Matthew chapter 5, verses 1 through 16, is a familiar text to us here at Faith Baptist Church. In the years that I've been in the ministry, I have no idea how many times I have preached on this text here and elsewhere. I'm sure it must be somewhere over 100. A very familiar text of Scripture to me personally, and I trust to many of you as well. I'm sure that some of our new people may not have heard our teaching on this particular passage of Scripture. And even for those who have, There are still rich treasures here that we have not yet found, which we will perhaps search for today. But as we continue our study of the book of Matthew, coming to this most important section of the book called the Sermon on the Mount, here in the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, we find the essence of the message and ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. He gives us in these few verses Not just an introduction to this sermon, but an introduction to everything he would say. And something that you and I desperately need to know to help us and guide us in our daily lives. Matthew chapter 5, verses 1 through 16. And seeing the multitude, he went up into a mountain. And when he was set, his disciples came unto him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, they should be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. You're the salt of the earth. But if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick. And it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light So shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, which is in heaven. Heavenly Father, we ask today that you would open our eyes to the truth of your scripture, that you would reveal to us here what we need to know from this passage of scripture. Lord, we thank you and praise you for the simple truth that we find here for the complex problems of life. And I pray that you would guide us into obedience and understanding this morning. I pray that every person here would have removed from his mind those distractions that would keep him from thinking for these few moments about what we find in this text. That regardless of how tired he might be, he would stay awake and listen, and that his life would be changed. Help me to preach clearly and to the point. In Jesus' name, amen. I want you to work with me this morning. I want every one of you to do whatever you need to do to listen carefully, because what we're going to do today is look through the keyhole of truth and see here a panoramic view from this narrow, simple view, our perspective, and see a key to everything that God has to say to us today. This is a pivotal text in the Scripture, a wonderful truth. And to help us understand the importance of it, Let me give an illustration. Learning to live is like learning to drive in many respects. Everybody thinks it's easy before they know how to do it. And then once they learn the basics, develop their skills, and obey the law, they find out it really is easy. But if they ignore the basics, don't develop their skills, and don't obey the law, they can do tremendous damage. You can learn an awful lot about the way you live your life by watching the way you drive. There are some people who never allow themselves enough time to get there. And they rush to and fro, in and out of traffic, stop and start, taking chances, cutting corners, breaking all the rules. There are other people who ignore their car. They never consider maintenance until they hear a strange noise or until their car breaks down. There are some today who have just had a serious wreck. Their fenders are bent. There's steam coming out from under the hood. They're going to have to call a tow truck and get some help. And there are others who, though they haven't run into a bridge or another car someplace, are totally spinning out of control with no idea how they'll ever get control again. Then there are some who are keeping their distance from other cars and driving along at a safe speed and quietly, calmly using that ability to drive in the right way to get them from where they are to where they need to be. People live their lives in those same ways. And I suspect that all of those different ways of driving are represented by the living of people who are here in this room today. The problems and pressures of life confuse us just like the problems and pressures of traffic. But Christ's message here in these verses has given us essential truth for living. Therefore, you must remember it and live your life by it if you're going to be what God wants you to be and do what God wants you to do. Now, in these first two verses, he sets the stage for the entire sermon. And there we see that God's message is expressed in his word. And because God's message is expressed in his word, you have to listen to it. He says here that when he saw the multitudes, or seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain, and when he was set, his disciples came unto him, and he opened his mouth and taught them saying, Now, some of you who were here over 10 years ago remember that I preached a 10-message series on the first 12 verses of this text today. And I'm going to resist the temptation to repeat all the things that I said over those 10 weeks in the 25 minutes or so that we have this morning left. But verse 1 tells us that God offers His wisdom to everyone. He saw the multitudes He went up into a mountain. In other words, He put Himself in a place where He could communicate