We turn in the word to its reading to Joshua chapter 8, Joshua chapter 8, and then Luke chapter 6. Let's stand together. What is happening in Joshua chapter 8 is a renewal of covenant according to the pattern that the Lord had instituted in Deuteronomy chapter 27 and following, where Israel on two mountains would hear rehearsed, Mount Gerizim, Mount Ebal, the covenant blessings and the covenant curses of the covenant of grace. That there's a way of life that they should choose and a way of rebellion that they should turn away from. And after a great victory at Ai, Joshua takes this pattern and leads Israel in it, reminding Israel what it means to serve the Lord. Now, Joshua built an altar to the Lord God of Israel in Mount Ebal, as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, an altar of whole stones over which no man has wielded an iron tool. And he offered on it burnt offerings to the Lord and sacrificed peace offerings. And there, in the presence of the children of Israel, he wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written. Then all Israel, with their elders and officers and judges, stood on either side of the ark before the priests, the Levites, who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord, the stranger as well as he who was born among them. Half of them were in front of Mount Gerizim, and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded before, that they should bless the people of Israel. And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessings and the cursings according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel with the women, the little ones and the strangers who were living among them. And now to the Gospel of Luke, in Luke chapter 6. And you will find our Savior, the great lawgiver, the prophet greater than Moses, giving to Israel the terms of the covenant. Beginning at verse 20 of chapter 6, then, He lifted up His eyes toward His disciples and said, Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and cast out your name as evil for the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for indeed your reward is great in heaven. For in like manner their fathers did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger. Woe to you who laugh now, For you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you. For so did their fathers to the false prophets. This is the word of the Lord. We turn in the word for the preaching of the word to Luke chapter 6 and verses 20 to 27. Familiar words, perhaps not quite as familiar as a similar passage in Matthew chapter five, which we call the Beatitudes. But in another sense, because of that familiarity, very familiar to us, particularly the form of the blessings that Christ pronounces here on his people. But before we begin, I would submit to you that what Jesus teaches here about the nature of discipleship. What it means to follow Him. In many ways we've lost, to a great degree, as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. I wonder how many of you have considered the following, that to follow Jesus in this life will be painful. We are a nation and a culture that loves the opposite, to avoid all pain and suffering. As a matter of fact, we often think the following, that if I am suffering, something is going wrong. Or one level deeper, I must have done something wrong and God is particularly angry with me. There's another reason why we don't suffer well, and that's because we just love pleasure. We just love to be comfortable. We have to be the most comfortable country in the world. I mean, the list of things that America has invented to make life comfortable is almost endless. And we love it. We love comfortable vacations, and comfortable chairs, and comfortable cars, and air conditioning, and we love fine food, and millions of things that we want to have. And sometimes if we don't have them, it's astonishing how unhappy people can get. We love health. And we love money. And if we lose a little bit, looking at your stock portfolio and it starts going down and there's people I know who get frantic and a little bit angry. Just a few percentage points and unhappy. We love so much yet this present world and the things of the world. which are passing away, but somehow so much of our affection is tied to them. The text before us is a major corrective against this tendency, the tendency to plant your flag in this present world, and especially so to say, I can be a follower of Jesus Christ and plant my flag in this present world. which is what our natural tendency to do is even as religious people to say, I think there's a way to have both. What we have instead in these verses here before us is a very clear call from our Savior Jesus Christ to live a simple sort of life of discipleship, which is willing to lose everything in this world because of a prize we have found in Jesus Christ, which is eternal life. Discipleship involves a willingness, we don't necessarily lose everything in this world, but a willingness to cheerfully lose everything in this world for the prize of having and following Jesus Christ. And when I mean lose everything, when we look at the text, that means to be poor, to weep, to be persecuted and mocked, to be treated with derision by the world, and to suffer. And all of that, if that was the total description of my present life, that Jesus Christ would be worthy of that. And that I would believe that His blessing and favor hadn't left me. But in a very real way, as the text will say, that these often are signs of His blessing and favor. And that I believe that He, my Savior, one day will bring me to that better place where all sorrow and sighing and tears will flow away. And more than that, the text teaches us that if I'm unwilling to live that way, that I'm not under his blessing, but here's sobering words, I'm under his curse. The scene in which Jesus pronounced these blessings and curses that we have before us in verses 20 to 26 is useful to review for a moment. It's always good