Beatitudes

This week of class we had was awesome.  It was lead by a youth minister from Spokane, Washington.  He shall remain nameless but he has the cutest 2 year old girl I have ever met in my life, but that is neither here nor there.

One of our class days we talked about the beatitudes.  We read the list in the Bible and tried to expand on the list of what Jesus was saying, or at least apply it directly to us as individuals.

This exercise is based on the fact the Jesus always played to the crowd gathered, and his list is not exhaustive.  If you think I’m a filthy liberal for trying to expand the teachings of Jesus I feel sorry for, and will pray for you.

The first part of the exercise was for us to write down a weakness of ours and then try to make it fit in the beatitude.

I wrote down that I often have time feeling sympathy for people who seem to make obvious poor choice after obvious poor choice.

I ended up with:

Blessed are those who lack sympathy for they will be given empathy.

Our friend Mr. O who is completely deaf in both ears and only hears through the modern miracle of cochlear implants said that he sometimes lacks courage to speak about Jesus in groups of people because his speech is not perfect.

He ended up with:

Blessed are those who lack courage, for they will be given the words to expand My kingdom.

Another friend of ours shared that she often feels timid and ended up with:

Blessed are those who are timid for they will be given boldness.

I thought this to be quite an interesting exercise, and I wanted to share it with all of you so that I don’t forget about it. 

So you might get your Bible out, read through Matthew chapter 5 and if you don’t find yourself exactly on that list try to expand it.