"I want to talk about the fact of being convinced and of coming to a place of real conviction and of assurity in what you're on about, and how that can be ours as well."
"It only really works for the musketeers to give themselves a role. It only really works if the king is a good king. If the king is not a good king, the whole expenditure of their loyalty isn't really worth it. Now, in the case of the Beatitudes, we have the one person who is a good king. It is the Lord Jesus Christ. And the Beatitudes are about how we can come."
"I also want to say that it was a joy for me to come this morning here and I immediately saw a beautiful illustration of what I'm going to be getting into from our passage, which is from the Beatitudes. And we're up to the one where Jesus said, blessed are those, well it's there on the screen for you to see, verse 7, blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy. And about the relationship of what exactly is mercy, how does it differ from grace, what is going on in the Beatitudes as Jesus is talking about how to come to God in the early ones."
"Blessed are those, verse six, who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled, the older versions used to read, or satisfied. Now when we listen in to people who comment on the Beatitudes and tell us what they think it's about, and probably if you took a survey of popular opinion, the general consensus is that the truth that's there is that God is the one who satisfies the basic needs of human living. And that there is a sense in which hungering and thirsting is a very common experience for people, and by coming to God, we find an answer to it."
"Blessed is the one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness, for they shall be filled. And the idea that there's a righteousness that Jesus said that we should hunger and thirst after, and that's one of the conditions of actually getting it in the end. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, or some translations have after righteousness, chasing righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. And tonight I thought maybe to add the other half of the message, and to talk about what is the righteousness of God. And it's actually a far more tricky question to answer."