what He had to say to anybody that wanted to listen to it. And that's exactly what you and I have today. God has communicated what He wants you to know right here in a place that anybody who wants to know it can find it. The problem that Christian people have, and certainly the non-Christian people have today, is that they ignore or forget what God has had to say. And even those of us who know it well, because of our fallen condition, forget and ignore regularly. And when we have a wreck, as it were, in our spiritual lives, we make the same excuses that people make to the police officer. I didn't see it coming. I didn't know. I lost control, or whatever it is that we say. We don't plan not to have problems because we make the assumption that they're not going to happen. And that is one of the most dangerous things that you and I could ever do. Nobody would ignore the Word of God unless he thought he didn't really need it. And there are those of you who have ignored the Word of God this week. and you're setting yourself up for a problem if you haven't already had one. And tragically, when you have your problem, you're going to run around frantically in all directions looking for a solution somewhere else than the simple teaching of the Word of God. And God gives us those circumstances to teach us to return to Him. He not only offers His wisdom to everyone, He opens His wisdom to those who are teachable. It says His disciples came to Him. Those who come to the Lord to hear what He has to say and how it will change their lives are people with teachable hearts. Now, I know that most of you either have teachable hearts or think you have teachable hearts. You're saying, now, Pastor, I wouldn't have even come to church this morning if I didn't want to learn something. Well, I know you may think that's true, but I know for a fact it's not true of some of you. Some of you here this morning who do not yet have the right to determine what you do in every instance in your lives because you're still under your parents' authority or you're embarrassed by the conventions of your relationships, you came this morning because someone made you come or because you would rather suffer through the service than suffer the consequences of not coming. But there are some of you in this room this morning who did not come to listen and learn and change and grow. And you will go apart from here somehow feeling like, okay, all right, I paid my dues. I went to church. Now leave me alone. And that's the attitude that you have. And because you have that attitude, you're going to have to go out of here and have a wreck in your spiritual life in order for God to get your attention. And tragically, when some of you have your wreck, you're going to blame it on somebody else. Now, listen to the Lord this morning. Be teachable. And consider what He says. Be a disciple and come to Him with an open mind. I don't mean open-minded in the sense of believing everything. I mean ready to receive God's truth into your heart and mind this morning so He can change you. There is this phenomenon that I think maybe we could call, since we're using this driving illustration this morning, the lane-changing Christian. Have you ever noticed somebody in traffic? He's always changing lanes. I've been flying out of Atlanta some recently instead of out of the Greenville Spartanburg Airport because it's so much cheaper. But driving from here to the Atlanta Airport almost makes it not worth it. If you go down in the morning or if you come back in the evening, you have to go through Atlanta rush hour traffic. Now, if God were to call me there, I would obey Him. But I pray He never does. I cannot imagine having to drive in that twice a day. Even listening to tapes, or trying to do something to make that a productive, or praying, whatever, to make it a productive time. There are some seriously angry people that live down there. And they all have cars, and they're all on the highway. It's an amazing phenomenon. And what you have to do is just get a good tape, listen to the Bible, listen to a sermon, something that will edify and bless your heart, and stay away from other people as much as you possibly can, which is not really easy to do, and don't get in a hurry. That's the only way to survive that, I think. I saw a guy the other day when I was coming back from Atlanta that must have passed me 30 times. He changed lanes, left, right, over, back. You know, there's four, five, six lanes to choose from, and he was in all of them. And every time there'd be a little space, he'd jump in it. And then he was passing me, and I thought, you know, the guy passes me, and then somehow he's in some other lane, and he gets behind me again. Just pick a lane, hunker down, and relax, fella. That was my thinking. This guy was getting himself all worked up. And at one point he got behind me. And I thought he was trying to get in the trunk. Now there are some people who live their Christian lives that way. They're just constantly changing lanes. One place and then the other. They go from job to job. They go from house to house. They go from church to church. Sometimes they go from wife to wife. Searching, looking, trying to find something. Let me recommend a Bible study to you sometime. I mean this. This will help you. Sometimes I know when I make these kinds of assignments, the only people that do it are the ones that already know the truth. But some of you here need to do this. You need to get your