March Like Jesus
… In Our Attitudes – Part I
Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:1-12
Key Verse: Matthew 5:3
“God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for Him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
In the title for this month’s devotional, I am playing off the common phrase “we have our marching orders”.
Jesus starts His ministry by giving His followers their marching orders. In Chapters 5-7 of Matthew’s Gospel is the “Sermon on the Mount”, Jesus’s first and longest sermon. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out what the New Testament is all about and how His followers are to live. The balance of the life and ministry of Jesus exemplifies these principles. The way Jesus talked, the way He behaved, who He spent His time with, and how He died all illuminate the Sermon on the Mount.
So, this month we are going to study the Sermon on the Mount and learn about how to fulfill Jesus’s “marching orders” to us!
Jesus started the Sermon on the Mount by describing the kind of attitudes He wants His followers to develop. We know these as the Beatitudes.
The first “order” that Jesus gives to us is to develop an attitude of spiritual poverty. In other words, Jesus wants His followers to continually have a sense of need for God in their lives. No matter how many years a person walks with God, Jesus wants that person to always know that they desperately need Him. Jesus did not say “blessed are the poor”. He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”.
The Key Verse for today is the New Living Translation of Matthew 5:3, which spells out what Jesus meant when He said “poor in spirit”. God hates pride and there is no greater example of pride than for a person to think they do not need God.
Jesus used the illustration of “the poor” because a poor person is always aware of their needs. The “richer” a person becomes, the less they feel the heat of needs. Unfortunately, American Christ-followers need to be very careful to not allow our wealth to lessen our sense of need for God. We need to remind ourselves, often, that our wealth is a gift from God. If wealth becomes our master, then it can have detrimental effects on our life and relationships.
The challenge for being obedient to Jesus’s marching orders is to make sure our behavior matches our words. When we say that we need the Lord, do our actions back that up?
When a person goes days without talking to the Lord… how much do they really feel a need for His help in their lives? Or when a person does not read their Bible between Sundays?
When a person lives contradictory to the lifestyle that Jesus taught and exampled, they may have lost all sense of real need for Jesus in their lives. Let’s live out this first marching order from Jesus!
Father, I know I need You every day. Please remind me to live the way I say I believe. I ask this in Jesus’s Name, amen.