beatitudes: so how you follow the beatitudes?
Before we look at each Beatitudes individually, we need to cover one more thing: how do you actually obey the Beatitudes? If we want to live a flourishing life, it won’t be enough to just talk about the Beatitudes, we have to know how to live them out.
Unfortunately, obedience is often seen as a bad word in many Christian circles, and lots of churches treat it as an optional part of being a Christian. Think about it, when was the last time you heard a sermon on obedience?
To many churches, the most important thing in Christianity is to get people saved. So they avoid talking about obedience, afraid that any mention of the need for Christians to obey God’s commands will lead to works righteousness.
what’s the actual point of christianity?
But that’s not how the Bible views Christianity. According to the Bible, the goal of the gospel isn’t just to get people saved, but rather to make them like Christ. In Romans 8:29, Paul says that we are predestined, not to be saved, but so that we might be conformed to the image of Christ.
The Bible teaches that salvation by grace doesn’t make obedience optional, but rather possible. After all, it was Jesus who challenged the crowd, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, but do not do what I say?” To Jesus, real faith is more just than just agreeing with his claims, it also involves putting them into practice through obedience.
Obedience then should not be seen as an optional part of Christianity, but rather how we grow to be more and more like Jesus. This is what we see in Philippians 2:12, when Paul tells believers to obey by working out their salvation with fear and trembling.
So, if you are ever going to become someone who experiences the flourishing life of God’s kingdom, you can’t just read about Jesus’ teaching in the Beatitudes and expect your life to magically change, you need to put it into practice through obedience.
part 1: how do we typically approach obedience?
Before we look at how the Bible teaches us to follow the Beatitudes, though, we need to first see how Christians typically approach obedience. Most Christians fall into one of two extremes. They believe that either:
Obedience is by willpower, or
Obedience is by accident.
the 1st approach: obedience by willpower
The most common way for Christians to approach obedience is to think that it’s all up to you. In this approach, obedience is your 100% your responsibility, and occurs through personal willpower and self-discipline.
The fundamental belief that drives obedience in this approach is: Christians are saved by grace, but grow in obedience through their own willpower.
When we approach obedience through our willpower, we think that we can handle our sin through moral conformity: if we can just control our bad habits and suppress our sinful desires then we’ll be able to avoid disobedience.
And so when we come across Jesus’ Beatitudes, we think that if we can just muster up enough energy and discipline, we’ll be able to conform our hearts to follow these teachings. “Good Christians follow the Beatitudes,” we tell ourselves, “So I’m going to do everything I can to make sure I’m always poor in spirit and meek and pure in heart.”
This causes us to take on total responsibility for our own obedience. It’s up to us and our hard work to obey Jesus’ teachings, so we resolve in our hearts to take Jesus seriously and set off feeling confident about our ability to follow through.
the problem with the willpower approach
While the willpower approach to obedience promises to give us the ability to control our hearts, there’s just one problem: it doesn’t work. Regardless of whether you are able to obey or not, the willpower approach is spiritually disastrous.
When things are going well, the willpower approach always leads to pride and self-righteousness. We become proud of our moral record and quite confident that we are somebody special.
Look at how good I am at being a Christian! Sure, I’m not perfect, but I’m pretty close, and so much better than those people who struggle with that.
This causes us to become legalistic in how we treat others: we're constantly judging other people and measuring them against ourselves, causing us to wonder why they can't get their lives together like us?
But then, when either our willpower inevitably fails or our sin becomes noticed by others, our pride and self-righteousness disappear and are replaced by shame and self-hatred.
I’m such a terrible Christian. There’s no way that God could ever love me or want to be around. I’m too flawed and messed up to ever be accepted by God.”
The shame from our failures cause us to withdraw from God and put up an “Everything’s good!” facade around others until we can get our act together again. We then resolve to never struggle with this sin again, and go back to trying to solve our corrupted hearts through external effort.
At its core, the willpower approach will never create lasting obedience because no amount of behavior modification can ever change the corrupted desires that flow out of our sinful hearts.
the results of the willpower approach
When we try to use our willpower to obey Jesus, it creates all kinds of chaos. It causes us to:
Ride the rollercoaster of personal performance: how we feel about ourselves will always depend on our latest performance. When we’re meeting our own standards we’ll be sky-high, but then the moment we fall short, we’ll be down in the depths, wallowing in self-hatred.
Disregard any of Jesus' teachings that we find too hard (like the Beatitudes): Since we’re our self-worth is based on our own moral standards, we shrink Jesus’ teachings into a small list of commands that we find easier to obey, while ignoring anything that doesn’t come naturally.