concordance, or if you have some kind of electronic media for studying the Bible, and plug in the words, to and fro, and look them up. 25 times you'll find that phrase in the Bible, and you'll learn some amazing things about human nature if you'll do that. It appears many times in the book of Job, talking about Satan, talking about Job. To and fro. And you'll find there the scriptural use of that phrase is usually in the context of searching or panic. And that's what people are doing today. Let me show you something here in Ephesians chapter 4. Would you turn there quickly? Ephesians chapter 4, verse 14. Actually, we've got to go back to the beginning of the sentence, which is in verse 11. He gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers. All of these are offices ordained of God for the teaching of the scripture. And he says it's for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ. Till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God into a perfect man and to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine by the slight of men and cunning craftiness whereby they lie and wait to deceive," and so on. That we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine. God wants us to grow up and be responsible people and not be tossed to and fro, back and forth, lane-changing all the time in our Christian lives, but to do what God wants us to do. I've been taking some courses recently in counseling and preaching, and I really see that God is doing something here in our church over the last three, maybe four years. There is a sifting process going on. Those who really want to change and grow are beginning to take hold and change and grow. And those who don't want to change and grow are becoming increasingly frustrated and distant with our ministry. Some are blaming it on God, some are blaming it on me, some are blaming it on you. The church isn't as friendly. The pastor doesn't care about my problems. I believe the Lord is leading me to another church. Those are the kinds of things we're hearing. But what we're seeing is people who don't want transparency and accountability, but are looking for comfort without having to change, are becoming uneasy here. And I got to tell you something. I rejoice at that. Because God doesn't want us to stagnate in the sit and soak mode and never get around to serving him with our lives. My daughter, Debbie, Her husband, of course, was here recently. And she said to me, she says, you know, Dad, up where we are, everybody really respects you if you have a college education. And she said, I'm so thankful that I have a master's in counseling because people are willing to listen to me when I tell them all they need is the Bible. Isn't that interesting? One of these books is called Our Sufficiency in Christ. Let me read this to you. There may be no more serious threat to the life of the church today than the stampede to embrace the doctrines of secular psychology. They are a mass of human ideas that Satan has placed in the church as if they were powerful, life-changing truths from God. Most psychologists epitomize neo-gnosticism, claiming to have secret knowledge for solving people's real problems. That's what the Gnostics believed. that only those who had this secret knowledge, these special insights, could ever really understand what God was saying in the Bible. There are even those psychologists who claim to perform a therapeutic technique they call Christian counseling, but in reality are using secular theory to treat spiritual problems with biblical references tacked on. The result is that pastors, biblical scholars, teachers of scripture, and caring believers using the Word of God are disdained as naive, simplistic, and altogether inadequate counselors. Listen to this. Bible reading and prayer are commonly belittled as pat answers, incomplete solutions for someone struggling with depression or anxiety. Scripture the Holy Spirit, Christ, prayer, and grace. Those are the traditional solutions Christian counselors have pointed people to. But the average Christian today has come to believe that none of them really offers the cure for people's problems. And the truth is there are people in this room today who when they hear me say over and over and over Read your Bible. Pray every day. It's like eating and breathing for your soul. You sit back and say, yes, pastor, but don't you really understand my problem? My problem is much more complex than that. The complex problem you suffer from, my friend, is unbelief. And that complicates everything. And the reason your problems seem complex is because you've blinded yourself with a simple solution by feeding yourself on the thinking of the world. Whether you've studied psychology or whether you've merely saturated your mind with the entertainment philosophies of the world, you've missed it. And the simple truth of scripture is the answer. And the Lord sat down and spoke. He opened his mouth and his word was his solution. Because God's message is expressed in His Word, you must listen to it. And then we come to what's called the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes here list not for us a menu of options from which we can select any one or more in order to have happiness, but rather a series of steps of growth, one leading to the next. And because we've done so much intense study and preaching on this particular text, I'm not going to develop it greatly today, other than to say that there are three important