Amen, amen. How we doing church? Everybody good? Hope so. If you got your Bibles, grab them. We're going to be in Matthew

Chapter 5. We're in the fourth week of this series that we are calling mountains, and we're going to teach on the

beatitudes or the sermon on the mount, at least the first part of it. And the reason I'm doing this sermon is because Dr. Paul said I had to. And so I

just do whatever he says. And the last time I was teaching this sermon, I was standing on the

Mountain of Beatitudes. And it is a beautiful place. And if you've never been there, you should go.

You should sell a car or sell a kid or sell a kidney on the black market. Whatever you need to do

to get there, you should, all right?

I promise.

It's pretty awesome.

So it was really intimidating there to talk about the sermon on the mount.

Because the last time the sermon on the mount was preached there was by, you know, the greatest

preacher ever, Jesus himself.

And so the thing is about this, about the beatitudes, is I think that they're very familiar, but they're very often misunderstood.

And so we're going to unpack that and then we'll talk about each one.

Chapter 5, verse 1 says this of the book of Matthew, seeing the crowds.

The reason there are all these crowds following Jesus at this point because of the end of Matthew chapter 4 4 we find out that he moves into Galilee. Galilee is a beautiful place. John the

Baptist, his first cousin, gets arrested in Jerusalem, and so Jesus is like, I'm out of here,

and he moves to Galilee. It looks like Napa. It looks like the mountains of North California. It's

beautiful, all right? So you've got to live somewhere. You might as well live somewhere awesome. That's why we live here. All right. Anyway, so all these crowds are coming because

he's healing the sick. He's casting out demons. He's doing all that kind of stuff. So big crowds

show up. And it says he went up on the mountain. And when he sat down, his disciples came to him. Now, part of what Moses is, I mean, part of what

Matthew is doing is Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience and he wants, he wants the folks to

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