Today I want to consider another woman we meet in the Bible. She doesn’t have a name but we know she was a widow from Nain (A village located 14 kilometers south of Nazareth) whose only son had died. Death had taken away her only source of hope, strength as well as protection. There was nothing she could do about it but weep bitterly. But then something unexpected happened. A stranger she met told her not to weep. The rest is history.
Someone said, “I bet the Funeral Parlors in Jesus’ day just about went broke. Anywhere Jesus went, the dead were being raised.” Jesus probably raised many people from the dead during his earthly ministry, although the Bible records only three of them.
In the U.S, the Assemblies of God has traditionally adopted a position of
total abstinence or “teetotalism” when it comes to the use of alcoholic beverages. Our church is no exception to that rule. But, in this age of moral permissiveness, how have we come to that position and how can we defend it?
Last month I had the joy of walking you through Jesus’ teaching on the Beatitudes and together we were able to discover some amazing truths to help ourselves in our walk with God. If you missed those sermons, don’t worry. You can get to them by going here.
Tonight I want us to consider another important portion of scripture recorded in the same passage as the Beatitudes. Once again please turn your Bibles to the Gospel of Matthew chapter 5. We will read verses 13 through 16, (Matthew 5:13-16). Some of you might question the necessity for this sermon because many other sermons have been preached from these verses before. This sermon, however, is going to be a much simple and an easy to understand version.
Jesus used the beatitudes to explain to His followers the true path to happiness. However this teaching has not always been accepted well because it’s the great contrast to the worldly notion of blessedness and happiness. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher once called them a “malignant disease.” Jesus’ point is we need to change our focus from the world’s perspective of happiness to God’s perspective of it, in order to find any happiness at all in this life and the beatitudes are the way to do it. In my previous sermon we looked at the first four of these. Let’s consider the rest today.
Elie Wiesel the most famous Holocaust survivor of all time once said this. “After the Holocaust, I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind!” If the Holocaust was a test, I am sure Wiesel passed it with flying colors.
We have before us this evening a well-known passage of the Bible. The Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Society is so familiar with the story there are at least half a dozen Hospitals in the US named after the Good Samaritan. So many sermons have been dedicated to it, searching the phrase “Sermon on the Good Samaritan” in Google returns over 481,000 results.
Countless research has proved that happiness is every man’s greatest goal in life. In Matthew 5:3-12 & Luke 6:20-22 Jesus used the beatitudes to explain to His followers the true path to happiness. This teaching has not always been accepted well though because it’s the great contrast to the worldly notion of blessedness and happiness. George Bernard Shaw called it an “impractical outburst of anarchism and sentimentality.” The point is we need to change our focus in order to find any happiness at all in this life and the beatitudes are the way to do it. In today’s sermon let us consider to how embrace these principles?
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