What Does "Blessed are the Persecuted" Mean?

"Anybody not know what today is? It's Easter." It's the day that celebrates how the Creator of the Universe walked among us and was crucified. It was on Easter that it was discovered that this man Jesus had risen from the dead. Isn't it amazing how, 2000 years later, we are still celebrating the resurrection of this man? How incredulous and absurd is the concept that a man could conquer death! Some of the most educated, affluent and free thinking people history has ever known are still astonished by this event.

Over the last several weeks, Erwin McManus has been talking about this man Jesus and how He didn't appeal to wealth, power or success. The Beattitudes are human characteristics given by Jesus about what it means to follow Him. Surprising His audience, He described the attributes of being truly human as things that those who were expecting a new King would not have thought were characteristic.

Everyone who was listening may have been kept a bit off balance by who Jesus called to be with Him. What does "Blessed are those who are persecuted" mean? For each of the Beattitudes Jesus gives a different result, But after saying, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, Jesus says "For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" once again just as He did after saying this about the "poor in spirit". This suggests a relationship between the poor in spirit and those persecuted for righteousness.

If we were trying to start a movement and trying to call followers, we would move Jesus out of marketing and maybe into filing. We would not campaign with attributes like the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful or those who are persecuted. We would do everything we could to doll up some of the things that Jesus says because these attributes are not what we value. Yet, on the flip side, Jesus isn't baiting and switching. He's not deceiving. He says that this journey will require tremendous strength. He tells us that we are capable of living a life that is way beyond our capacity if we would just follow Him. He doesn't promise us that all of our problems will go away, but He does promise a better way to live.

Jesus talks about the extraordinary life we can live if we will just engage Him. Blessed are those who are persecuted. Sometimes we use this phrase carte blanche in viewing our lives as being persecuted. "I'm having a bad day because I'm being persecuted." But arrogance may often be the reason we are experiencing persecution. We can get wrapped up in our own self-righteousness, so others begin to fight back. Somewhere along the line, we became obsessed with winning and seeing that we are right as Christians and that others are wrong. So, we begin to use political might to push what we think is God's agenda and then we are surprised when those fighting back use politics to retaliate. We can be stubborn and claim that we are being "persecuted" because of our beliefs when often times it is simply our arrogance.

Sometimes, we have bad experiences, not because of arrogance, but because of stupidity. In the past week, Erwin was very sick. He couldn't breathe well and laid in bed Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday. Laying in bed for three days drove Erwin crazy because he's an active person. So he called his friends to play basketball, but his wife, Kim, found out about it and insisted that he not play. Erwin cancelled, but then secretly rescheduled for Friday morning. So, going against his wife's advice, he secretly played that morning. But after he played, his leg was really hurting him. Seeking empathy from his wife, he mentioned to her his injury, but she focused instead on his poor decision to play (she intuitively knew). If he was making poor decisions and simply suffering the consequences, why should she be empathetic? Sometimes that's the way it is in life. If we make stupid decisions and then simply suffer the consequences, there's no blessing in that. It is what it is even though we sometimes hide it under the auspices of persecution.

Remembering back a few years ago when he had the privelege of traveling the world, Erwin, for some reason could not recall his experiences in Cambodia. He thinks this may partly have been because there was so much hard stuff to see. Sickness, missing limbs, starvation and hopelessness. As if that wasn't bad enough, he went to see a place called "the Killing Fields", which was a place to remember the thousands of people who were slaughtered. Sometimes, people are the innocent victims of horrible crimes, but even this is not persecution.

In summary, Jesus is not talking about persecution that we deserve, nor is he talking about persecution imposed on us by unjust people. What Jesus is talking about here is the persecution we experience because of our decisions made in love. He wasn't talking about an elusive allegory, He was talking about our lives as well as His own. The end of Jesus' life would itself be the worst persecution of all, but the most beautiful as well. It was a story of love. A story where sacrifice was a privelege for the object of God's love, us.

