The Poor in Spirit

I've avoided this for two years.

On my podcast today you can listen to me preach. Never, to my recollection, have I inflicted my preaching upon any Internet listener. I'm a bit reluctant to do so even now, and even as I publish the link, I myself readily acknowledge:

1. I am not advancing myself as a model preacher. Yes, you preach better than I do (your pastor preaches better than I do). I do hope and pray that I've improved a bit since I began preaching twenty-three years ago as a pimply-faced boy. The Lord and those poor suffering people know that I preached some B...A...D... sermons when I was fifteen. But everyone starts somewhere, and we all only progress so far. I'm still learning to preach, and I would look foolish indeed if I were trying to hold up my own preaching as any sort of model for anyone.
2. It is quite possible that I messed up the exegesis of this passage horribly and entirely. If I did, I don't know about it (or I would have corrected it, right?), but I'm a lowly Church History major, not a New Testament or a Preaching major. By all means, if I am spreading gross heresy on the Internet, please correct my errors in the comment stream right away and without mercy, so that the truth might be upheld.
3. My reason for sharing this message (and I might upload some of the later ones, as well), is simply the fact that my recent study of the Beatitudes has been profoundly beneficial to me in my own walk with the Lord. These are simple teachings from Christ that strike right to the heart of what it is to be a disciple. My hope in sharing this sermon on the Internet is precisely the same as my hope in preaching the sermon from the pulpit in the first place—I hope that God might somehow use the interaction with His word, however pitiful it might be, to be of benefit to you, the listener.

So, if this sermon does your heart any good, then praise God. It certainly did my own.