What's up
I'm currently Preaching a series on the Sermon on The Mount called 'The Kingdom's Manifesto' (A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions) we are 4 weeks into the series.

Here are some the points I covered so far (Matt. 5:1-5:16)

• Jesus saw the multitudes and knew he had to establish the disciples to handle the need.The multitudes wanted to touch and meet the person of Jesus as well as feel his power...but Jesus knew they also needed to learn his principles.
• Jesus chose an elevated place to share these teachings...we too must elevate our faith(in order to shape our future), mentality(in order to change our reality) and attitude(our attitude determine our altitude)....the word and the presence of God will change our nature and the church will nurture that change
• The initial targeted audience for this sermon was the disciples...are you a disciple?...a disciple is a discipline learner(student) of the gospel
• Verse 1 says the 'disciples came to him...'we must learn to seek and go to God instead of always insisting he comes to us.
• Verse 2 says 'he opened his mouth..' this is a way of arousing the reader's attention to prepare them for something heavy and important
• beatitude means consummate blessing (consummate means completion) so beatitude can be describe as complete happiness...we will have complete happiness when we internalize and materialize these principles.
• the words 'Blessed are' means 'happy are'.
• 'Poor in Spirit' means the absence of spiritual pride and the absence of being full of ourselves(not financially poor)...we must know we are internally and eternally spiritually bankrupt without Jesus Christ,When we are spiritually poor the we will inherit(not because of our work but of someone else's work) the kingdom of heaven which is receiving citizenship to heaven and living out the principles of God (kingdom denotes King's Dominion when you are a resident of a King's dominion you must live by his rules if you want to fully enjoy the benefits of citizenship)

that's enough for today I will give you more points later this week where I will cover the rest of the beatitudes.

I hope you were blessed by these quick 'power'points, if you live in NYC and you don't have a church please feel free to visit us this Sunday.

Upcoming post: NFL Draft special, Top 10 tech toys, review of my time preaching at the Park Slope Christian retreat, 7 lessons I learned from 7 great people, Kingdom's Manifesto part 2 and more

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