things taught here in verses three through nine. The first is that transparency is how you begin. Now, listen, not only because God's message is expressed in his word, must you listen to it, but because God's message is the essence of wisdom, you must listen to it. And the first step is that transparency is how you begin. Remember from Genesis chapter 3, the two consequences of man's fall from fellowship with God? The very first thing that Adam and Eve did when they sinned against God was they hid. They hid from God. Now psychologists can call that repression and regression and denial and all the rest of it. But the simple fact is sinful man tries to cover up his sin. That's what it means. And you and I have to admit our sin and admit our fallen nature and be honest with God about what we are and what we have done if we're ever going to get any help from God. Now Adam and Eve tried to cover their nakedness with a hiding place and with the fig leaves of human effort. And human history is the 6,000-year record of man's search for a lasting fig leaf. That's all it is. And it won't work. God has the answer. And we have to come naked and open unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do if we are going to get any help from God. Not with our own coverings. not with their own effort. Transparency is how you begin. And there are two aspects to transparency. The first of the Beatitudes says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. If you want to even enter into this thing called the kingdom or the realm of rule of the Lord, if you want to put yourself under the authority of the king, you have to start with the recognition of the poverty of your own soul. There is nothing in you and of you to recommend you for God's favor. We do not deserve God's love. This attitude that says, God loves you so much that He did the following for you, therefore you must be a wonderful person. You have such worth. You have so much worth as a person that Jesus died on the cross for you. You got that backwards, friend. Jesus didn't die on the cross because you have worth. You have worth because Jesus died on the cross. He attributes worth to us. He didn't see worth in us. You see? That's psychological thinking. We have poverty. We have worthlessness. Some people sniff at this and call it worm theology. You're just a worm. And I've heard people scoff at that and ridicule it and say it's one of the most damaging things you can ever teach a person. No, the most damaging thing you can ever do is feed a person's pride. But teach him that he is needy before God and he'll turn to God if he's honest. Poverty of soul. That's the end of self-reliance. That's the very first step, if you want to write it down. The end of self-reliance is where we have to start. I regularly counsel people who come to me, not having reached the end of their self-reliance, wanting me to help them figure out how to get more resources to retain their self-reliance. If you're going to get help from God, you've got to come to the end of yourself. You've got to get to the place where there's no place to turn but to the Lord. That's how you got saved, if you are saved. And that's how you'll get sanctified. By stopping this business of trying to help God and trusting Him to do it for you. Repentance, if it means anything, means to stop trusting yourself and to start trusting God. You can't get help from God without it. And it requires transparency to do so. Just being honest with God about what you are. We're not talking about exhibitionism before men. We're talking about transparency with God. And not only does that transparency involve admitting what you are, but being grieved over it and willing to change. That's why the second aspect of it, it's like the flip side of that coin. It says, blessed are they that mourn, for they should be comforted. The end of self-reliance then, which leads to sincere repentance. grief over the condition that we're in, a desire not to be this way. There are some people who will say to you, look, I know I've got a lot of problems, but what they want is not reformation, it's relief. They're not blaming themselves for it, they're blaming God or their spouse or somebody else. They're not truly grieving over the condition that they're in willfully. You will never begin to grow. You will never understand a truth. You will never get anything from God until you first realize the condition that you're in and desire to change it. One of the most frustrating aspects of counseling is having people come who merely want psychological support and encouragement. Instead of a pastor, they want some Rogerian psychologist who will just listen to them and nod. To whom they can talk for two or three hours, the Bible says, the fool hath no greater delight, but that his heart should discover itself. Just let me open up and tell you how I feel. I've had so many people angrily respond to me when I try to tell them what the Bible says. Pastor, listen, you don't know how I feel. Let me tell you how I feel. I wouldn't say this to you individually, but let me say it to you corporately, since I'm picking on no one in particular. It doesn't matter how you feel. If I have anything to offer you to help you, it is not a listening ear. Please, no offense. I have enough problems of my own without listening to other people's for hours on end. I can't help you by listening to you. I can only help you as you listen to the Word of God. You say, well you don't... Here's