Matthew 5:4 — Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Why might we mourn?We may mourn for many things. We may sorrow over loss and difficulty in this life. We often shed tears because an opportunity is lost, or our team was defeated, or because the supper is cold. We cry over our own folly and the tarnished reputations that they earn. We are sad to lose esteem before men. From th...  Read More

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 Bear with me as I draw out one last bit from the first of the beatitudes… Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The poor have the reward of their poverty (such an odd thing to say, for it is gift not earnings) the kingdom of heaven now. There is, present tense, the kingdom. Another way to translate it would be, “of them is the kingdom of heaven.” That is, they are i...  Read More

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Matthew 5:3 — Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…Before moving on to a meditation on the second of the Beatitudes, I would like to lingerfor a moment longer on verse 3. This first pronouncement of blessing expects the presence of two realities in our world. Jesus speaks to us of poverty and kings. Clearly, he does so with assumption that we will have some sort of ex...  Read More

In August of 1742, a crowd of 50,000 gathered in Cambuslang, Scotland, for an outdoor communion service amidst the revivals of religion then erupting all throughout the Western world. The setting was the Great Awakening, which burst on the scene in 1735 with the preaching of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the conversion of George Whitefield at Oxford.The broader context of the...  Read More