work to be an extension of his peace.

Amen.