the problem. Some people, because they're so steeped in psychology today, have come to believe that nobody has a right to tell them what to do until they have paid the dues of listening to them for hours on end. And that's just not true. If talking about your problem would help you, you'd already be over it, wouldn't you? And it's not really that I mind listening to your problem. It's that I don't want you to keep listening to it. You need to hear what God has to say about your responsibility. I had a dear lady write to me recently and was telling me about how her son, who is a teenager in a pre-trial program down in Florida, was so wrapped up in psychology and the counselor was saying that his problem is he has a poor self-image. He'll never be able to love others until he learns to love himself and he based that on a verse of scripture misinterpreted. And I wrote to her by email and said, if he were two years old and having a tantrum in the grocery store, would you say, bless his heart, he doesn't love himself very much. No, you would know instantly his problem is he's selfish and he wants his own way, which is the epitome of loving himself too much. But now that he's 18, somehow that same attitude has been turned into a poor self-image. And how do they cure it? You cure a person's selfishness by causing him to focus completely on himself and what he wants. Does that make sense? The Lord says, mourn over it. Grieve over it. Be willing to change. Transparency is how you begin. And secondly, accountability is how you continue. After God found Adam and Eve, and He didn't have to look for them, He knew where they were, but He made them come out of their hiding place, then He asked them what they had done. And you know what they started doing? They started blaming others. Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, they both blamed God. A refusal of accountability will never get you any help. Once you have admitted what you are and what you've done before God, then you have to be willing to do what God says about it. And you will never do what God says about it. You will never put His covering on you for salvation or sanctification as long as you're trying to blame somebody else. That is basic human nature. If you're still struggling in some kind of a problem, it's because either you have not admitted yet that you have a problem, or you're still too busy trying to proclaim your innocence by blaming somebody else for it, and you will never grow or never change as long as you're doing that. Admit what's going on in your life, and accept God's instruction about it, instead of trying to blame somebody else, or say that they're the problem. Accountability is how you continue. And that's why he says to us in verse 5, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. That, of course, is a quotation from Psalm 37 and verse 11. And there, as here, it means this. The person who is willing to be governed, which is the definition of the word meek, is the one who gets the blessings that God has promised on those conditions. The children of Israel who went into the promised land were the ones who were willing to trust and obey God. Everybody else died in the wilderness. except Joshua and Caleb and the people who were under 20 years old when the rebellion came. Everybody else died. Millions of them died. Why? Because they wouldn't trust and they wouldn't obey. The only ones who inherited the land, went into the land, and got their piece of real estate in the promised land were the ones who were willing to be governed by God. And there are certain blessings that God wants you to have today that He will not give to you until you are willing to trust Him and obey Him. Don't you minimize the importance of obedience? It is not on the merit of your obedience that you get the blessings of God. It is on the merit of God's grace that you get the blessings of God. But in His grace, He requires you to obey Him. And therefore, you must. You begin with the end of self-reliance, you move through sincere repentance to submissive obedience. That's the first step of accountability. And then when you have that submissive obedience, that leads you to a spiritual appetite. One of the reasons some of you in here can ignore the Word of God for days on end and never pray is because you don't have a spiritual appetite for it. Any appetite that you feed will grow, whether it's an appetite for the things of the world or an appetite for the things of God. Whatever appetite you feed, it grows. You feed a spiritual appetite, it will grow. You feed a carnal appetite, it will grow. And verse 6 says, Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Once you make up your mind that you're going to be transparent with God by acknowledging you can't trust yourself, the end of your self-reliance is here, now you're genuinely at a place of sincere repentance, willing to change, and you come to submissive obedience, one of the first things that you will develop then is a hunger for the Word of God. You will want to know what God has to say to you, once you're willing to obey Him. The person who's not willing to obey what the Bible says, doesn't care what the Bible says. But the person who really wants to know what the Bible says, so that he can obey it, is hungry for it. And he will appreciate it when it's taught to him, or when the Holy Spirit leads him through the Word. And the more you eat, the more appetite you'll have. The more you drink, the thirstier you'll be for the things of the Spirit of God. Transparency is how you begin. Accountability is how you continue. And wisdom is what you develop. And that wisdom is described in verses 7 through 9. