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Most of us carry a ready answer to “I’ll be happy if…”—the promotion, the healed relationship, the life that finally settles into place. That hunger is exactly what Jesus addresses when he sits down on a hillside in Matthew 5 and declares blessed the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, and the persecuted—people whose lives look nothing like what we’d put in that blank.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon describes Jesus calling blessed those who mourn, hunger for righteousness, and face persecution—people who don’t feel blessed in the moment. How does resting in God’s promises differ from the happiness we naturally pursue through promotions, possessions, or comfort? Where do you find yourself tempted to fill in “I’ll be happy if…” with worldly things?
Which Beatitude most challenges your understanding of what it means to be blessed, and why? What would it look like to actually live out that Beatitude in your daily life?
The preacher uses the image of a casserole—individual ingredients that are ordinary or even unappetizing alone, but beautiful when mixed together. How does this shape your understanding of the church as the body of Christ? What does it mean to trust the “baking” process when the church or your own spiritual growth doesn’t yet feel complete?
Jesus teaches that we are ambassadors of his kingdom sent into a world that rejected him. What does it look like to represent Christ in your family, workplace, school, or neighborhood—especially when “being blessed” doesn’t mean everything is smooth or comfortable?
The congregation was invited to write down prayers they’re waiting on God to answer and place them in the cornerstone. What unanswered prayer are you currently bringing before the Lord, and how does waiting for God’s answer—rather than seeing immediate results—connect to the blessedness Jesus describes in the Beatitudes?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
What a joy it is to be together, to celebrate in the house of the Lord, to celebrate the goodness of our God who gathers us. And here we are tonight, we’re beginning a new church in addition to a new series. We’ve been meeting online, but here we are gathered in person. As we’ve been talking over these months, trying to think, where should we start? Where would it be good for us to begin in studying God’s word? It seemed like an appropriate place would be where Jesus gathered his disciples and started to teach them, what does it mean to be a disciple of this kingdom? What does it mean to be what would ultimately be known as a Christian? What does it look like?
And we see that described, that kingdom that we’re called to bring forth as the ambassadors of his kingdom, described in Matthew chapter five, the Sermon on the Mount. And so we’re going to be looking at the first portion of that over the coming weeks as we look at what are known as the Beatitudes. And they’re going to sound really familiar if you’re not familiar with them already, as we read them, because we’ve heard these sayings said over and over again, and it speaks to the values that God has, but our human hearts don’t always have.
So as we begin, let’s go ahead and as we read God’s word in preparation for having it applied to our hearts here tonight, when we begin this series, would you please stand for the reading of God’s word?
Matthew chapter five, verse one: Thus seeing the crowd, he went up on the mountain. When he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and he taught them, saying:
He said, he didn’t have an AV system, but here’s what he said: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who went before you.
You may be seated. Let’s pray.
Fathers, we come before your word tonight and we reflect on it. Would you apply the truth of your word to our hearts? Through the power of your Holy Spirit, would you help us to see where in our own hearts we fail to have the values that you have called us to have? Where our hearts value things other than what you value? Lord, would you turn our hearts towards you? Would you apply your gospel to our hearts this day? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So, here we are. Most of you have at least been following a little bit of this journey to start Little Hills and obviously all of you have been following it at least a tiny bit because you’re here tonight. Unless you were just driving down the street and you thought, oh, there’s an open door, I guess I’ll walk in.
But if you’ve been following it, you know that there have been a lot of ingredients that have come together. We see some of those tonight. We see the batteries in my battery pack that clearly gave up the ghost. We see microphones. We see chairs. We see people in those chairs. And you think about what we celebrated last week. We celebrated Easter. Of course, we were celebrating the resurrection and the joy of that resurrection. But I bet most of you, after we left church, you went someplace and you had an Easter dinner, right? At least for me, one of my favorite things are the casseroles that come with Easter dinner. I love holiday casseroles, the potato casserole, the green bean casserole, the veggie casseroles, all those sorts of casseroles. They’re all so delicious.
And the ingredients in them are good, but they’re so much better when you mix them all together, right? And some of them more so than others. Like, I’m not really a big fan of cream of mushroom soup by itself. But you put that in green bean casserole, and it seems like a taste of heaven on earth. You take those ingredients and you mix them together, and something beautiful happens.