to remember the narrative flow of the Gospels and remember that when Jesus says things, he's saying them at a certain time and in a certain place and to certain kind of people and hear that scene is very powerful. You might remember it. Actually, before we get to it, just an aside, you might ask the question, why are there a similar set of verses in Matthew and slightly different in Luke? The pound of ink that has been spilled on this question in Matthew, Jesus on a mountain. In Luke, Jesus is in a level place. Matthew, there's only blessings. In Luke, there's blessings and curses. And how can that be? Well, if you talk to any preacher, the very first most obvious answer is that We often preach similar sermons in different places, number one, and that they're not always exactly the same, and there's nothing too complicated about this. And the second thing is the gospel writers, when they are recording by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, often the same event, are doing so with different details, which are not at all in contradiction one to the other. I'll give you an example. Jesus stood in a level place. It could have been a level place on a mountain. We don't know. People call this the Sermon on the Plain, there's the Sermon on the Mount. We just don't know all the details. And Luke could record words that Matthew didn't record. There's nothing about these two accounts, which is difficult to explain, either in one of the two ways I just gave you. The Scriptures remain the infallible, inerrant, inspired word of God, and these two accounts cohere together. It's uncomplicated, despite the fact Many Bible scholars want to make this complicated. But directly in the Gospel of Luke, we have a context. Verse 12 through 16, rather, sorry, verse 12 through 19, but looking especially at verses 17 through 19, you remember that the context, if you remember the sermon from two weeks ago, powerful ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, where His disciples, His 12 apostles, and then those from Jerusalem and Judea, and then those from Tyre and Sidon, these ever-increasing circles, this massive crowd of the inner circle of Jews and of Gentiles, the whole world coming to Jesus. They wanted to hear Him teach. They wanted their diseases to be healed. And they saw His power in casting out demons. And we have that last phrase in verse 19, and power went out from Him and healed them all. This is a supernatural visitation of Jesus Christ. This is a scene that if you were there, you would watch, your spine would tingle, you would see power, you would hear words of authority, you would say, we never saw anything or anyone like this. It's also clear from the Gospels that at times like this, people became interested in Jesus for a lot of different reasons. Not everybody in the crowd loves him. How do we know that? Because the text says Judas, who betrayed the Lord, was there. that there was a mixture of people. We know the same was all through Jesus' ministry, it would be the same through the apostles' ministry. There were people who were curious about His power, show us a sign. They didn't love Jesus, but they were entranced with a display of power. Or they were His critics. We know often in the crowds, there were the scribes and Pharisees who said, we don't buy it. Even when they watched Him heal on the Sabbath day, they would curse Him. Jesus knows this about the crowd, and so He says the following words. He lifted up his eyes, verse 24, as his disciples, and he said, and what he says next cuts like a sharp knife, a sharp sword through the crowd and through our hearts, the word of God living in power, sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting to the thoughts and intents of the heart, the joints and marrow deep into the human condition. As Jesus asks in this proclamation, in essence, why are you following me? What do you see in me? What is the reason for you being here? And what comes in these verses is what we could call a laser focused teaching of the doctrine of the two ways. There's only two ways to live in relation to Jesus Christ. Let's look at these blessings and curses which describe the two ways. The way of true life and salvation and the way of destruction. A narrow road that leads to life, the broad road that leads to destruction. That's what's being described here in language of covenant blessings and covenant curses. We're gonna study those blessings in verses 20 to 23, and the curses in verses 24 to 26, and we're gonna look at them broadly, not each individual one, but we're gonna see what we can learn from the whole text. We've got a number of things, things to learn. There'll be five of them, and then some applications for the heart of the hero. Thing number one, pretty simple, the structure. You'll see that there's four blessings, blessed are the poor, blessed are you, blessed are you, blessed are you when men hate you, and then woe or curse, we'll see in a moment, woe to you, woe to you, woe to you. There is a direct mirror of blessing and cursing. And even within the blessings and cursings, number one of the blessings and number one of the woes are identical, though reversed in content. The subject of each one is the same. What is happening here? Well, first of all, what does it mean to be blessed? This would be the most important question. Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed are you. This is the great positive of the text. What does it mean to be blessed? It means to be happy. But it does not mean to be superficially happy, like when you've had a good steak. It means to be spiritually happy. A kind of contentment and joy in all circumstances that can never be taken away, which is a fruit of the Holy Spirit's work in your heart in giving you salvation. This blessedness is the blessedness of life in the presence of God. Life under the favor of God. This blessedness is the blessing of the covenant of grace. To live under God's smile and favor. Having your sins forgiven. Being in a right relationship with the triune living God. This is the blessedness of salvation. The Bible uses the word blessed. This is what it's talking about. How about the curses? Well, they're described in, not with the word curse, but the language of woe to you. And what does woe mean? Horror, dread, intense sadness, difficult pain, distress, an intense state of sorrow. And in the formulation of woe to you, we have here what we would call curses. Warnings. But more than warnings, powerful declarations that if this is your life, then this is your spiritual condition and your relationship to God. In other words, the first four are the relationship of blessedness, life in the presence of God. The last four are descriptions of what it means to live outside the presence of God and under His wrath and curse. That's the structure. Now where does this come from? Does that remind you of anything? We just read something from Jeremiah chapter eight, but we'll turn back to Deuteronomy for a moment. And you will see that God had told Moses that the children of Israel should be reminded that to live in covenant with him would mean to know both the blessings on the faithful life and the curses on unfaithfulness. And so, God ordained, God called Moses to gather Israel and these two mountains that we read about in Joshua chapter 8, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, and there the curses and blessings of the covenant of grace to be pronounced on the people of God. Now it shall come to pass, Deuteronomy 28, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, you observe carefully all his commandments, which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above all nations, and all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you." A wave of blessing. You respond to God's saving mercy with love and obedience, with trust in Him. Moses said, the Lord has told me to say, blessings will overtake you. Goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life, and you will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. That's the language of Psalm 23. Blessed shall you be in the city, in the country, the fruit of your body. When you come in, when you go out, your basket, your kneading bowl, your enemies will be destroyed. The Lord will open to you the good treasure of the heavens. He will give you rain to bless all the work of your hands. You shall be above all. And if you heed the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, or careful to observe them, God will bless you. But it shall come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all his commandments and his statutes, which I command you today, that these cursings will come upon you. Cursed you shall be in the city and cursed you shall be in the country. Your basket, your kneading bowl, the fruit of your body, when you go out and when you come in and when your enemies come in, they will take you away. The two ways. Matter of fact, at the end of Deuteronomy chapter 30, it's summarized in the following way. See I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. And the command that I give you today, to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, His statutes, His commandments, His judgments, that you may live and multiply. The Lord your God bless you. But if your heart turns away, I announce today that you will surely perish. I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose life, that you and your descendants may live. Now Jesus, in Luke chapter 6, greater than Moses, is doing the same thing. He's teaching the doctrine of the two ways, that there's one way to live, salvation of life, and the other way is destruction. Psalms do this. Psalm 1, the Lord knows the way of the righteous, the way of the ungodly will perish. Psalm 2, the world sets themselves against the Lord and His anointed. Kiss the son lest he be angry and you perish in the way. That there's a way of life which is following Jesus Christ. There's a way of death and destruction and judgment which is the other way. Psalm 110, the same thing. Two ways. Volunteer in His army or under His feet. His enemy is His footstool. Two ways. Jesus here. There's a way of blessing. There's a way of cursing. That's number one. Number two, the second thing from the text. Your state before God in these ways, so either the blessed life or the woe to you life. What are the characteristic differences between those two ways? They are determined by measuring four things. four specific life conditions, what we might call levels of comfort in this world. What are they? Number one, money. Look at verse 20. Blessed are you poor. Look at verse 24. Woe to you who are rich. It's the first thing. There's money. Now money here is not the actual exact object when the scriptures talk about poverty and riches. Not necessarily the amount of money in your bank account. Though it is being used as the image and this does dig into our hearts. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. But poverty or riches refers not simply to money but your place in this world. Either beleaguered, suffering for Christ's sake, or on the top of the world, a big bank account, and happy with your money. That's the measure number one. The second one is food. Blessed are you who hunger. Now, verse 21. Woe to you who are full. It's the second measure. The satisfaction you have in the good things of this life. If you are full in this world, if you're satisfied, food's the second image. If you're satisfied, if you want nothing else than just that plate of food, maybe your heart's like Esau. The third image that Christ uses is your emotional state. Either you weep, verse 21, or you laugh, verse 25. And what Jesus says, if you just want to live a life of partying and you're satisfied with watching stand-up comedians and partying with your friends, an outward life of mirth, just being happy, the good life, it's a problem. But he's using your emotions and he's asking you a question. Money, food, emotional