Application of God's Word

Jesus' sermon on the Mount covers a variety of teachings that provide valuable guidance for believers in their journey of faith. In Matthew 5 , Jesus starts with the Beatitudes and in this account by Matthew, our focus will be on the last beatitude.         11 “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. 12 Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Persecution can take many forms, and we may not always recognize it for what it truly is. To persecute means to persistently harass, oppress, torment, afflict, torture, annoy, or cause trouble for someone.  But Jesus says "Blessed are you" when they do these things to you for My sake .  The word  blessed means to be divinely favored, to have good fortune, and to be worthy of deep reverence and respect. We as believers are blessed when we are revile...

Matthew 4 details the temptation of Christ and the beginning of His ministry.  The very first verse starts off with, "Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil." This verse here conveys that this temptation was inevitable and almost a rite of passage for Jesus, seeing that he was led up by the Spirit. Something monumental occurred before this temptation and something even more monumental was ahead of Jesus after the temptation. The temptation occurred right after Jesus' baptism which further illustrates that this was something that Jesus had to go through. This temptation revealed to us that even Jesus was not immune to the temptations of the devil. However, Jesus was able to overcome the devil's temptations using the word of God. The temptation of Jesus is what I like to call the "battle of the word." Jesus who is referred to as the Word of God (John 1:1) was using the word of God to rebuke the devil's words. ...