A Study Guide to The Beatitudes and The Sermon on the Mount

By Patricia Adams

A Study Guide to The Beatitudes and The Sermon on the Mount is a personal investigation into how we can live the truth of Jesus's major teaching. Pondering and journaling the issues addressed in the Sermon on the Mount will connect the user to Christ in a deeper and more faithful way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patricia Adams Publishing
• Release date: Oct 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781958920510

Patricia Adams

Patricia Said Adams, known as Pat, was born in 1941; she spent most of her childhood in Louisville, Kentucky, and her teens in Wilmington, Delaware. She graduated from Connecticut College in 1963 with a BA in Art History. She has worked in banking and retailing; her favorite job was as a women's sportswear buyer. She and her husband raised three children; he supported the family and she was a school and church volunteer.She has been a Spiritual Director for 15 years, a supervisor of spiritual directors for six years and a blogger about the spiritual life for nine years. She so enjoys the privilege of working with others at the soul level. The central question of her life is this: how do I, how do we, live the life God intends for us?Thy Kingdom Come! is her first book AND her second book is,Exodus: Our Story Too! From Slavery to the World to the Kingdom of God.CONTACT PATRICIA SAID ADAMS AT:Exodus: Our Story Too! - http://exodus-our-story-too.blogspot.comPatricia Said Adams - http://patricia-said-adams.blogspot.comBy The Waters Blog - http://bythewaters.net

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ISBN: 978-1-958920-50-3 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-958920-51-0 (Ebook)

Copyright © 2022 Patricia Said Adams

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

Chapter 2 Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Blessed Are Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

Chapter 5 Blessed Are the Merciful

Chapter 6 Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Conclusion

Introduction

A Study Guide to the Sermon on the Mount

They are like rungs on a ladder, which Christ has arranged in an exact order. There is a pattern to his arrangement. Each step builds on the foundation of the previous step, each leads to the next, and each is indispensable. We can’t divide them up, retaining those we find appealing and leaving those we don’t care for to others, as if one could specialize: ‘I’ll take peace-making, you can have purity of heart…The Christian life is climbing the ladder of the beatitudes—and when we fall off, starting once again.¹

Everyone born of God overcomes the world. 1 John 5:4

When I follow the Holy Spirit’s direction, I never know where I will end up. With this book, in particular, it’s been a journey that started with a comment from one of the readers of my blog, By the Waters. I had written a post entitled, God Calls Us Out of Slavery to the World. And one of my readers commented, What do you mean? God never condemned slavery! Immediately, I had to see if that was really true. And so I looked up all the references to slavery in the Bible, and sure enough, there was no outright condemnation of slavery at all. But what became clear to me as I read all the references is that God helped people out of slavery all the time, like the Israelites He rescued from the Egyptians. Or He promoted Joseph and Daniel when they were enslaved so they would suffer a lot less. He saved Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from certain death, Jesus healed people who were paralyzed and sick—another form of slavery—to the body. So many stories in the Bible tell the tales of kings of the Jews who kept to God’s laws who were helped by God against all kinds of enemies and much more. And the kings who didn’t keep to God’s laws suffered tremendous setbacks.

About this point in my research I saw that slavery in the world was the common state of affairs: slavery to a king or an empire, slavery to the cultural norms, serfdom, chattel slavery, slavery to one’s own self-image, debt slavery which was very common in biblical times, and more, slavery to wealth or the accumulation of money. And against this worldly pressure that enslaves so many of us was the invitation that God and later Jesus extended to us: to follow His laws, the spirit of the laws, and we will be graced by an end to any enslavement to the world’s ways.

As I finished researching slavery in the world, it became clear to me that I wasn’t writing a book about slavery per se. But it took me quite a while of pondering before I heard the clear directive that the book is to be about the Sermon on the Mount, a distillation of Jesus’s teachings, an early exposition of what it meant to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. It’s about how, as Jesus’s followers, we are freed of all slavery and attachment to the world. Later still, it came to me that this was to be a study guide, a workbook, not a book about the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount.

As I began to delve into the sermon, it became clear to me that the Beatitudes were the summary of the teachings that followed in the Sermon on the Mount. So the first step in my research was to match the teachings about murder and adultery, oaths, praying, judgment and so much more with each Beatitudes. I could begin to see how each step, like blessed are the poor in spirit, echoed the Golden Rule of Matthew 7 about how we are to treat others: In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you for this sums up the law and the prophets. [v. 12] And that blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness echoes how we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength that each of the Beatitudes points us towards a life of loving God with all of ourselves, with our whole selves given over to Him, that is, all the good in us and the oh-so-human stuff, too with our thoughts and our attitudes and with all of that we are joined with and led by God in living out the rest of our lives.

And so, the Beatitudes began to come alive for me in ways that they never had before. At first I looked only at the passages in Matthew,