As Jesus brought together his disciples, you have all these disciples, and we learn about them in the Gospels. They are flawed individuals. They are individuals that don’t really get what’s going on oftentimes. Some of them more so than others. You get all the way to Judas. He betrays Jesus ultimately. You have some really interesting ingredients that Jesus gathers together, and that’s just the 12.
On this Sermon on the Mount, we actually see more than that. We see the larger group of disciples, those who were at least sort of curious. Who is this Jesus guy? You know, he says he’s a rabbi. Should I listen to him? Does he have anything worth listening to? They’re asking those questions.
What Jesus was doing in the meantime while they were asking all those questions is Jesus was taking them together to form something far more beautiful than they were by themselves. And he pulls them aside. He pulls them out of the larger crowd. These people who are saying, this sounds interesting. I want to know who Jesus is. I want to know what he has to say. And he’s forming them into something beautiful.
We say, wow, isn’t that amazing? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could know what it was like to have Jesus gather us together and to teach us? Guess what, we can. That’s the amazing thing when you think about the church today, what we’re here doing today. What we do every time the body of Christ around the world gathers, we’re experiencing part of what was happening when Jesus gathered the disciples, that larger crowd of people who were interested in Jesus on that mountain.
And we’re told explicitly that that’s what Jesus does with us. Take a look at 1 Corinthians chapter 12. He says, this is Paul, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit we were baptized by one body into one body. Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.”
Think about that for a moment. We’re told that when Jesus gathers us together, when he calls us into his fellowship, when we’re baptized into his fellowship, what happens? Well, he starts to put us into that casserole called the body of Christ. And whatever was the most delicious thing you had last week, this is far more delicious.
And this wasn’t the first time the Lord had done this either. If you think about it, we go back into the Old Testament, we go back to Exodus, and what do we see way back in Exodus? We have the Israelites, they’re enslaved, God’s people are enslaved, and God says to them that he’s going to give them freedom, he’s going to call them out, and so he does.
And just like the disciples, and just like us today, it’s an interesting group. You look at those Israelites and you think, why would God call these people? They don’t get it. They grumble all the time. They don’t know what’s going on. What did God know? God knew what was going on. He knew that he was going to take these ingredients that seemed kind of odd in just pieces, he was going to pull them together so they could experience what it was to be something truly beautiful and to show that beauty of God’s love to the world.
And then Jesus, as he expands that mission beyond just Israel to the entirety of the world, he does the same thing. He gathers them together, and he gathers us together. He’s doing that same thing. Each of us is an ingredient. Maybe one of us is the can of green beans, and another one of us is the can of mushroom soup, and another one of us is the turkey’s French fried onions that just complete the dish. But as great as French fried onions are, they’re not very good by themselves.
And that’s what Paul’s talking about here. We need everyone. And that’s what Jesus is doing here. He’s bringing together that variety to be able to ultimately do what God has called his people to do.
So that’s the first part of what he’s doing here, is he’s beginning to launch into this sermon that’s going to outline what the kingdom looks like, but the second thing he’s going to do is he’s going to summarize what that kingdom looks like.
Because here’s the other challenge, and this is a challenge for these people. They’ve been waiting for a messiah. They’ve been waiting for someone to come and to teach them and to say, I’m the messiah, I’m the answer to these prophecies. I’m going to come. But here’s what they were waiting for. They were waiting for someone who was going to come and was going to overthrow the Roman government. They were waiting for someone who was going to take the values that seem to be important to the world, the power of the world.
He was going to take that, and he was going to apply it in a sanctified way, in a holy way. He was going to turn that worldly power into something used as a tool for God.
That’s not exactly what Jesus does, is it?
We’re in 2022, and of course, we’ve been hearing all kinds of coverage already of the upcoming midterm elections. And then we’re already starting to hear people speculating, who’s going to run in two years? Who’s going to be the victor in the Republican primary? And then there’s all the intrigue. Is there going to be a challenger in the Democratic primary? And we know that there’ll be wall-to-wall coverage in a couple years. Who is going to get this nomination? And then we’ll see the battling heads between the two parties. Who’s going to get it?
