Matthew 5:1-12
“Forget What You’ve Heard”
Min. Cheryl A. Lindsay
Mt. Zion Congregational Church UCC
Sunday, February 2, 2014

Our sense of hearing is powerful and virtually inescapable. It’s hard not to hear. And it’s even harder not to take in what we’ve heard. As we hear a thing over and over, we not only learn it, we internalize it so that we can retrieve it from our memory without hardly needing to think about it at all. The same can be said about our lives as people of faith. So much of what we believe comes solely from what we have heard…not from careful study of Scripture…not from prayerful consideration or leading of the Holy Spirit…but from what we have heard.

The Beatitudes are a series of counter cultural statements defying the conventional wisdom of its time and of ours as well. Jesus understood that in order to prepare people for what he was about to do…he had to reorient their thinking. Because what he was about to do wouldn’t make any sense to them. It would certainly appear foolish based on human standards and conventional wisdom.

Forget what you’re heard about blessing. It’s not about what you have…it’s about who you have.

Forget what you’re heard about human wisdom…it’s God’s wisdom that saves us.

Last, forget what you’ve heard about you.