A traveler once told of going an entire day without food while leading a theology seminar. By the end of the day, he said, all the fascinating theological conversations his companions wanted to have meant absolutely nothing to him. He could not focus on anything but...
Meekness is one of the most misunderstood words in the Beatitudes. It is not weakness. It is not passivity. Meekness is quite compatible with great strength and ability. What distinguishes the meek is not the absence of power, but the absence of self-assertion. The...
This Beatitude has two dimensions, and both matter. The first is mourning over personal sin, grief over the ways we have fallen short of God’s holiness, the kind of godly sorrow Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 7:10 as producing repentance without regret. The...
The word behind ‘poor in spirit’ carries deep Old Testament roots. In the Psalms and Isaiah, the anawim were the oppressed poor whose condition had driven them to one conclusion: they had nothing left but God. Stripped of every other resource, every other...
Before Jesus ever uttered the word ‘blessed,’ Matthew spent an entire chapter telling us who was following Him. The crowds that gathered on the hillside to hear the Sermon on the Mount were not the religious elite or the socially powerful. They were the...
