I'm in a men's Community Group that meets during the week to study the Bible and do life "shoulder to shoulder," and right now we're working slowly through the book of Matthew. For the last few weeks we've been in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, and as part of that we read "the Beatitudes" in Matthew 5:3-12: 3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, Understandably, these "Beatitudes" (think of them as ways to be blessed) can be abstract, and many of them sound foreign to our 21st century Western ears. Therefore, in the men's group of which I'm a part we spent the bulk of our time discussing what these Beatitudes look like as they're actually lived out. What does it look like to be "poor in spirit"? How about "meek," or "pure in heart"? How do we embody the Beatitudes?
A key part of the answer that was suggested is that we look at the life of Jesus. As the perfect, sinless, and sent "God-man" (fully God and fully man), how did Jesus live out these values? Below I've included a number of ways I see Jesus embodying these Beatitudes - what follows is very brief, certainly isn't exhaustive, and I'm guessing a few people might quibble with one or two of the things I bring up. But these will hopefully get your own mind thinking about how Jesus embodied the Beatitudes AND give you a better sense of how you can live out these values yourself, in your situation.
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 People just like you have taken "Bible Basics: An Important Class about God's Word" and have benefited from it. Take a few minutes and hear what they've got to say. Then, click here to be taken to our Spring 2015 classes page where you can sign up for this Bible Basics class and benefit from it yourself!
In just a few weeks, Spring 2015 Institute classes will begin. (Woo hoo!)
The start of a semester always gives me lots of great opportunities to (re)introduce people to the Brookside Institute - what the Brookside Institute is, values that guide us, etc. As part of that, below I've compiled a handful (or two) of links - most of them blog posts - that relate to these sorts of questions and topics. Consider it "speed dating" the Institute - learning a lot about what we do and what we're about in a short amount of time! Happy reading!  Here's a sampling of some of the things I've been reading and reviewing this week. The hope is that these bite-sized sections of books, articles, blog posts, etc will stand on their own and be beneficial (or at least thought-provoking!) in-and-of-themselves. But I also hope that some of you will like these excerpts enough that they pull you into the larger work from which they've been taken.
Let's start sampling:  Recently I was sent this question via email: "[We're] looking for a tool that we could use to help study the bible. Something beyond a a guide written specifically for a certain book but rather something we could use to help with any book/chapter/verse. Do you have any suggestions?" I love this question! I love how these individuals want to read God's Word closely and faithfully. Here's my reply, with a few minor edits:
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