Jesus calls us to lead a life that is beautiful and true, yet a disturbance of status quo. The Ten Commandments were the picture of the minimum standards to be human, but the Beattitudes were the ways Jesus calls us to live our lives. The lie that "Jesus promises no more problems" couldn't be more of a deception. Jesus calls us to trust Him in our most painful moments because it teaches us how to live and how to find beauty in life even in the worst times.

Erwin was sitting with a friend recently talking about the movie set his friend was working on, "The Day the Earth Stood Still". During a break, someone went up to Keanu Reeves and asked him to sign their bible. Keanu looked Erwin's friend, Scott, and said, "Wow, this has never happened before". A short while later, while strolling through the city, Scott pointed out to Keanu a church tower with a cross and said, "Isn't that beautiful?" to which Keanu replied "Not really". But Scott engaged him asking, "If you understood (Jesus) was dying on that to save your wife and children, wouldn't it be beautiful?" Keanu agreed that Scott was right. If we don't understand why the crucifixion happened, it is most tragic and horrific. But if we do understand that His death was a choice so that we could be free to live in the fullness of life, that cross becomes the ultimate mark of beauty. It is a great example of how our lives can reflect beauty in persecution.

Erwin grew up Catholic. Along the way, he went to a few (Catholic) Easter services. At a certain age, though, someone invited him to a non-Catholic Easter service. But this particular service really focused on the man of Jesus. As Erwin was looking around, he saw a cross with no Jesus which is atypical in the Catholic church. His thought was that someone forgot to put the Jeus oon the cross. S o, he asked a girl next to him, "Where's Jesus?" The girl, realizing what he was asking, said, "He rose from the dead. He's not on the cross anymore." It was the first time Erwin felt like he really "got it". To him, this was the great mystery unraveled.

No one realized or guessed that they could actually see and touch their God as a man as Jesus. No one ever saw it coming that we would actually turn on Him and crucify Him. But it all came to light when He rose from the Dead. "Blessed are the pesrsecuted" is the only attribute where Jesus elaborates. He implies that we are going to get a strange reaction from living a life of beauty, truth and love. We have to live a life that is connected to that which is eternal to follow Him. But why would anyone oppose us with these attributes? The reason is that it obstructs the status quo.

If we were to choose evil we could choose to live like Hitler, Stalin, Manson etc. or other personifications of the worst of humanity. Or we could choose a life that reflects the image and likeness of God, fueled by love. But if we choose this life, it will bring the disdain of those who have chosen the other life. And if we want to avoid problems altogether, we can choose the meaningless, ordinary and mundain goopy life in between. This, unfortunately, is where most in the world choose to live. But when we choose to move to the higher plain, we disrupt the common.

Erwin still remembers the night he chose to trust Jesus. It became a struggle to accept the reality of Jesus and then the imposing nature of God. Since Aug 20, 1978, his life has never been the same. But while it was intimate, it was never meant to be private. If Jesus calls us to an intentional life of meaning, we need to understand that it isn't a private calling.

What Does "Blessed Are Those Who Mourn" Mean?

"We've been looking together...at what it means to be truly human". Jesus erupted on the field in his time and people were just trying to figure out who He was. He had a dozen or so followers consisting of fisherman and tax collectors. They had seen miracles of the Savior, but probably the most memorable aspects to them were His insights to life. In Matt 5, Matthew outlines much of what Jesus shared with them. True to form, Jesus outlines the most counter intuitive of human traits as the keys to the Kingdom.

The first description of the kind person Jesus wanted to have close to Him was the "poor in spirit". This had to be a bit of a shock to those listening because Jesus wasn't calling for those who were strongest or the most agile. He would need powerful soldiers beside Him, wouldn't He? He would need the brightest of biblical scholars, right? No. The second attribute Jesus calls for are those "who mourn, for they will be comforted". Erwin can take the words "blessed" and "comforted" and connect the two, but putting "mourn" in the middle loses him. Who wakes up saying they've lost everything in this Recession; their house, there girlfriend, their money, their job and then think, "Hey, I need to add more grief and sorrow to be blessed"?

