Daily Devotional

Step back now and look at all four Beatitudes together as pieces of stained glass forming a single mosaic. You see someone who came from poor, insignificant circumstances. Someone who mourned deeply over the state of the world. Someone who did not throw His weight around even though He easily could have. Someone consumed with seeing righteousness done in the world. That is Jesus. He is not just the one who preached the Beatitudes from a hillside. He is the one the Beatitudes describe.

He was poor in spirit, living in total dependence on the Father. He mourned over Jerusalem, weeping over a city that would reject Him. He was meek and lowly in heart, His own description of Himself in Matthew 11:29. He hungered to do the will of the Father so completely that He called it His food in John 4:34. Every Beatitude with one exception describes something Jesus Himself embodied. He is the stained glass window these pieces create.

This is why the Beatitudes are not a to-do list. They are first a portrait of Christ, and second an invitation for those who cannot achieve them on their own to discover that the One who embodied them perfectly has given His righteousness to them. The sermon begins with beatitudes rather than imperatives because grace always precedes command. God pronounced blessing over this crowd of broken, discarded people before He ever made a single demand of them.

Just as God rescued Israel from Egypt before giving them the law at Sinai, not the other way around, Jesus opens His mouth on the hillside and blesses the broken before He asks anything of them. If you are here today and you feel like the unimportant, the beat down, the spiritually empty, aware of everything that is wrong with you and the world and powerless to fix any of it, Jesus sat down and opened His mouth and said your name first. That is the gospel. That is grace. And that is who you belong to.