Create a toxic Christian culture filled with legalism and fear: Our Christian cultures are not built around grace, but rather legalism (God likes me because I’m better than most people) and a performative facade (I have to make sure no one knows that I struggle with sin).
Focus on behavior modification, not heart change: since all that matters is how other people see us, the Christian life becomes about managing our external appearance, not solving the real issues of our hearts.
When we try to follow Jesus’ teachings through our own willpower, the results will destroy us. Not only will we continually struggle with pride, fear, and shame, we’ll ignore the Beatitudes and never experience the flourishing life of God’s kingdom.
When we try and give up, then we lose hope. So we quit trying. Jesus didn't really mean that stuff. And then we miss out, we don't flourish.
the 2nd approach: obedience is optional
As a result of the problems caused by willpower-based obedience, many Christians in their 20s and 30s have left this approach and now attend churches on the completely opposite side of the spectrum. These churches teach that it’s okay to obey God, as long as you never try to.
Their working belief towards obedience is: Since you are saved by grace, you don't need to worry about obeying.
In this approach, to try to obey God would be to diminish grace and to set yourself up for legalism and works righteousness. And so obedience becomes unimportant, something that can happen, but should never be directly pursued.
In this setting, the only “authentic” obedience is what happens naturally and without any overt effort. This means that we obey when it fits us, but when something runs contrary to our emotions (i.e. what feels good), then we don’t obey. If we do obey that’s fine, but if not, there’s grace for that.
Instead, these churches focus almost completely on receiving God’s grace and claiming God’s promises. There’s little time or interest to talk about obedience and how Christians should actually follow Jesus’ teachings.
The most important thing in these Christian circles is not whether you obey Jesus, but whether you’re excited about him. The mark of mature faith is not obedience, but rather having an intense emotional experience when you encounter God. As long as you love God and try to be a nice person, how you live is a secondary concern.
the problem with this approach
For Christians who follow this approach to obedience, the problem isn’t legalism, but rather license: it doesn’t matter whether you obey Jesus because you’re already saved by his grace.
The problem with license, though, is that it leads to hypocrisy. We are so focused on the freedom found in Christ that we never fight against our indwelling sin. They never say no to their sinful desires, which means they never change and never grow.
The root mistake of this approach is that it confuses effort with merit. But as Dallas Willard wrote:
Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.
Because these Christians believe that grace makes effort obedience unnecessary, they never become like Christ. They don’t obey Jesus’ teachings because they never come naturally, and so, over time, they often live no differently than the culture around them.
the results of this approach
When we don’t treat obedience to Jesus’ teachings as important, it creates all kinds of disastrous results. It causes us to:
Exploit cheap grace: when we make obedience unimportant, we live through cheap grace, a grace that only focuses on what we get out from Jesus, but never mentions what he gave to create it.
Never experience the supernatural change of the sanctification: since we don’t have to say no to our sinful desires, we never grow in holiness.
Obey our culture, not Christ: human beings can’t opt out of obedience; you’re always going to obey someone. If that person isn’t Jesus, then we’ll spend our lives obeying other people in our culture.
Reject Jesus’ wisdom: when we refuse to obey Jesus we may think we are “living in grace,” but what we’re really doing is rejecting the wisdom of the Son of God. It’s the age-old temptation to think that we know better than God.
Be our own god: since we get to decide what is worth obeying and what isn’t, our feelings and opinions become our god, one that we judge the real God by.
where this all leaves christians
Both of these approaches causes major problems, and makes it so we avoid obeying Jesus’ teachings in the Beatitudes. When Christians try to obey the Beatitudes through willpower they quickly give up, but when Christian make obeying the Beatitudes unimportant, they’ll never get started.
This leaves us in a tough spot: how do we actually obey the Beatitudes and experience the flourishing life of God’s kingdom?
Part 2: what does the bible say about obedience?
The key to following the Beatitudes is to recognize that the Bible doesn’t teach obedience through willpower or obedience by accident, but rather obedience through spiritual transformation.
Biblical obedience happens when our hearts are spiritually transformed to become more and more like Christ, as we respond to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. It’s not doesn’t pit grace and and obedience against each other, but rather calls us to obey by working out our salvation with fear and trembling.
Here are a few ways that biblical obedience is different from both human-centered approaches to obedience:
The foundation of biblical obedience is not anything you can do, but rather the power of Jesus' resurrected life. It's our new life through the power of Jesus' resurrection that makes obedience possible. Like Paul says:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Biblical obedience is the result of a changed heart, not the cause of one: While legalism says you can change your heart and license says your heart doesn’t need to change, the Bible says that obedience will always flow out of a heart that’s being changed by God. Jesus told his disciples:
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit.