The end result is attractive, but wouldn't it have been better for Jesus to say, "blessed are those who avoid mourning"? Couldn't He give us a loophole to avoid the sorrows of life? If He is designing this whole thing, why can't He show us how we can stem bad experiences? But God tells us that our life in following Him will be filled with mourning and He is also tells us that there is a blessing in all of it. Erwin muses, "I look back and I think I now understand"

When Erwin was 13, he and his mom were driving down the rode and she asked him, "Honey, who do you think you would rather live with, your father or me?" Erwin responded unexpectedly (to his mother), by saying that he would want to return to El Salvador and live with his grandparents, Mammy and Pappy. Offended, his mother said, "Oh, so I could just die right now and you would be fine. Right?" Speaking truthfully, Erwin answered by saying, "Yes, I would be fine." He wasn't being mean to his mother. He was just sharing with her who he had become in life. He had experienced so much pain at that point in his life that he had figured out that the best way to deal with it was just to not feel anything at all. His parents had divorced and Erwin knew intense despair and disappointed to the point of not wanting to care anymore.

For mourning to happen, there has to be 1) loss and there has to be 2) love. If you haven't experienced mourning, you haven't lost anything you love. But if you live long enough, you will. If you don't, it is somewhat of a tragedy, because it means you've been hurt to the extent that you won't allow yourself to feel the deepest level of love because of the accompanying risk of sorrow and grief. Jesus mourned. To mourn is not only human, but divine. Jesus wept when he saw his friends mourning the death of a Lazarus and he joined them in their sorrow. His love wasn't limited to the individual. He looked over Jerusalem and said, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I longed to hold you in my arms like a mother hen holds her chicks, but you would not."



A lot of us think that mourning is a sign of weakness and that if we have inner strength, we will never suffer inner loss. We've chosen to live on the surface level because we are so afraid of being wounded again. Maybe this is what Jesus meant by saying "blessed are those who mourn", because those who mourn are able to experience deep love. He promises us though, that if we allow ourselves to love, we will lose, but that He won't leave us. However, He does makes it very clear that we cannot navigate any way around loss.

"I've been to a lot of funerals...more than I ever cared to go to." says Erwin. Observing those in funerals, he came to realize that those who were most flamboyant about their grief in public were usually those who were most disconnected to the person who had died! Often, the ones who loved deeply actually wept in a very elegant quietness. Maybe Jesus moves us to the place of mourning so that we can be comforted. It is a genuinely beautiful experience to love. Grief is proof that love is more powerful than death. A person may die, but the love mysteriously continues to live on. The expression of grief is a desire to physically connect love with the one who is lost.

"I had a strange thing happen this past month." Erwin gets a lot of emails from people he doesn't know and one of the emails he received was from a couple in Kansas City, Brandon and Jodie. They looked to be in their early 20's. They were married and had a baby boy two years ago. After reading one of his books, Erwin was surprised and shocked to learn they had named their child "Erwin". But one day, he found out that Brandon was diagnosed with cancer. The couple, being believers, thought everything would be okay. But the cancer grew more aggressive and is now terminal. Erwin called and, for the first time, spoke briefly with the family, Jodie and then with Brandon before he was to go in to his final surgery. Brandon barely survived. Here is a moment, though, where aside from our grief, we ask God why this man, who serves Him and honors Him, would experience this kind of loss and threat to never be there as a father for his son. But Jesus never tells us we will be blessed because He "will fix it all". In fact, He promises we will have tragedy, death, sorrow and loss. What He does do is promise that His Spirit, the Great Comforter, will be with us. He promises us that, in our deepest moments of pain, He will meet us.

