The beatitudes are the gateway to living the divine life.  In the final of the beatitudes, Jesus reminds us that this life is one that is both counter-intuitive and counter-cultural.  Because of this, it is inevitable that the world will misunderstand, misrepresent, malign, and even act violently towards us.  This is all a part of participating with Jesus in his mission to rescue and restore the world.

When he declares that the pure in heart will see God, Jesus does not mean that the really moral people will see God. The point is not that you get God as long as you avoid lying and cursing and excessive drinking and immorality. This is Jesus saying that those who have an undivided heart and who quit spending their lives looking at everything else will, now and forever, see God.

Jesus often illustrated terms and ideas more than he explained, and his parable of the Good Samaritan gives us a deeper understanding of his meaning when he says, “Blessed are the merciful.” Contrary to what we often assume to be the point of the story, he is inviting his questioner (and us) to realize that we are the one in need of mercy, a realization that will compel us to live mercifully.

It is possible for us to unintentionally veer away from a daily awareness of Jesus himself and into trying to create or maintain a comfortable life that seems reasonably Christian. But “reasonably Christian” is only real if it’s truly rooted in Jesus as he really was and is — and that kind of life requires ongoing attention to who Jesus was and is. Historical understanding is certainly not the whole of knowing and understanding Jesus, but it is an essential starting point.

John writes that Jesus is one with God and that he shows us exactly who God is, a claim Jesus himself later makes. If that’s true – if we only know who God is by knowing Jesus – it is of utmost importance that we don’t rely on assumptions or summaries of who Jesus is and that our knowing and understanding him is accurate and always growing.

We often think doubt is the opposite faith, but Psalm 27 sets fear against faith. While we can’t always control our doubt, we do have the capacity to choose to trust that there is a better story – a better life – for us than the one controlled by fear and fatalism.

Our world is overwhelmed with and then motivated by fear. When we allow fear to control us, even in small ways, it erodes our created purpose by causing us to forget that we live in God’s world and preventing us from seeing that those we fear were made in God’s image. Psalm 27 reminds us that we were not created for fear, and that we have access to everything we need to live in faith, courage, and love instead of fear.