And of course, while technically it happens there, it’s all decided by the time you get to the conventions. But what happens at the convention? The nominees come out, and they give that speech, possibly the speech of their lifetime, and they’re going to outline, here is my vision for the United States. Here’s what we need to do. Here’s what’s going to make the country wonderful, and everyone’s going to be happy, and everything’s going to be good, and the music swells, and of course, you want to vote for me because everything’s going to be wonderful.
You know what’s interesting about what they always do? They always appeal to the things that the world values. Depending on which party, they appeal to different things that the world values, but they always appeal to the things that the world values. And we’re going to take this power, and we’re going to use it in the way that we think is best.
Now, as the people gather around Jesus, here’s this man who the whisperer says that maybe he’s the Messiah. They’re waiting. What’s the king going to say? Jesus says, I’m not going to say what you think I’m going to say. Listen, just again, listen to these words. Really listen to what he says in these Beatitudes.
Verse three. He says, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
See, we’re building up here. The swelling, everyone’s cheering, right? Persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you, falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for they so persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Imagine the crowd. They’re gathering, they’re cheering. Here’s Jesus, here’s this man who we think might be our king. Imagine what’s going through their head in that moment.
And there are several of these moments in Jesus’ teaching ministry where they come and they’re here to hear him teach. He’s not saying what they want to hear. They’re looking for someone who looks like a teacher. And Jesus does it to an extent there.
We’re told in verses one and two, as Matthew’s setting up the setting, that Jesus goes on this mountaintop and he sits down. It’s no mistake, it’s no coincidence that Jesus goes to a mountain and sits down there. There’s several interesting things that are happening there.
You see, when Moses was gathering the people through the Lord’s power and God comes and he’s going to give the instructions, we know this, right, we’ve seen Charles and Heston, right? What happens? Well, Moses goes up the mountain and he meets the Lord up in the mountain. He comes down with the teaching.
Well, Jesus takes his disciples to a mountain, probably not a huge mountain, just a little hill, sort of fitting here at Little Hills Church. But he takes them up there and he sits down. Now, why does he sit down? Well, the rabbis of the time would have sat down to teach. We often stand when we’re teaching in our culture today. But if you were a person of authority who was going to teach about something in that day, you would sit down. So he sits down.
So you have all this imagery going along. It’s sort of like, I put on this jacket today. I know it’s warm, kind of warm in here with the sun, but I had this on for a reason. I remember getting this sport jacket. I was so excited. I was starting to teach at London Wood. I wanted to teach a college class so badly. I was really excited about that.
And you know, one of the things you have to have if you’re going to be a professor, you need the jacket with the patches on, right? You have to fit the part. You have to look like a teacher. I wanted to go in there and look like a teacher. Well, Jesus looks like a teacher. But he doesn’t sound like the teaching that they expect.
And so he gets into a point, but now he’s going to challenge them. He’s going to challenge them to think about what does it really look like if you want to follow me? He doesn’t say, you were wrong. You were wrong to think that I’m the Messiah. You were wrong to think I’m talking about kingdom. I’m going to tell you, the kingdom of God is near. It’s coming. I’ll tell you all kinds of things about it.
But as he gives that, as one commentator said, a spiritual charter for the kingdom. He says, this is what the kingdom looks like.
It doesn’t look like what they imagined. It doesn’t look much like it at all. But here’s what he says. The people who follow me, the people who are part of this kingdom are following for a purpose. And that purpose is the inverse of what you think it often is. It’s the inverse of what the world says is important.
You’re coming to me because you want me to solve everything that is unsettled in your lives. You want me to get rid of those Roman occupiers who make your lives miserable and tax you like crazy and can occupy your houses. You want me to do that. You want me to make you successful. You want me to make everything okay.
How many of us would like God to make everything okay? Yeah, I would too, yeah. And that’s a good thing. We should want God to make everything okay. That’s not a wrong thing, but the problem is we tend to think of it in the wrong way. We tend to aim for the wrong goal.
You see, the people who think everything’s okay in the moment Jesus says, in that moment, the people who are in power, the people who think everything’s okay are the people who think everything is going their way. It’s going their way in the moment, but they don’t value the kingdom of God. They’re not experiencing what the kingdom of God looks like.
You know who does? Well, these people that he lists out, these people that don’t sound like people who are very blessed or happy. Depending on your translation, it may say blessed or blessed, it may say happy, but the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, well, the merciful just get beat up, right? Pure in heart, peacemakers.
Have you ever tried to actually bring peace in a situation that isn’t? You know, that’s not necessarily the place you often really enjoy being. It doesn’t feel very blessed in the moment.
Jesus says, those are the people. Those are the people who are blessed. Those are the people who are truly happy.
Ask yourself this question, if you would. I’ll be happy if… let’s leave a blank there.
What would you put into that answer?
I’ll be happy if. If I get that promotion at work, I’ll be happy. If I can get, I’ve been searching for a house, I can’t seem to find one because I’m not sure where I’m going with it. I’ve been searching for a house, I can’t seem to find one because everyone seems to buy the houses before they go up on the market. If I can get that house, I’ll be happy. If I can retire, I’ll be happy. God will heal me, I’ll be happy. If I can win the lottery, I’ll be happy, right? I’ll have all kinds of money.
All those worries, whatever they might be, they’ll be just erased, right? We probably all have those answers, those answers we can fit in there. I know I do.
Jesus challenges us to think, are we putting the right things into that blank? The things that truly lead to lasting happiness. Because here’s the thing with all those things. You get the promotion at work and you realize, wait a second, I’m hardly getting any more pay and now I’m working 20 more hours a week. I buy that house and the roof leaks. I win the lottery. Well, if you look at the statistics, it doesn’t actually bode very well for happiness.
Now, to an extent, we can say, well, this sounds okay, though. I get it. I shouldn’t value those things that I often value that aren’t really what are important to the Lord. We can go along with it for a while. In fact, if we turn a couple chapters to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, it seems to work.
Matthew 7:28 says, “When Jesus finished these sayings, the crowd was astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority and not as their scribes.” So he has this sport jacket on with the people and he’s teaching them as one who has authority and everyone says, oh yeah, he seems to have authority.
And we’re told there’s a crowd. He’d separated from the crowd, but the crowd seems to have gathered again. They seem to maybe have been building. Some commentators think that the Sermon on the Mount is actually a series of segments from a multi-day session of preaching. If that’s the case, it’s quite possible that the first day people heard this and said, Jesus, this Jesus is a really dynamic preacher. You should go and hear him and they bring friends back. And then the next day, Jesus preaches some more and people bring more friends back. And so, crowd’s building up. Everything looks really good.
But here’s the thing.
If you go into the next few chapters of Matthew, it doesn’t keep building up. On the other hand, what happens? Well, those scribes and the Pharisees, the ones that the crowd says, they don’t teach with the same authority that Jesus does. Well, they don’t like that Jesus teaches with such authority and people are saying that. But more than that, they start to try to win the hearts and the minds of the people back.
And we see in chapters eight through twelve a repeated pattern of people rejecting Jesus and attacking Jesus and seeking to undermine him. Scribes come and say he doesn’t have authority. They’re trying to rip that jacket off him and say, look, he doesn’t have authority. He’s just a guy, has some weird ideas. Let’s teach you the things that you normally want to hear. Let’s talk about a Messiah that makes sense to us. Let’s talk about how things ought to be.
What does Jesus challenge us to do? What is he going to be challenging us to do these next weeks as we go through the Beatitudes? Think about each of them individually. We’re gonna go one by one because each one is packed with so much meaning. What is he saying in those?
He’s saying to us, if you want to experience the real kingdom of God, if you want to see everything genuinely made okay at the end of time, then what you should be looking for right now, what’s going to bring you blessedness right now, happiness right now, isn’t that everything is made right in this moment.
So you’re gonna be my ambassador declaring that I am making everything right. I am making everything right.
So this is the problem that’s been a challenge for us as God’s people throughout all time. If you think about the Israelites, why do they grumble? Well, everything isn’t right in this moment and we had better food in Egypt and why are we out here in this wilderness? We’re thirsty, we’re hungry. Yeah, we were slaves, but we had good food.
