Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread":
After these two millennia, Jesus Christ continues to upset our assumptions and contradict them. We think that those who are always smiling are the happy ones, the self-esteemed, the purpose-driven saints, the always-on-top Christians, like corks that can’t sink. He says, “Blessed [happy] are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). Frankly, He sounds heretical!
Is something quiet and unobtrusive going on behind our backs—peopling the New Jerusalem with quiet, sober, even troubled people we haven’t thought will get through?
Then Jesus drives the thorn in deeper: “Blessed [happy] are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (vs. 4). He even sounds like disappointment and pain and heart-break are good experiences! How apparently backward can His thinking get?
He sounds like real lasting “comfort” can only follow being acquainted with grief first. The “mourning” He speaks of is not losing loved ones in death; it’s heart-sorrow for the sin that the Holy Spirit has convicted us is buried deep in our hearts. As the “Son of David” Jesus reveled in the psalms of David, learning as we must learn. Obviously He had read 126:5, 6: “those who weep as they plant their crops, gather the harvest with joy! Those who wept as they went out carrying the seed will come back singing for joy as they bring in the harvest.” Could this have inspired His Beatitude?
Another of our popular assumptions He pricks like a balloon: “Blessed are the meek [not the “success-stories”]: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5). The “meek” are those who always manage somehow to get trampled on, because they react to contingencies like the One who said He was “meek and lowly in heart” (Matt.
If you follow Him you get so you can’t even exist another day unless you believe what He says. That’s how “the just shall live by faith” (Hab. 2:4).
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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