4.7

The teacher is here (John 11:28)

Jesus’ public ministry was soaked through from beginning to end with teachings upon teachings. He used whatever situations, analogies, parables, and examples from life to get His messages across to His followers. He taught as His Father taught Him, holding back nothing God gave Him (John 15:15). He received the masses who were crowding Him and following wherever He led, beseeching Him to meet their needs, to relieve their poverty, hunger, diseases, spiritual oppression, and the burden of a brutal Roman occupation. The multitudes were so drawn to Him, they wouldn’t let Him alone and stepped over one another just to get near Him (Luke 12:1). As they came and kept coming, Jesus welcomed them and spoke of the One who was drawing them to Himself, of His Father who sent Him to turn them back to Himself as His people

One of His earliest recorded teachings is known as His Sermon on the Mount. It starts with a series of very strange blessings. “Blessed are you poor in spirit,” Jesus began. Blessed are you who mourn, who are gentle and hunger for righteousness. Blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart and peacemakers. Blessed are you who are persecuted for Jesus’ sake, because in the same way the prophets were persecuted for God’s sake (Matthew 5:1-12). Here and throughout His ministry, Jesus taught God’s eternal truths as paradoxes. If you are poor, you are rich. If you are hungry, you are well fed. If you are weak, you are strong. If you are last, you are first. If you lose your life, you gain it. If you give generously, you receive much. If you bow down before God, He lifts you up. In these paradoxes, Jesus makes clear the profound difference between God’s ways and our ways. He wasn’t teaching the art of reason and how to logically decipher God with our mind, but He was teaching and living God’s incomprehensible ways to feed our heart with His life. When we see that we are blind to God’s ways because they so dramatically differ from ours, God in His kindness begins to show us His good ways

The depth and wisdom of Jesus’ paradoxes will be more fully explored later. For now, we can state as a general truth that His paradoxes presented the Jews with the greatest of life’s decision: either trust this incomprehensible God as their God, or trust their own understanding and however they choose to value life’s good. God begins life as His gift and He requires Himself to teach us how to open and savor it. We, however, derive our life from what we judge is or isn’t good, is or isn’t deserved, is or isn’t up or down. If we are last and God is first to us, He makes us first with Him because He is that gracious

There are so many things Jesus taught His disciples and followers, too many to cover in any book. But in this beginning of His Sermon on the Mount, called the beatitudes, He described the kind of spirit that can see and know God and live in union with Him. This spirit is humble, pure, receptive to God and sanctified to Him. It describes the nature of His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus. Jesus manifested the same humble and devoted Spirit He taught. He both spoke and lived God’s words as one inviolable truth. Whether or not the crowds knew, it was the beauty and desirability of God’s Spirit that drew them to Him. They knew He would accept them, answer their needs and direct them to the one God who is their one hope. This Jesus lived and spoke one message: God is good. Watch Me and see what God’s good looks like