When Jesus sat down on the Mountain and gathered his disciples and others around Him, He began explaining how the they could become the kind of people that God would bless. He carefully developed His theme – in what is recorded for us as Matthew 5 – until he reached a climax in verse 46 with the words we looked at last week, “Be perfect.”

Those who desire to take Jesus at his word and be what he asked us to be in that command should carefully consider what he said leading up to that statement. Toward that end, let’s carefully consider Jesus’ message.

Jesus begins his sermon and each of his first several comments with the words, “Blessed are…” He is clearly teaching that it is possible to experience God’s blessings, and to know those blessings here and now – not in some future time or in some other place. It was this very sense of the here and now in his teaching that attracted so many to him. The people of his day and his culture – just like the people of our day and our culture – needed to know that God was among them and could touch them as they went about their routine daily tasks or faced difficulties in their lives. Those people lived under the oppression of a foreign government, suffered unjust and inequitable taxation, were surrounded by religious rituals they did not understand or perhaps saw as hypocritical or demanding, had family pressures like sickness and disease, and – in short – were very much like people today. But Jesus promised them a blessing!

Jesus immediately dispelled the idea that some kind of special entitlement was necessary to have the blessing of God. The blessing didn’t depend on winning the lottery, or being from a wealthy family, or having the right job, or appeasing some government official. In fact, the only thing needed to qualify for this first blessing from God was to be … poor!

So the rich are disqualified, right? This is a promise only for those in financial poverty? No, that would have been the opposite kind of discrimination. Jesus set out a qualification for God’s blessing that is available to absolutely anyone, regardless of class, culture, wealth, standing, religion, experience, ability, or anything else. He simply said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Absolutely anyone who desires to experience God’s blessing and who recognizes he has nothing to offer God in exchange for that blessing is in a perfect position to experience God’s blessing in his life.

Each blessing Jesus pronounces in his sermon has a benefit attached. Those who claim this first blessing by confessing before God that they are poor in spirit – that is, that they simply come with nothing to offer Him except themselves – are promised the Kingdom of Heaven. Notice, “theirs is;” not “theirs will be at some distant time.”

As we move toward a better understanding of what Jesus meant when he told us to be perfect, I challenge you to join me in coming before the Lord anew, confessing that we have nothing to offer Him, and ask that He bless us with His Kingdom.