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. As you continue to feed yourself on the Word of God and slack your thirst with the Word of God, you know what will happen? You will find that the thing that God uses to meet your needs is His mercy. It's not just the rule of law. It's the grace of God. The more you read this book, you will find from front to back it is a book about the mercy of God and man's desperate need for it. And the more you read about mercy, the more filled with mercy you will be. And the more you are filled with the mercy of God, the more you will know where to get mercy when you need it, and the more merciful you will be to other people. Blessed are those who are filled with mercy, For they shall know how to obtain mercy." That's what that means. If you know that God has met your needs with His mercy in the past, you will know where to go to get God's mercy when you need it in the future. Some of you in this room are desperately in need of God's mercy today, and you don't even know where to find it. You know why? Because you have forgotten where you got it. You've forgotten that God gave it to you. And you're not showing it to others as well, because you've forgotten how merciful God's been to you. Now, when you really start focusing on the mercy of God, you will become single-minded. And that's the next step. That spirit of mercy leads to single-mindedness. It says here in verse 8, "...blessed are the pure in heart." That word, pure, is a word which means unalloyed. Like pure gold is not mixed with anything else. It is just pure gold. And when you become a person with an unalloyed heart, you will be a single-minded person. What does the Bible tell us in James chapter 1 about the double-minded man? He is unstable in all of his ways. He's a lane changer. See? He's unstable. He's running to and fro. If any of you lack what? Let him ask of God. Wisdom, but let him ask in faith, nothing doubting. For he that doubteth is like a wave of the sea driven by the wind and tossed. The double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways. He's like a wave. Some of you in here are living like a wave of the sea, tossed to and fro. If you want wisdom from God, my friend, you have got to understand that God is the one who gives it. And when you get it, you will be a single-minded person. Single-mindedness means that you don't want both what the world has to offer and what God has to offer. Some of you in here, you've begun to get started. You've begun to grow a little bit. You've been to Christian school enough, or you've come to Sunday school enough, or you've read your Bible just enough to realize that God has something to say to you. But you still are in love with some of the things of the world. You want what God has to offer as far as eternal life is concerned, and you want what the world has to offer as far as the pleasures of life are concerned. And you're a double-minded person, and you'll never have wisdom that way. And he that lacks wisdom is not only tossed to and fro like a wave of the sea, what is the opposite of being wise? The Proverbs make it clear. It's being foolish. Some of you here still demonstrate the foolishness of immaturity. Your children tossed to and fro, running to and fro after every wind of doctrine. Now, if you can get to the place where you genuinely have that single-mindedness of God, then your life will take on meaning and purpose. And one of the big problems that many of you have here is that your life doesn't have any meaning. You live for pleasure. You live for the routine. You live to pay your bills. Like the old Italian fellow, he said, I dig it a ditch to get the money to buy the food to get it a strength, to dig it a ditch. You just live from one step to the next, hoping that someday something will work out and there will be some pleasure and happiness in life. No real purpose. God left us here for a reason. He has a purpose for our lives. Some of you, especially some of you young people, you're still arguing and struggling. I don't want to do that with my life. I don't want to be that way. I don't want to serve God. I just want to enjoy my life. Well, you never will. You never will. Until you make up your mind that God made you for a reason and you need to fulfill his reason. You Christian young people who have not yet made up your mind to serve God with your life, you're like a fish that wants to live in a tree or a bird that wants to live in the sea. God didn't make you for that. He didn't save you for that. He didn't gift you for that. He won't allow you to do it. You cannot deny the Lord that bought you and go live like the world. You say, well, it's not fair. How foolish. How foolish. You will never again argue about fairness once you start doing what you were made to do. You'll rejoice. Because anybody who's trusting and obeying God is a joyful person. You show me a person who's genuinely trusting and obeying God, who's not a joyful person, and I'll show you a self-disciplined legalist, not somebody who's really trusting God. That, my friend, leads you to fulfilling your purpose in life, which is the wisdom of winning souls, or being here to represent Christ. Verse 9 says, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they should be called the children