The Beatitudes, Seeing God, and an Introduction to the PCA

Weekend Newsletter: March 5, 2022

Jacob Gerber

Mar 5, 2022

This Week’s Sermon

This past Sunday, I had the privilege of preaching twice, in the morning and then again for our evening service. In the morning, I preached on the Beatitudes of Jesus, from Matthew 5:1–10.

I have never preached on the Beatitudes before, but I was fascinated by their structure, where the first four deal with our relationship to God (namely, a relationship of repentance), and the last four deal with our relationship to others (namely, in the way that we resemble God in our dealings with others).

Here is the introduction from the sermon notes:

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers the purest, most perfect wisdom the world has ever heard, in a distillation of only three chapters of material (Matt. 5–7). Within this Sermon, Jesus begins by a series of paradoxical statements about the blessedness of those whom the world would never consider to be blessed. Here, Jesus reveals the mysteries of a spiritual kingdom where the poor are rich, the hungry are satisfied, and the persecuted possess a kingdom. Here, Jesus teaches us about the centrality of repentance toward God, and the need for us to resemble God himself. Here, Jesus teaches that blessed are the repentant who resemble God.
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Then, here is the full sermon (transcript here):

Then, Sunday evening, I preached on Matthew 5:8 specifically: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” There is no video, and the audio quality of the recording wasn’t great, but here is the link to the sermon.

This topic of seeing God is deeply significant to me. Here was a sermon I preached a couple of years ago on seeing God face to face, from 1 Corinthians 13:8–13:

This is one of my personal favorites of the sermons I have preached.

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Also, if you missed it, here is the next installment on my series on Presbyterianism:

Two Pathways | Jacob Gerber

Introduction to the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)

Note: These are the lecture notes for the fourth class of an 8-week series that I am teaching at Harvest Community Church, called “What Does it Mean to be Presbyterian?” Links to the other class lecture notes may be found at the end of this post…

2 years ago · Jacob Gerber

In this class, my goal was to give a brief history of the denomination, talk through some of the distinctives of the denomination, and then try to identify the significant debates current in the PCA.

Have a blessed Lord’s Day tomorrow!