state. The last one's popularity. Either men will hate you, verse 22, exclude you, revile you, cast out your name as evil, or all men will speak well of you. And here Jesus is just taking the ordinary things of life, of money, and food, and enjoyment, and emotional state, and your popularity, your place in this world. And he is saying that these four things are important measures of discipleship. And they are related to their state, where the slider is on each one of these, is linked to either blessing or curses. Number three, the relationship between these four things and blessing and curse, here you have to listen carefully, is the inverse of natural human expectations. If you were to describe the blessed life in terms of money, food, emotional state, and popularity. Money, food, emotional state, popularity. Blessings, blessed by God. You know what's in the text, but you push it away. What's the natural human impulse right there? Maximum money, best food, most happiness. and the most popularity. Everyone likes me. That might be a signal that God likes me. Examine the present condition of the blessed. Blessed are you poor. Blessed are you who hunger. Blessed are you who weep. Blessed are you when you are hated, reviled, and cast out. This defies natural human logic. The reason of the natural man has been inverted powerfully by our Lord Jesus Christ here. To be poor, to be hungry, to weep, to be hated, to be reviled, excluded, and cast out is the condition here of blessed are you who hunger, Look at the curse condition. But woe to you who are rich, full, laughing, and popular. Woe to you who are rich, full, laughing, and popular. The Apostle John says in 1 John chapter 2, If anyone loves the world and the things of the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Later he says, the things of this world are passing away. Where do you think John got that idea? Surely here. Do you think that this world is a place for your best life now? There's a book by an ostensibly Christian preacher called Your Best Life Now. Do you want to live a life that avoids all sorrow, pain, and suffering, especially when other people wrong you? You want justice. Do you want to avoid all labor and sacrifice? If that described you, Jesus is giving you a warning that you have the Christian life upside down, backwards, and that your heart is very much in love with this present world. I think of another text that our Savior will give, we'll treat it in a few weeks, but it has the similar theme to it. He's talking about discipleship. If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, let him take up his cross daily and follow me. To follow Jesus Christ entails a willingness to give up all the comforts and pleasures of this world. All of them. Who is he addressing? Look at verse 20. Then he lifted up his eyes toward his disciples and said, You're following me? Let me tell you the nature of the way. We expect and embrace suffering. We expect and embrace suffering. There are Christians in the world right now because they're suffering and everything has been stripped away. In a jail cell somewhere and are learning that your loving kindness is better than life, Lord. Jesus is sufficient for me. You've promised that if everything's taken away and I have Him, I have everything, I have eternal life that I can't lose for me to live as Christ, to die as Cain. In a discipleship it's often when we're poor, hungry, crying, and when we lose friends, that the singular object of our affection is revealed to be greater than we ever understood Him to be, Jesus Christ. and where we see blessing, where the world expects that that would be a curse. The inverse is true. That when our stomach is full and our bank account is big, and we have everything this world has to offer, that it is easy to forget that in Jesus Christ, the pearl of great price, the treasure that was hidden in the field, that to have Jesus for me and not against me, to have forgiveness in life, is the best and only thing that really matters for this life. Our age is the opposite. If you have emotional pain, there's a pill for that. Physical pain, there's another pill for that. Relational pain, walk out. Jesus says no. The way of blessedness is through the valley. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. The bigger theological framework behind this is that yes, since the fall, there's something profoundly wrong with the world. God did not make a world in which poverty and hunger and weeping and rejection by fellow men, even persecution all the way to the end, right to death. That was not supposed to be part of the fallen world. It's right that our heart aches under such suffering. But the point of the text is that the removal of these things is not the removal of the favor of God from His people. That He is for us, not against us, even in the pain. The fool, on the other hand, can't understand this. This is home. The believer says, it's not my home. My citizenship is in heaven from which I eagerly await a Savior, Jesus Christ the Lord. And I'm in a broken world. And I am longing for the day when He wipes all the tears from my eyes and brings me into that land of rest. And if He calls me to follow a path that looks like my Savior's path, I will follow it all the way to Him. Lord, give me the grace not to love the world and the things of the world. Thing number four, and I'm jumping ahead already, a true disciple understands that the future age will bring a realization of divine blessing. Look at the language of the text. Blessed are you who hunger now, who weep now, when men hate you, now, for the son of man's sake. The first beatitude, verse 20, is blessed are you poor. How about this for a promise? For yours is the kingdom of heaven. Look at the last one. Verse 23, Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for indeed your reward is great in heaven. Now jump down to the woes. If you're rich, you've got it. You have your consolation. You've got your bag of