In Revelation 21:1-5, we get a peek into what it is going to look like in Heaven. Verse 5 is beautiful for the mourner; "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." Erwin says he doesn't know all the symbolism or metaphors of the book of Revelation, but what he does know is, Jesus does know our pain, but He is here to help us experience deep love, compassion joy, celebration and hope.

Do you ever read scripture and you just skip ove the parts that really don't make sense? What's curious about Revelation is the part in the verses above (Verse 1) that says there will no longer be a sea. "What's wrong with the sea?" muses Erwin. His name actually means "lover of the sea", so why would God want to get rid of it? To know the answer to this requires some explanation of context.

Erwin loves ice cream much more than his wife. Often, he compulsively gets an urge to get ice cream at odd times. Sometimes he will drive all the way to Pasadena just to go to "21 Choices", the pinnacle of ice cream experience. It's fantastic and they always have new flavors. But, no matter how many flavors he'll sample, which they allow, he always goes back to his "old school" flavor. He'll through in pecans, blackberries and strawberries. The entire experience is joyful and it reminds him of what Heaven must be like. Erwin learned years ago that, when he was 3 or 4 years old, his father actually kidnapped him and they found the two of them in an ice cream shop eating ice cream together. Could it be that this is why Erwin, decades later, loves ice cream so much, because he subconciously connects it with the love of his father?

The man who wrote the book of Revelation was a guy named John. Unlike the other apostles, who were killed, John was exiled to the island of Patmos. When he got up every day and walked to the edge of the beach, all he saw was a sea. The sea was what kept him from everyone he ever loved and or cared. How often John must have despised the sea that separated him. Writing "there will be no more death, weeping, mourning or pain", he includes "sea" as the symbolism that we will not have the separation of love. What are the seas in our lives? Erwin, still from his childhood loss of his father, still feels a disconnection when he loses someone.

Jesus knew that the experience of the most beautiful love would bring the greatest pain, but....it is better to love. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." For those who are willing to risk much and experience the deepest loss, they are blessed.

What Does "Blessed Are the Pure of Heart" Mean?

Continuing his series on the "Beattitudes" at http://www.mosaic.org/podcast/, Erwin McManus quotes the fifth verse of the Beattitudes, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." In our reality, when we read a verse lke this and we typically think about it in terms of after we die. Or we read, "they shall see God" and think, "well, they don't really see God". Right?

This past week, Erwin's mom had cataract surgery. His mom called him up and said it was a pretty serious surgery. Sometimes, water gathers behind the eyes, coagulates and eventually solidifies, which distorts vision. So, a cataract surgeon will take the retina out, scrape it clean and then replace it. But if you were born with this condition, you would just assume that the rest of the world sees as you see. The entire world would be blurry and distorted, but it would never occur to you that you were "blind".

On Thursday, Erwin and Mariah went to New York and had real "New York style" pizza. They went to the first pizza place in the U.S., a place called Lombardi's. A film making friend of theirs named Ryan joined them and, as they were talking, Ryan said his first film was in black and white which Erwin found odd for someone so young. But later in the conversation, Ryan also told him that he was color blind. "Is that why you made your film in black and white?" Ryan answered "no", but explained to him that his color-blindess was a blindness to pastels. He explained that, as a little boy, he could see yellow and he would fight for things that were yellow because he could see those the clearest. Erwin muses, "If all of us couldn't see pastels, we would assume they didn't exist."

Erwin himself is near sighted and occasionally has to put on glasses to see distances clearly. He'll wear them when he sees a movie because he likes to see the clarity and detail of the film. But Erwin was 20 before he discovered he was nearsighted! He remembers that he and a friend of his in college, Randy, were extremely competititive. They would play chess, racketball and tennis competitively. One day, they were driving between Dallas and Los Angeles and to stay awake, they were playing and ABC game, just identifying letters in order on signs. "He was at Q, and I was still on K and I thought he was cheating." So Randy told Erwin to read a sign when he could read it and Randy would do the same. It wasn't long before they realized that Erwin needed glasses! He went to the eye doctor and, when he finally had his glasses, it was beautiful because he never knew the world could be seen that way.

