Character 8

Matt. 5:3-4 ... "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

      In Mat. 5:3-12, at the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus presents eight features of the kind of personality He wants His disciples to have.  He then promises a blessing upon the person who will build these features into his thinking and consequent behavior.  A blessing is paired with each of these features, so that the quality of the person's life is enriched and lifted to a higher plane. A view has developed in the popular explanation of this passage that "blessed" means "happy," and thus it is translated in some recent versions of the New Testament. A more careful examination shows this view to betray the essential idea in Jesus' meaning.  "Happy" is from the root word "hap," which denotes chance and its random nature. But a blessing is not the product of chance; it is a measure of God's grace received. A person who is blessed has a reason to be happy, but a person can be blessed without being happy. Many is the time in a Christian's experience when the roughness of life is stressful and unplea-sant, but God's blessing is still with him, if he perseveres in faith and trust in God's providence. Clouds of trouble often darken the lives of God's people, but He will eventually part the clouds. and the sun-shine of His goodness will bring light and joy.  So, it may be said ... A Christian's life will pass from sorrow and oppression to joy and exaltation, but at all times God's blessings are present. I advise that we not replace Jesus' word "blessed" with the weak and shallow, but very popular term, "happy."

      The character trait that appears in the first beatitude is humility: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." A person who is "poor in spirit" is an humble person who does not put himself before others. He is always concerned about the situation of people around him, especially if they are having difficulty. He does not consider himself to be more worthy, more deserving, and more fitting than others. He recognizes value in everyone, believes they are due consideration, and seeks to find a good place for them in a given context. There are numerous times in Jesus ministry where He is found paying attention to the needs, the pain, and the welfare of people. He reacted to their misery and deprivation by relieving their pain and bringing them into the mainstream of productive, meaningful life experience.

      The character trait in the seond beatitude is sorrow: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." This does not mean being sorrowful about disease, accidents, losses, backsets, and those kinds of afflictions that life deals out to everyone. Jesus speaks of the sorrow one feels because of the great prevalence of sin in the world that is continually devastating the lives of everyone, including one's own life. Because every soul is made in God's image, because one soul is worth more than all the  world, and because a soul is something eternal, one should feel great sorrow that sin constantly invades the soul. It is a spiritual contagion that sickens its victim in the worst way, in the part of his being that exists forever, beginning in this world and continuing through eternity.

      The attitude of the common worldly individual is, "It's every one for himself, and let the devil take the hindermost." This prevailing attitude is the opposite to the character trait revealed in the second beatitude. It is a grievous character flaw.  The further a sinner is removed from us, the less we care about him, and the better we feel because he is at a distance. We rarely look at him with sorrow and  have much concern that his soul is wrecked and headed into a dreadful, hopeless oblivion. Jesus had no sin, and therefore He could not sorrow over sin ruining Him. But the New Testament is replete with examples of the sorrow Jesus had for someone else whose life was being blasted and wasted by the action of sin within him. 

Character 7

In previous articles I have asserted that Christ is the only real model for good character.  By looking to Him in the way He lived and by considering carefully what He taught, we can discern the elements that constitute a good character. In this article, and those remaining on this subject, we will do just that. First, we shall examine a special section of one of His sermons, the one popularly known as the Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5-6-7). His introduction was a set of blessings He pronounced on the person who will incorporate into his life certain personality traits which He names. Since the word for "bless-ing" in Latin was beatus, and the Latin Vulgate had a great deal of influence on the earliest English translations of the Bible, these statements in Mat. 5:3-12 have for centuries been called the Beatitudes. Actually, these traits are essential components of real character. The emphasis will be upon the specific traits named and not upon the blessing that rewards the person who builds these qualities of spirit into his life. That is the emphasis for another study.

Note the words, "who builds these qualities of spirit into his life." They are not external things that are put on as clothing; they are spiritual things that are introduced into the heart to permeate thought, feel-ing, and perspective and thus reconstitute one's inner being into a far better person, even the best a mortal man can be. Character models that seek only to shape and regulate outward expression really do not produce genuine character. What Jesus teaches in the Beatitudes are to be taken into the heart and refashion it into a person whose inner and outer lives are congruent. (See Pro. 4:23.)

Reputation is often taken to be character, but it is not. Character is what you really are; reputation is what people think you to be. That may be said another way: Character is what God sees when He looks at you; reputation is what people see when they look at you. A person's life is at its best when reputation and character match, but that is seldom the way it is. And the mismatch goes both ways. Sometimes a person's reputation extends no further than his family and a small circle of friends and acquaintances. But he may have an excellent character. Because he is quiet, humble, and unobtrusive, not many people realize the excellence of his character. I have known many such people and considered them to be the solid foundation of their community and church. On the other hand, there are people whose reputation is big and widely known. They project themselves; they want to be seen and heard; they want to be up front of any group they are in. But if you measure them by the canon presented in the New Testament, you discover that, while big on reputation, they have significant deficiencies in character.

When you see people at church, you are only seeing one side of them. If you could see them in their routine at home, at work, in business, and in  public interaction, you might recognize quite a different person than you know at church. There are some people who do know them in both both settings, and they are well-acquainted with their duplicity; but for many reasons, they keep what they know private. But, the lord knows, for His knowledge of man is complete. We are told in Psa. 14:2 that "the Lord [looks] down from heaven upon the sons of men, to see if there are any who understand [margin: act wisely], who seek after God." A person of good character will have a reputation that matches his char-acter, at least by people who know him in all areas of life.

(* Beginning in the next article we will begin to consider the 8 essentail traits of good character taught by Jesus in the Beatitudes of Mat. 5:3-12).