money, as far as it's going to go. If you're rich and unbelieving, Abraham and Job were rich, Jesus is not saying it's sinful to be rich, but he's saying if you're rich and you think this is it, well, that's right, this is it. That's all you've got. You're still under God's curse. That's your consolation. You keep breeding. You shall hunger one day. You will mourn and weep one day. When all men speak well of you, so did their fathers to the false prophets. This is not a new problem, but there's going to be this great reversal in the future. There's a reversal in the blessed and a reversal in the woes. For the woes, the reversal will be everything you have will be taken away. And for the blessed, everything you longed for, that all the tears will be wiped away, will be given freely in my kingdom of heaven forever and ever. And that's why to be in Christ, in this world, in your tears, remains blessedness. Because you have the promise of the favor of God, and the final great reversal of all the sadnesses. Yours is the Kingdom of God! What kind of language is this? All that belongs to God belongs to you. This is what the Apostle Paul is exalting in Romans chapter 8 when he says these words. If we are children of God, the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. If children, then heirs of God. Listen to this. Heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. If indeed we suffer with him, that we also may be glorified with him. You understand that language? You know when the second son in the parable, the prodigal son comes home, there's a little phrase that the father says to him. He says, why are you upset? He says, all that I have is yours. Blessed are you when you are poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when you're reviled, for great will be your reward in heaven. Jesus teaches an expectation of a future age for those who follow him. All tears, sadness, rejection, poverty, hunger, and pain will flee away and that this is worth waiting for and living for Christ for. It means that the sufferings of this present age are not worthy to compare to the glory that shall be revealed in us now and then ultimately in the future. Jesus says, as a matter of fact, look at verse 23. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy. He's saying this is so true that if you were to be persecuted, and we may be one day, if this world continues to unravel at the rate it's unraveling, all that we think is normal, sane, and well-ordered could fall apart. And Jesus says if that happens and you find yourself, behind bars for my sake. He says something astonishing. Rejoice. Rejoice and leap for joy. I have not left you or forsaken you and you are following me. When people identify you as a Christ follower, in your present sadness as a follower of Christ, they have redemptive significance. If you were to suffer, Christ suffered and God brought great things from Matter of fact, Paul would understand this principle when he said to the Philippians, it has been granted to you to suffer for Christ's sake. It's a gift. Thing number five, the fulcrum point. The dividing line between the blessed life and the cursed life. Look at the text. It's in verse 22. If you do all this for the son of man's sake, The Bible does not teach that works righteousness or asceticism, the mere, okay, I'm gonna fast and be hungry, I'm gonna live in the woods in a cave, I'm gonna deny myself and that's the path to glory. That's not what's happening here. Jesus is saying this, if you have seen in me as I preached and I healed the masses and I cast out the demons, If you have seen in Me when the power went out from Me and healed all those who were sick and crying and filled with tears. If you have seen in Me salvation and life. If you believe Me to be the Son of Man. You remember what He said when He healed the paralytic who was let down to the roof. The Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins. You remember what He said. When He healed on the Sabbath day, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. As a matter of fact, all through the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is going to say, I am the Son of Man. What is that? The second Adam, the Messiah, the Savior of sinners, the one that Daniel prophesied, who would rise to the throne of the ancient of days and be given an everlasting kingdom, dominion and glory from Tyre and Sidon and Judea and Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. Jesus says, if you have seen in me, in your sorry, crying, sinful state, salvation and life, you are blessed. Despite all the suffering that might come your way. For the Son of Man's sake, we give up our lives for Him. Why? Because He gave up His life for us. Because we love Him. The blessed, Jesus said, have found something in the Son of Man that makes them willing to forgo every pleasure and comfort in this life in order to reach heaven and glory in Christ. And this is the state of blessedness in life. You have Jesus. You have it all. This is why Paul at the end of Romans 8 can say, We are more than conquerors who loved us, even when we are being led like sheep to the slaughter. Killed all the day long for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ. Waves of those who say, I have seen something in him that I recognize as saving power for eternity. who I once was in my sins has been replaced by being in Him the Son of Man. That is the life of blessing. I'm like Paul. Everything that I had before I count as rubbish, dung, nothing, emptiness. What I want to know more of is Christ and the power of His resurrection. If by any means I might attain to the resurrection of the dead. I am living. I'm running in such a way as to attain the prize. I am leaving everything behind and responding to the upward call of God in Christ Jesus my Lord. Here is the doctrine of the two ways. The blessed life, the cursed life. A few things to learn from it. Again, the doctrine of the two ways set before you. Blessed are