Seeing Christ

Matthew 5:1-12

What are the things that satisfy your thirst?

What are the things that satisfy your hunger?

Matthew 5, Jesus taught also that blessed are those who hunger and thirst for His righteousness, for they will be filled. Jesus loves to fill His people’s lives with joy. They will be filled with peace and joy and contentment. The world tells us the opposite.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). “This verse means people that go all out, not halfway, will see God,” says Matthew, age 9. Lukewarm Christians make Jesus nauseated to the point of vomiting.

Meekness is an attribute of human nature and behavior. It has been defined several ways: righteous, humble, teachable, and patient under suffering, long suffering willing to follow gospel teachings; an attribute of a true disciple.

Romans 8:28 famously says that God is causing all things to work together for good and then :29 tells us what that good is: “to become conformed to the image of His Son.” God is working everything together in your life, to make you more like Jesus. That is His goal for your life.

But what does it MEAN to be like Jesus? It doesn’t mean that we are going to look like Him physically. It means that God’s goal is for us to become like Jesus in our INNER CHARACTER. But what is that inner character like? How do we know if we are like Jesus? The character of Jesus is revealed to us here in these Beatitudes.

JESUS is the perfect man of the Beatitudes:
He was totally poor in spirit, depending on His Heavenly Father for everything.
He mourned not over His own sin, because He didn’t have any, but over the sins of the world. He grieved over the hardness of heart that He found. He wept over our sins.
He was meek, totally submitting to God’s will and not His own. He trusted Him and did what was right when others were hurting Him, especially at the cross.
He was hungry and thirsty for righteousness, memorizing scripture, praying all night and seeking His Father.
He was merciful: how often the gospels tell us He “saw, and FELT COMPASSION, and did something to provide the needs He encountered.”
He was absolutely pure in heart; “tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.’
As we saw in Ephesians 2, Jesus was the ultimate peacemaker, bringing God and man together through His death on the cross.
And He was persecuted by His enemies only for His righteousness.

When we look at these 8 Beatitudes, we see a “snapshot” of the perfect disciple God wants you to become —and if that snapshot looks familiar, it is because it is a snapshot of Jesus Christ Himself! And it is God’s goal for each of us as His disciples, to become like Him. Glory to God!