by Ray Ortlund
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:3

Jesus welcomes into His kingdom only the people who have defied Him and offended Him and sinned so badly that their own righteousness is gone for good. They’ve lost their innocence, and now they’ve come to Him with nothing but need. They don’t admire themselves anymore. They mourn over themselves. But Jesus is happy with them, and He wants them to know He’s happy with them. He’s happy with you, to the praise of the glory of His grace.
So the Beatitudes are not just another passage in the Bible. The Beatitudes summarize what real Christianity looks like. The Beatitudes portray what repentance looks like, the way repentance thinks, the way repentance feels.
The kingdom of Jesus is for sinners and penitents, and for them only. It’s for people who have failed so badly they have no bargaining chips left, and they refuse to fake it. They bring their need to God; He gives them Jesus; and He creates with these unlikely people something new in this world that will last forever: His kingdom.
And the Beatitudes are not a menu to choose from. They’re a coherent whole, so it’s all or nothing. When Jesus preached this sermon on the Galilean hillside and all those people were out there, He didn’t look at one group and say, “Oh, nice to see the poor in spirit here today. And then the mourners over there—glad you guys could get out of bed. And way in the back are the meek. You know, they’ll never push themselves up to the front row, and …” The poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, and all the rest are the same people viewed from different angles of vision.
How do we know that? The first and last Beatitudes, found in verses 3 and 10 in Matthew 5, both say, “For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” So those two matching declarations wrap around all the Beatitudes, showing they belong together as a unit. Here’s why that matters: for me, meekness is not easy, but mourning isn’t that hard; so I would treat these verses as a menu of preferences, and I would gravitate toward what I perceive to be my strengths. But Jesus means every word here for every single one of us. So we want to move toward our weaknesses, because that’s where our King is waiting for us with grace.

Thought to Remember for Today

Contrary to popular thought, the kingdom of heaven is not populated by the strong, the sinless, the consistently victorious. It is populated by those who know they are poor and weak and naked. It is populated by those who have put down their weapons of self-justification and rest in Christ’s promised love alone.

Fitzpatrick, E. (2016). Grace untamed: a 60-day devotional. Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook.