A Watermelon for anyone who Memorises the Beatitudes!

I know some others are currently in a sermon series on Matt 5-7.  Here are some thoughts as I go along; others may be able to sharpen my understanding and praxis.

Memorisation

I am offering a watermelon as a prize for anyone who can recite the Beatitudes from memory in Behdini Kurdish.  Maybe next week it'll be a bunch of grapes... then a punnet of peaches... and then a plain old apple.
I plan to produce flashcards and cut them up more and more each week, so people's memorisation deepens each week.  We sometimes forget that memorisation is not a black and white matter.  A good start would be to see two columns of flashcards and be able to match up mourn with ...comforted and hunger & thirst with ...be filled.  In reality, many mature Christians have memorised around 10% of the Scriptures.  Hard to quantify, of course, but just because we can't recite Isaiah from beginning to end doesn't mean that we haven't memorised a lot of it.  Some of us can have a fair shot at telling you some of the contents of any given chapter in Isaiah.  We should aim for memorisation in a whole range of ways; perhaps get people to memorise the contents of Mark, for example, or in the case of the Beatitudes, to know it word-perfectly, because it's kind of poetic: it's recorded in such a way as to make it easy to remember.

I used to know the Beatitudes a bit like a cricket line-up, (I always think of Hunger & Thirst as a solid No.4 Batsman :-) ), although it only gets up to batsman no.8!  Better, I suggest, to line up each Beatitude with a day of the week, with Persecution squeezed in to the events of a Friday evening, which frankly might be quite apt since people here sometimes get fired up to do dastardly things after hearing some chap get hot under the collar midday on Friday.  So, here it is with Saturday is the first working day of the week:

Sat Poor in Spirit

Sun Mourn

Mon Meek

Tues H&T for Righteousness

Wed Merciful

Thurs Pure in Heart

Fri Peacemakers

Fri night! Persecuted

Resources

Kent Hughes- Free mp3s of his sermons that became the Preaching the Word book on the Sermon on the Mount.  All of his books of expositions seem to be available in their original sermonic form.  As ever, good exegetical insight, some good illustrations and examples from Christian history, despite the messages being quite short.

One verse--and a world of difference

I've got to Isaiah 12 in my OT devotions and I recommend v6 as an incisive summary of how a the church differs from the majority faith all around us:
Isaiah 12:6 CSB
Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is among you in his greatness.”

Firstly, we love to sing passionately : Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion

and secondly, the reason why we express our doctrine in song: our God is GREAT, but he is great AMONG us. Our neighbours here loudly proclaim that God is great, but generally deny that he can be among us. They might object that this damages our reverence for the awesome transcendent God, and sometimes churches lose their trembling in order to make worship entertaining, but even here in this one verse there is an answer to that objection. Who exactly is AMONG us? The Holy One of Israel. Ultimately our Christian celebration, especially our weekly gatherings, centres on the jaw-dropping wonder that the Holy God in Christ has come to dwell among us, satisfying both his holiness by paying the price of our sin and his love by being willing to accept us as his people, dwelling among us and comforting us step by step as we make our way painfully to our destination where
"God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them." Revelation 21:3 CSB