Good morning and welcome to Tuesday’s podcast. My name is Alan and it is a privilege and a pleasure to open the Bible with you each morning – or whenever you listen. My hope is that as we read and reflect on the scriptures, that you will hear God’s voice, his gentle whisper, speaking to the core of your being. That together we will be touched and changed by his love, his undeserved, his unearned grace and favour. In short, that God will show up and do what only he can do.

REFLECTION:

Yesterday we saw Jesus begin his public ministry by calling some fishermen. We discovered Jesus’ grace filled invitation to us to come, to be enabled, to be shaped and changed into men and women of the kingdom.

Jesus calls his disciples and then it all kicks off! Jesus proclaims the good news of the kingdom. He heals every disease and illness, those in pain, those demon-possessed, the paralysed… those having seizures. Everyone is healed – no-one is excluded.

Word begins to spread and large crowds… massive crowds of broken people begin to gather.

So Jesus heads up a mountainside, he sits down… and he begins to teach… Matthew Chapter 5 v 3

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

BOOM! The earth shakes, the heavens roar, the very fabric of society quakes at the sound of his voice.  This statement alone is shocking, scandalous… this is outrageous… NO, this cannot be true.

The broken, the despised, the rotten, the sick, the twisted, the mutilated, the maimed, the mentally unstable, the beggars, the cursed… those on the margins of society, those shunned, those excluded, those discriminated against… the dregs, the scum of the world, those without a place, those at the very bottom and rejected by the mainstream…

Jesus calls them Blessed! Blessed! Blessed!

Those, who in the worlds eyes are furthest from God, seemingly stricken by him, seemingly overlooked by him, even seemingly judged and punished by him…

Blessed! Blessed! Blessed!

You see, when Jesus opens his mouth and begins to speak, he is not revealing to us another way to worm our way into the kingdom of God. He’s not outlining a 5 point plan how to get into God’s good books: make yourself poor in spirit – be blessed! Mourn… be blessed! No, Jesus has come to tear down the old ways, the old thoughts of who’s in and who’s out. Who is included, who is not good enough… He has come to destroy the notion of acceptability, of who has access, of who makes it onto the guest list, of who is worthy.

You came for healing… and God has been pleased to lavish his love, his grace, his favour, his blessing, his power on you. He healed you, all of you, without exception. The kingdom of God is at hand, it’s accessible to you, there is hope!

Blessed are the poor in spirit

The poor –are the bankrupt, the destitute, the beggar, the one who has nothing, the emotionally, the physically, the spiritually… the morally bankrupt

Think about that for a minute… no-one is excluded! The invitation to the kingdom is open to all… the addicts, the adulterers, the abusers, mass murderers, the depraved and perverted, prostitute and the fraudster….

They are all in the crowd. They have all received a touch of God, they have all been recipients of his grace.

Poor in spirit – the spirit… the soul… the centre of who we are… where we suffer… the deepest part… the very core of our being…

Blessed are the crushed, the abused, the cheated, the robbed, the betrayed, the blackest of souls, the most broken and battered.

You see, in God’s kingdom there is no-one who falls outside of God’s blessing… there is no-one exempt, no-one too bad, too fallen, too far gone.

This is the kingdom of God, this is why Jesus came, this is the unfathomable grace of God, this is the power of the cross, the defeat of death, the resurrection of the dead.

The whole of humanity, in all its filthy depraved,