So, when Jesus says, "they shall see God", is it possible that He sees the world differently from us? The reality of our lives is that we live blindly. But we were designed to see God! "I don't want to live blind, but I want to believe Jesus!" Are we trapped in a world of money, houses and cars because that's all we can see? In Deuteronomy 34, near the end of his life, Moses saw the invisible God. He is described as a man who new God "face to face". A few chapters earlier, Exodus 33:11, it says God would speak to him like he was His friend! This was unusual for Moses if you remember how he first saw God back in Exodus 3:1-5. Moses saw a burning bush and immediately hid his face from God. But yet he finishes his life with a special relationship with the creator of the universe! This wasn't a new idea. God would walk into the garden (of Eden) in the cool of the day looking for mankind in the Beginning.

God designed us so that we would be able to see the invisible God. There is an interesting contrast in the relationship of God and Moses as compared to God and Pharoah. Moses experienced miraculous signs and wonders and we even remember Moses as being right in the middle of a life of miracles . Pharoah, on the other hand, saw all the same signs and wonders that Moses saw, but he refused to acknowledge God! Think about it. Pharoah was on the other side of the Red Sea! But in the book of Exodus, over and over it says Pharoah hardened his heart and chose to reject God while Moses allowed the voice of God to so change his life that he chose to follow God everywhere he went.


"Pure of heart" seems so far away, doesn't it? Even in our best moments when we are pursuing all that is right, we still know there are some bad things inside of us. But we are not alone. We can't expect to be perfect. Remember, Moses killed someone and was a leader over slaves. He was a murderer. So, if a guy like this can be changed to be pure of heart, that tells us that we are all qualified to experience purity of heart. It doesn't matter how sinful or distructive we've been in the past. Moses was so overwhelmed with this incredible gift that he seemed to push the envelope (in a good way) to experience God more. When he was leading the Israelites, Moses tells God that if His presence is not with him, he will not go on with the people. He begs God to constantly be with them and accompany them. But God basically says, "Do you realize what would happen if I did that?" Have you ever seen a bug zapper and what it does to bugs that fly into the light? In His holy and perfect presence, we would be like moths to the flame.

God desires to change the essence of who we are so that we might be able to see the fullness of Him in all His glory. Jesus came so that we could live in the fire. In the book of Ezekiel 36:26-28, God talks about how he will show his holiness through his people; through us; "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. You will live in the land I gave your forefathers; you will be my people, and I will be your God. He says that he will show himself through His people.

But this is not something we can do ourselves. We can try and do a lot of good things for ourselves, but "it's like doing situps to cure cancer. You will just die with a washboard." Erwin says it doesn't seem like much of an upgrade when God exchanges our stone hearts for flesh hearts. But we were created in God's image and He just wants to bless us with true humanism. In the book of Jeremiah, I am going to create a new covenant. I will write my laws in your mind and place them on your heart. God is not trying to make us better, he is trying transform who we are. The amazing thing Jesus does is he changes us from the center. He is not changing our morality, He's changing our motivation.

"If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation." Have you ever bought a new car and you thought it was an amazing car to you, but the moment you bought one, that model and color was everywhere?" If we live our lives blind to the invisible, we assume there is nothing more out there. But the moment we let Jesus in, we begin to see God everywhere. Do you know why you can't see God when your heart's not pure? Because we see the world through our soul, and if our soul is filled with bitterness, anger, lust and perversions, we interpret the world through our soul filter. When out at sea, you can usually only see but so deep in the water. But when diving, the water itself actually magnifies the sights of the ocean! Seeing God is a way of seeing everything differently. We see a world of good, hope and opportunity through Him. We don't need incremental improvement, we need Him to completely transform us.