The disciples, as they watched Jesus, and they ultimately, we just got fully weak. We just went through it and we think about how the disciples, they run. Why do they run? Because they don’t want to follow someone who’s just gonna be taken to the cross and killed. That’s not what a king looks like.
Of course, we know as we read on, the disciples come back, 12, and many others. They start to experience true blessedness, not what they probably envisioned when they started to follow Jesus, but what it actually means.
One of the reasons I love reading the letters from Peter. I’ve really fallen in love with those epistles over the last few years. I didn’t spend much time in them before, but you know what’s really beautiful about reading the letters that Peter writes? Because we know Peter really well in the Gospels. We know this man who always wants to charge ahead and he’s right there with Jesus, but ultimately denies him three times. He’s confident in himself. He’s confident in what it looks like to be someone of the world who wants to be godly.
What do we see when we look at older Peter in those epistles? We see a very different man. We see a man who understands it’s not going to be by the sword that we’re going to win right now, that God’s going to win. It’s going to be by being a nation of priests. He goes back and he quotes that language from Exodus 19. He goes back to it and says, all of you, all of you who follow Jesus, you know who you are? You’re priests. You’re those who show God to the world.
We don’t use that term in that sense very much anymore. Think ambassador. What are you if you’re an ambassador in some foreign country? You get a call tomorrow from President Biden. He says, I’m sending you to France. You’re going to be the ambassador to France. Well, what’s your job? Well, your job is to represent this country to France, represent our interests to France, hear about France’s interests and bring them back.
That’s what we are. We go into the world. Each of us goes into the world. We’re going to drive home in a few minutes. We’re going to go home. We’re going to be around our neighbors. We’re going to be around those whom we work with. We’re going to be around our families. We’re going to be around those at school.
We’re ambassadors to them. The blessedness that Jesus is talking about here, if you start to think about it, what’s it describing? It’s describing what it looks like when we actually represent Jesus to the world and the world doesn’t like it.
Why are we blessed? Because we’re resting in Jesus. We’re not resting in what we can accomplish. We’re not resting in worldly success that we can point to in this moment. We’re resting in the promises of God that God’s kingdom is coming. And the fact that we’re gathered here together, that this casserole is in the oven, we can smell the aroma when we gather.
Wonderful fragrance, that wonderful smell of the ingredients melding together into something delicious. And you know what, if you pull out that green bean casserole the minute after it goes in the oven, it wouldn’t be awful, but it wouldn’t be very tasty.
And a lot of times we look at the church in this moment and we say, church isn’t very tasty. How can this be blessed? How can following Jesus in this way be blessed?
It says I am making all things new and we’re called to wait as that oven continues to bake as the Spirit works in us and transforms us.
And in the interim, why are we blessed? Why are we happy in this moment? It’s because even if we’re the poor in spirit, even if we’re those who are hungering and thirsting for righteousness rather than fully experiencing it just now, we’re those that know that Jesus is going to bring it into being. We know what he accomplished on the cross, the thing that brought those 12 back minus one.
See, I think the challenge for Judas is that he failed like all the rest of them, but he didn’t recognize that the casserole was still cooking. He looked at it and said, okay, I’m gonna try to get this to come about. We don’t know exactly what was motivating Judas, but in some way or another, he thought he was going to bring about good. That doesn’t work. He goes and gives back the money. That doesn’t work. He didn’t realize the casserole was still baking. He goes and ultimately hangs himself rather than going and repenting like Peter does. He doesn’t experience what happens.
That’s what we’re called to do.
I’m gonna have Chris pass out some note cards, and also I think she has some pens. You may also have a pen in the back of your chair. And we’re gonna do a little something. We’re gonna be dedicating our cornerstone in a few minutes, and I want something to remind us of what it actually looks like to be blessed in this way.
You know what it often looks like? It looks like coming and bringing our prayers before the Lord and recognizing they’re not immediately answered in the moment, but we know that God is going to answer prayer, that God is faithful, that he hears our prayers. Sometimes we pray and pray and pray for years. We wait and wait and wait.
