Christians in every age and in every place tend to drift from a biblical view of the kingdom of God to a view that is filtered through the lens of culture. When that happens, God always calls his people to realign their cultural view back to a Kingdom view. And one of the ways he has provided for his people to do that is through the Beatitudes, the preamble to Jesus’ Constitution of the Kingdom found in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. In these eight simple but profound Beatitudes, Jesus clearly and compellingly sets forth the ethos, or the values of God’s kingdom. As we read, understand and embrace these Beatitudes, what we might call Jesus’ kingdom manifesto, not only we will see how counter American church culture is to kingdom culture, we will also discover a clear path to what God’s kingdom is to look like in and through us. And by that, we will discover how the church can model for the world a bit of heaven while we’re still on earth. In this first message in a new series called Heaven on Earth, we explore the first Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