you, woe to you. I want to set before you something simple this morning. The Bible has always taught, always teaches, The gospel is very clear. There's a way that leads to life and there's a road that leads to destruction. There's a way of blessedness and a way of cursing. It's here in the text. It's interesting that God wanted Israel to be reminded of that in his covenant mercy. And Jesus wanted you to be reminded of that. Blessed are you, woe to you. There's a simplicity and sobriety to human destiny. His life calls you to choose for Christ, to follow Him. The Gospel calls you to. The Bible pulses with this final truth, that it's better to go in the house of mourning than the house of feasting, for this is man's end. You're going to die, it's appointed to die, and then the judgment, and then Ecclesiastes 12. Everything that you've ever done in public or in private, God will bring into judgment. And that's the moment that matters. That's the moment that determines destiny. And Jesus said, it is worth giving up everything in this world to have me, the son of man, and so the assurance of an everlasting destiny of glory. If you've never followed after him, believed in him, the call of the gospel this morning is to believe. And if you have, the language of our savior is, blessed are you. You may hunger and thirst and weep, be rejected now, but I will take you to glory. Second lesson, expect hardship following Jesus. Life doesn't always look like the hardships described here. Abraham was rich, Job was rich. Sometimes a Christian can live a very quiet life all the way to the end, but Here's a thought experiment that I often think about when I drive up my driveway. I say, Lord, if you took away my home, would you be enough? If you took away my freedom, Lord, would you be enough? If you took away my family, Lord, would you be enough? Lord, help me to see in you such glory, love, and power that I would always bless your name. Lord, help me to see the blessedness of following after you. Help me to hold loosely to this life and its things. Help me to embrace suffering as essential to your purposes and your kingdom as it was for Christ, your Son. Lord, help me to follow after you. Lord, I love the way of blessing. Help me live for eternity. J.C. Ryle says this when he meditated on this text. He said, there are thousands to the truth of the gospel, but if you ask them, give up this for Jesus' sake? They would not. Do we really believe that riches, life, and glory are found in Him and that they are nothing compared to the salvation or the praise of God? And the third thing to learn, what the blessed have found in the Son of Man, what is it that we found in Him that makes us willing to receive these words for this life? Have you ever watched somebody suffer and trust God at the same time? It's probably one of the most humbling things I have as a pastor. I walk into a situation where I cannot look upon it without being broken and weeping. And I hear words something like this, Peter, The Lord is good. I had lunch with someone on Friday and somebody lost his father when he was five years old. He lost his mother in his thirties. There's a period where he wandered from the Lord and he was telling me that the Lord was calling him back after his mother died. Six months later, his wife's mother died. They both died within weeks of finding out they had cancer just in the last two years. He said, I stood at my mother's grave and I remember my father, five years old, in the grave. And my wife was wrestling. Is the Lord good? And he said to me, I told her, he never makes mistakes. Trust him. When you hear those things, you realize that there's something bigger and greater that we find in Jesus Christ than all the sufferings of this world. John Payton, the missionary, you've probably heard of him. Three months after he arrived in the New Hebrides, his son Peter was born. 19 days later, his wife Mary died of a tropical fever. 36 days after he was born, his son Peter died. After they died, he buried them. And because he was on an island of cannibals, he had to sleep on the grave or else the unspeakable would happen. And he spent the rest of his life preaching the gospel there. And you ask, why? Because he understood this. Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who hunger, they shall be filled. Blessed are those who weep, for they shall laugh. And blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you, revile you, cast out your name as evil for the sake of the Son of Man, for Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. And so Jesus calls you this morning Go back to that final scene, the whole multitude sought to touch him, verse 19, for power went out from him and healed them all. The blessed in him have found forgiveness and life. Salvation in Jesus, nowhere else. He's the dividing line between the two ways. You have him, No matter what happens in this life, you still have everything. Or if you have everything the world has to offer and you don't have Him, what do you have? Nothing. Here is the simplicity of the Gospel. Let's pray. Lord our God, we think of how quickly our hearts grow cold to the things that matter most. How little we want to suffer, be inconvenienced to follow after You. which tells us how little we think of your own cross and passion and deprivation and tears in our place. And we pray, renew even through the preaching of your word, a heart of love for you. And Lord, a willingness to take up our cross, deny ourselves and follow you. And a trust that even in these things, your blessedness abounds for your people. And Lord, we pray for any who are tempted to wander, and to consider temporal blessings to be good enough for peace with you. Lord, we pray that all such would instead turn to Christ, the Son of Man, for life and a kingdom and salvation and heavenly glory and that reward. And we pray in Jesus' name, amen. And we go with God's blessing. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all, amen.