Dear Family at Christ Community,

       We will begin this Sunday a sermon series on the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12. This will serve as the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount that we will continue after Advent. In the first Beatitude in Matthew 5:1-3, Jesus invites us to rest content in the poverty of spirit gifted to us in His finished work and gratefully receive the Kingdom of Heaven as His assured promise to us in both the Now and Not Yet. To be and grow in being poor in spirit, we must first submit by God’s grace alone through faith alone to Jesus as our Savior King alone. This submission renounces the kingdoms and ways of this world and receives the Kingdom Heaven and characteristics of its citizens as gifts from Christ. We must recognize that we have nothing to bring to God to earn or deserve His love, yet He chooses to love us and enrich us with all the heavenly blessings needed to live the abundant life. Thus, only Jesus can make us poor enough in spirit to receive the Kingdom of Heaven because of His finished work and assured promises. As Robert White writes in the Introduction to John Calvin’s Sermons on the Beatitudes:

Jesus is both the herald and the agent of the messianic blessing. All the Beatitudes are summed up in him. Meek, pure in heart, merciful, peaceable, persecuted without cause, he enacts his own message and thus becomes the very embodiment of all righteousness. His vindication will be the vindication of all who believe in him. The Beatitudes thus send us back, not to an abstract list of moral perfections, but to the person of Jesus Christ, to whose image Christians are even now being conformed by his indwelling Spirit.

       In celebration of these gifts through the gift of Christ Himself, we will come joyfully to the Lord’s Table. Please gratefully receive the broken bread given for us to nourish us in being and becoming poor in spirit for Jesus’s incalculable gift of forgiveness. Please drink with hope the cup of the New Covenant given to nourish us in our flourishing citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven both Now and Not Yet. With nothing in our hands to bring, simply to Christ we cling as we receive everything we need for the abundant life by God’s loving grace!

In Christ,
Cameron