The Way to Blessing

Jesus began his "Sermon on the Mount" with a list of beatitudes, ways to be blessed and live in a state of exalted happiness. They are nine brief, yet life-changing, concepts. The main reason the beatitudes are transformative is because they take our focus off our personal problems, our immediate wants and how we have been wronged, and they force us to look at the notion we should not demand mercy and justice for ourselves, but we must never cease to give mercy and justice to others. We should not demand our own rights be upheld, perhaps giving us more time to stand up for the rights of those who are weak or oppressed.
 
The beatitudes promote ideas which many of us struggle to implement in our lives because they go against common mindsets within our society of what it takes to get ahead in life: self-reliance, wealth and power, for example. Instead, we are instructed to be gentle, merciful, pure in heart, peaceful and "poor in spirit," which is often interpreted to mean not placing confidence in our own religious ideas, but relying on God's greater strength to help us overcome adversity. When we mourn, we will be comforted. When we hunger and thirst for righteousness (virtuousness), we will be satisfied.
 
Finally, when our beliefs are challenged, when we are insulted for following Jesus, when false accusations are made against us because of him, we are to recognize this is the way the secular world has always viewed religious principles, and we shouldn't spend the precious time we've been given worrying about what people say about us. The more violently we defend ourselves, the further away we get from the blessings of the beatitudes.
 
If everyone in the world practiced the ideas in the beatitudes, then God's kingdom would be fully present here and now. If every person in the United States lived by these standards, our country would be changed completely. If churches were devoted to these words of Jesus, denominations would not be dwindling. And it starts with each of us deciding to find our own happiness in living out these concepts, thereby becoming a blessing to all we encounter. Happy people help bring happiness to others.