No portion of our Lord’s teaching is better known and probably no portion of the Word of God is more difficult to read than the Beatitudes given in Matthew 5. This is because it is impossible to read these verses without realizing acutely that while they may describe the Lord Jesus Christ, they most certainly do not describe us.
In verses 13 and 14 Jesus talks about prayer, saying that prayer is effective. Notice the way He puts it: “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
In verse 9 Jesus talks about knowing God. He says, “You really can know God, and the way you know God is by knowing me.” It comes out of a question Philip asked. Philip had said, “Lord, show us the father and that will be enough for us” (v. 8). When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” I think Philip got the message of Jesus’ departure. Philip thought, “The Father is in heaven; Jesus is going to heaven; he is going home.” So he said, “Lord, I get what you are saying. You are leaving us. But we have come such a small way in our experience of spiritual things. Before you go there is one thing we really want: we want to see God. That is what we want to see.”
The next thing I notice is that heaven is a home. It is our home. “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through,” we sing in one of our gospel songs, and that is true...We are never going to find a truly permanent home in this world, because this world is transient. We are never going to have a permanent spiritual home here. But Jesus says, “I am going to prepare a place for you. I am making you a home in heaven.”
Let me list the things Jesus tells us are a basis for why we should not be troubled. First, there is a place called heaven, and He has gone there to prepare it for us. D.L. Moody once talked about a man he knew who had some thoughts about heaven. He said that when he was young, he never thought about it, or if he did, he thought about it as a distant place that did not have anything to do with him. It was far away and was peopled with nobody he knew. It did not mean much to him at all.