Blessed is the one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness. Blessed are the poor in spirit. We take these things before the Lord.
And so I’m gonna ask you, if you would, would you write down something you’ve been praying about, you’re waiting on the Lord for? If you put it on that card, you can fold it up. You don’t have to put your name on it. You can if you want, but you don’t have to.
We’re gonna take those prayers and we’re gonna put them in our cornerstone.
Why are we going to do that? Because we’re the assembled group of ambassadors going and waiting and hungering for what the Lord is going to do. And we’re praying for each other. We’re going to pray for our community and we’re going to serve our community. They might know what it is to truly be blessed.
As we do that, we’re gonna have those prayers in that cornerstone reminding us, not that everything is done and everything is comfortable, but that God is still working. That we can still place those things before him and we’re blessed because we know he is with us in that inner working, in that waiting as we wait for things to happen.
Blessed are those in God’s kingdom. Yet we feel weak. We feel weak. We feel weary. We think, God sent us out, but now we’re just facing our cold, dark world.
Look at what he says in Matthew 28, the Great Commission. “Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
He sends them out into a world that’s been rejecting him, both in his time on earth, and then they crucify him, and then they persecute and kill most of the disciples. That’s the world he sends them out into, and he sends us out into, but here’s the thing we shouldn’t miss in that, and this is why that blessedness exists in there, in this moment. I am with you always, until the end of the age.
If you trusted in Jesus, that’s that promise for you too, and if you haven’t trusted in Jesus, my prayer would be, you’d pray, you’d pray tonight that Jesus would be your Lord and Savior, that you would experience that blessedness. It won’t make everything easy and wonderfully smooth in the moment. As we face life, it sure is a lot more blessed. We’ve got spirit with us. I believe that’s what ultimately turned those disciples around. Nothing else could.
But they went out, and they did everything that didn’t make sense to them earlier on when Jesus was teaching. Why did they do it? They did it because the spirit was with them.
Jesus did something else to remind them of that. Hopefully you got a little communion packet when you came in. If not, they’re right back in the back corner, by the door there, on the cornerstone, actually.
Think about what Jesus does the night that he was betrayed. He gathers his disciples for a meal. And in that moment, I think they probably felt really happy. They felt blessed. They’re with their teacher, their rabbi, and they’re celebrating Passover, and things are really good. I think we’re about to turn really bad.
But in that moment, Jesus took the bread, and he broke it, and he gave it to them. He said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And like Banner, after supper, he took the cup. He said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for you into the remission of sins. Do this as often as you drink of it, in remembrance of me.”
Why did he do that? He did that that we might receive the benefits of his sacrifice for us, that we might be nourished by his body and blood, that we might be strengthened and reminded that his spirit is applying those benefits to us, so that as we go into that world, and it doesn’t feel very blessed, that we might experience blessedness, not because everything’s smooth, but because he’s with us.
Now, this is an invitation to disciples, and if you’ve been on the fence tonight, you’re not sure who Jesus is, then we would ask that you would let these elements pass you. Not forever, though. My prayer is that tonight would be the last night they ever pass you, because you say, I want to be blessed. I want to experience what it is to have the Savior with me. And I know I would love to pray with you, Melanie would, Jim would, anyone here who has that hope would love to pray with you tonight. It doesn’t take any particular person. It just takes coming before our Savior, placing your sins before him, confessing him as your Lord.
But the next time we come together and we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we might take this little wafer, this little cup of juice that remind us of the work of the Spirit in us, and apply the benefits of that work of the Spirit to us.
Lord, so often we don’t understand what it looks like to be blessed. We don’t understand what it looks like to be happy. We see the things of the world, and we think that would make us happy.
You call us to something different. You call us to trust in you. You call us to rest in you.
Lord, would you strengthen us? Come before the table. We don’t come before a perfect Lord. Lord, do you know our hearts? We would never come before your table if we waited till we were perfect. We would go through this life without this nourishment that you give, and yet we know that you invite us, just as you invited those disciples, anyone who trusts in you that these elements might be applied to us and strengthen us.
So we pray by the power of the Holy Spirit that you would apply the benefits of your body and blood to us this night. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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