Every Good Gift: A 28-Day Advent DevotionalSample

Jesus’ opening lines of the famous Sermon on the Mount paint a compelling picture of the ways of Christ.

So far this week, we’ve talked about the rich and the poor and how the good news relates to those in poverty and those with wealth. And yet ultimately, we know the good news of Jesus is for everyone: rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, slave and free… the list could go on. It is not our status in life—whether rich or poor—that brings us into the Kingdom. What brings us into the Kingdom is our confession that we have all fallen short of the glory of God—we are all missing something, we are all “poor in spirit”. And the good news of Jesus is that when we recognize our need for a Saviour and put our faith in Him, we are called children of God. We are one in Christ.

This is the radical, counter-cultural peace that the good news brings: in Christ, we are invited as we are into a shared community of Jesus-followers who “realize their need for him.” (Matthew 5:3 NLT) When we have that in common and take on the other postures outlined in the Beatitudes—humility, purity of heart and a hunger for justice, just to name a few—we can begin to experience and cultivate the transformative peace and radical unity that Jesus is all about.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Compassion’s local church partners have been on the frontlines to support children and families living in poverty by delivering hygiene kits and emergency food packs, providing educational support, praying with families and encouraging them by sharing God’s love. All of this was, and continues to be, made possible because of supporting churches and generous Jesus-followers around the world.

At Compassion, we saw the global church rise as one in response to the pandemic to meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable. Linaldo, pastor of one of Compassion’s local church partners in Brazil, says, “It’s so fascinating to know that people around the world, that we’ve never met, are praying for us and supporting our work.” Indeed, our supporters around the world came alongside our more than 8,000 local church partners to truly embody, as one, the way of life that Jesus so poetically describes in the Beatitudes. 

In a world that so easily divides, we can recognize our collective need for Christ and our shared experiences of grief and mourning. We can choose humility and see that we all crave justice. We can be merciful and pure-hearted. We can be tenacious in our pursuit of peace and recognize that when we face hardship even when we do what is right, that is kingdom work.

Prayer:

Jesus, thank You for the gift of Your Church and the opportunity to be one in Christ, together, and show up in the world to cultivate transformative, counter-cultural peace. Help us to be people who live out the Beatitudes: to recognize our need for you, to mourn honestly, to be humble, to seek justice, to be merciful and pure in heart, to be peacemakers and to follow You even when there’s a cost. Jesus, we pray that as we live this out, people would see You in the very lives we live. We know and we trust that this results in lives transformed by Your grace and for Your glory. In Your name, Amen.