The Beatitudes Part 8

INTRO: We have come in these beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount to the fifth beatitude. May I remind us that we have come once more to a most sacred part of Christ’s teaching. It is the very first part of Christ’s very first extended discourse, the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. I have mentioned that there are those who believe this sermon was not meant for the Church. There are those who do not see that there is any amount of the Gospels that was intended for the Church. The longer I go, the more I find that relates to the Church. I believe that when you come to Matthew 13, those parables are prophetic of the Church age. It is not much later, chapter 16, that Christ directly mentioned the Church.
As I see it, the entrance into the kingdom God prepared from the foundations of the world, the millennial kingdom, will be entered precisely the same way as entrance into the kingdom ruled from heaven today. The very first thing that must happen to anyone entering the kingdom, whether in the Church age or in the tribulation for entrance into the millennial age is to become poor in spirit. There must come a mourning over one’s sinfulness. One must come to where the Apostle Peter came when He and Christ were in the same fishing vessel together. Peter came to recognize who Jesus was and he said, “Depart from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.”