From Oswald Chambers' devotional My Utmost
for His Highest:
"Blessed are . . ." — Matthew
5:3-10
"When we first read the statements of
Jesus they seem wonderfully simple and unstartling, and they sink unobserved
into our unconscious minds.
"For instance, the Beatitudes seem
merely mild and beautiful precepts for all unworldly and useless people, but of
very little practical use in the stern workaday world in which we live. We soon
find, however, that the Beatitudes contain the dynamite of the Holy Ghost. They
explode, as it were, when the circumstances of our lives cause them to do so.
When the Holy Spirit brings to our remembrance one of these Beatitudes we
say--'What a startling statement that is!' and we have to decide whether we
will accept the tremendous spiritual upheaval that will be produced in our
circumstances if we obey His words.
"That is the way the Spirit of God
works. We do not need to be born again to apply the Sermon on the Mount
literally. The literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is child’s
play; the interpretation by the Spirit of God as He applies our Lord’s
statements to our circumstances is the stern work of a saint.
"The teaching of Jesus is out of all
proportion to our natural way of looking at things and it comes with
astonishing discomfort to begin with. We have slowly to form our walk and
conversation on the line of the precepts of Jesus Christ as the Holy Spirit
applies them to our circumstances. The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of rules
and regulations: it is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy
Spirit is getting His way with us." (emphasis mine)
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