of God. People will recognize that you represent the Lord. Now, we don't have time to consider all the rest of these verses today, but let me just give you this closing thought, and we'll come back to this again. There's a simple proverb. It's in Proverbs 28 that I want you to see today. Proverbs 28 and verse 13. It tells us the same thing that we've seen. And verses 13 and 14 sort of summarize what we've seen here in the Beatitudes. He that covereth his sin shall not prosper, but whoso confesseth and forsaketh, then shall have mercy. Now that teaches us transparency and accountability, which leads us to what? The mercy of God. Same things the Beatitudes teach, right? Now look at verse 14. Happy is the man that feareth always. But he that hardeneth his heart shall fall into mischief." You harden your heart against this truth today, my friend, you're just going to have another wake-up call somewhere later. You can either learn it by the grace of God this morning, or you can get another application of the rod sometime this week. God is not going to let you get away with throwing your life away. He wants you to love Him and serve Him and change and grow into what He made you to be. That simple proverb in verse 13 leads to the simple principle of verse 14. You know what the problem is with Christian people today? They've forgotten this. Want another little Bible study assignment for this week? Those of you who are really hungry for the things of the Word of God? Get out your concordance and look up the word, forgotten. I think there are about 45 appearances of it in the Bible. And you know what you find? Now, there are many different ways it's used, but there are two primary ways in which it's used. One way in which it's used is as unbelieving people accuse God of having forgotten them. And the main way it's used is by loving God, telling His people that they've forgotten Him. When you think God has forgotten you, it's because you've forgotten Him. Let me just give you three key verses as we close. 2 Peter, we studied this text here recently. 2 Peter chapter 1 and verse 9. It's talking about the fact that God by his grace has saved us for himself. And then he tells us what our responsibilities are to add to our faith, virtue, knowledge, and so on. And then comes the conclusion of that thought, and he says in verse 9 of 2 Peter 1, He that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. He lacks assurance, he lacks power, because he's forgotten God's grace and mercy to him. You show me a man that's not dedicating his life to telling others about God's mercy, and I'll show you a man who's forgotten God's mercy to him. You show me a man who's forgotten God's mercy to him, and I'll show you a man who thinks God's been unfair to him, or is being unfair to him. Whenever I hear a person complain, gripe, or express sinful discontent, I know that I'm talking to a person who has forgotten the mercy of God. Whining is unbelief. griping is unbelief discontent irritability and frustration instead of looking for the opportunity to serve god and represent him is unbelief and that's a sin hebrews twelve five and then one more verse says and ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children Despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him. For whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." You say, it's just not fair. The problems, the pressures I'm under, they're just not fair. No, no, that's not the case. You have forgotten what God said to you. Don't faint. You rejoice. God loves you. He will not tolerate your remaining as an immature, self-centered person. If you're saved, you have to grow. He doesn't want you to remain as you are today. And a final verse in Hosea 4 and verse 6. Hosea uses the word forgotten many times, perhaps more than any of the other prophets. he says this word of admonition my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge because thou hast rejected knowledge i will also reject me thou shalt be no priest to me seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy god i will also forget that children The problem is not that God has forgotten us. The problem is we have forgotten God. These simple truths that we've seen so far here from Matthew 5, many of you in here would say to me, well, Pastor, I've heard you preach on that. I know what that passage says. And yet you will be tried by the Holy Spirit sometime this week, and you won't be able to respond according to the teaching of this passage. Just because you've heard preaching on it, doesn't mean you know it. You will know that you know what this passage teaches when you're living this way, without having to be told, or without having to be made to do it. That is what every one of us desperately needs, to understand that because God has revealed His message in His Word, We must listen to it. And because God's word is the essence of wisdom, we must make it a part of our lives. Father, thank you for the attendedness of your people today. And I pray, dear Lord, that as we continue coming back to this text again, that you would open our eyes to truth and cause us, Lord, to see what our needs are. Lord, there are people here that need to accept responsibility, that need to change and grow. They don't need self-love. They need self-discipline. And Lord, I pray that you'd cause them to realize it's available to them in Christ. Help us, Lord, as a church family to become what you want us to be. In Jesus' name, amen.