Jesus’ resurrection gives our hearts’ new life, but they still need to be formed: Even after a Christian is regenerated, we still struggle will indwelling sin and need to grow as we’re conformed to Christ. Paul writes in Romans 7:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do.”
Biblical obedience is not opposed to grace, but rather flows from grace: Christians aren’t saved by grace and then grow through effort, but rather by responding to God’s saving grace and applying it to every area of our lives. This is why Paul can tell us:
Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.
Jesus doesn’t see obedience as optional or unimportant, but rather the natural accompaniment to being his disciple: When Jesus was giving his final words of instruction in the Great Commission, he told his disciples:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
Unlike every other religion or secular strategy for flourishing, Christianity is not a self-improvement system, but rather a relationship that leads to supernatural change. Spiritual formation isn't just action control, but rather a renewal of our heart and desires.
Obedience through spiritual formation is different from legalistic obedience, because it's us responding through grace. But it's also different from grace-based license, because it requires us to put forth effort in order to grow to be more like Jesus.
The question now becomes, how do we experience the spiritual transformation that leads biblical obedience?
part 3: so how can we actually obey the beatitudes?
While there are lots of passages you could turn to in order to better understand how spiritual transformation gives us the ability to obey, one that I’ve found helpful is Ephesians 4:21-24:
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
In these verses, Paul outlines the three things that need to happen if you want to grow in your ability to follow Jesus’ teachings. You need to:
Put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires.
Be renewed in the spirit of your minds.
Put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
If we ever want to grow in our ability to obey Jesus’ Beatitudes, this is our roadmap.
1. put off your old self
The first step towards biblical obedience is to put off the old self. The old self is the deceitful desires, attitudes, and patterns of life that make up who we are before we are born again through Christ.
To put off your old self is to renounce your old personality and the desires and values that drove it. Paul reinforces what we talked about in an earlier essay, that because of sin our natural desires are corrupted and driving us towards all kinds of unhealthy behavior.
To do this, you need to examine your life and seek to understand what is motivating you. Where are you being driven by the desires of the world and not by the desires of God? Where are you trying to flourish by building a big enough kingdom to satisfy your own desires, and not entrusting yourself to God's kingdom?
Putting off the old self is more than just trying to kick a few bad habits, it’s a complete and comprehensive change in how you live. It's examining the motives, attitudes, and beliefs that drive your life and renouncing them. It’s not hating who you are or getting rid of everything in your life, but rather acknowledging and repenting of the destructive desires that are in our hearts.
2. be renewed in the spirit of your minds
The next step towards biblical obedience is to be renewed in the spirit of our minds. This happens when the Holy Spirit works in us to renew our minds and make us more and more like Christ.
When we're renewed by the Holy Spirit, God is transforming our hearts, capturing our imaginations, and becoming the most real thing in our lives. Our desires are changed, so that we want the things of Christ and not the things of this world. This is what Paul is talking about in Romans 12:2, when he says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed through the renewal of your mind.”
While being renewed is something that's done to you, you do have a role to play in creating the conditions where it can happen: by dwelling in God’s presence, primarily through prayer and his word. It’s as we let the word of Christ dwell in us, through reading it, memorizing it, and meditating on it, that the Holy Spirit works to change our hearts, not through outside pressure but rather through internal transformation.
3. put on the new self
As we put off the old self and are renewed by the Holy Spirit, we complete the process by putting on the new self. To put on the new self means to become like Christ and live into his righteousness and holiness. We are to put on his beliefs, attitudes, and actions as we seek to follow him in all that we do.
Whenever you put something off, you have to fill the void, otherwise it will always come back. It doesn’t matter how many times you pull the weeds from your front lawn, until you plant grass, they will always keep coming back.
This is the same way with our beliefs and behaviors. In Romans 13:14, Paul tells us to, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” It’s only as we live into our new life with Christ that we are able to cast off the secular approach to flourishing and put on Jesus’ approach to flourishing in the Beatitudes.
How do you put on the new self? By preaching the gospel to yourself and reminding yourself who you are in Christ. As we put off our sinful desires, are renewed by the Holy Spirit, and put on Christ, our hearts are changed and begin to bear the fruit of obedience.
Part 4: so what's the result of biblical obedience
When we seek to obey Jesus’ commands through God’s way and not our own, we’ll find that Jesus’ burden is light and his yoke is easy. Biblical obedience through spiritual transformation is the only thing in the world that gives human beings the power we need to make real change and experience supernatural growth.
As we begin next week to look at the flourishing life promised in each Beatitude, I'm reminded of this quote from C.S. Lewis:
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.
But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
God’s plan for us isn’t just to make us a little nicer or friendlier, but rather to make us like Jesus Christ in every way. And as you seek to follow the Beatitudes, you’ll be shocked at the changes that God is making in you.
