When he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends, saying to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed. For I too am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard these things, he marveled at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” And when those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the servant well. (Luke 7:6-10)
I trust it’s “enough said” about the contrast between Jesus marveling at great faith and marveling at great unbelief. We should know in our hearts which group we are in, and which group we want to be in.
For the rest, I want to share how we travel through the Beatitudinal Valley in the Beatitudinal Journey of transformation. This is based on Jesus’ Beatitudes of Matthew 5:1-12, his introduction to what is known as the Sermon on the Mount.
The first four Beatitudes are what I call the downside of the valley. If we attach to the blessing of God in each one, there is a feeling of going deeper inside ourselves with each step until reaching the core of our being where we absolutely long for what God is doing in us in Christ. The second four Beatitudes describe what we become like once we have encountered God in the humbling work of the downside into his mercy.
1. “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” As we stand between the two scenes of Jesus’ marveling, we feel God’s blessing as we recognize in ourselves the many ways we fail to have such great faith as that centurion. Yes, it is a blessing when we look at this scripture passage and realize it does NOT describe our kind of faith. And it is a blessing when we look at Nazareth and its unbelief and feel that is far more what we are like. God is blessing us with the realness of admitting our true soul condition.
2. “Blessed are those who mourn…” While the natural inclination of the flesh is to run back up the downside of the valley and get out of there because we don’t like how our humbling feels, when we feel God blessing us, we find ourselves irresistibly going deeper into the mourning of our soul-condition. To let ourselves feel grief over why we have so little faith (instead of self-justifying that we are not so bad after all) is God’s blessing. There are comforts that are only experienced by those who will mourn their poverty of spirit.
3. “Blessed are the meek…” At this point, we still refuse to go back up the downside in an “I will do better next time” kind of way, and instead, in meekness, we go deeper and admit we can’t fix our lack of faith, but Jesus can. Knowing the miserable state of our soul condition, we yield to Jesus’ authority to transform us into his likeness from one degree of glory to another, and we know it will not happen until we give up on ourselves and surrender to him.
4. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…” When we are fully aware that we do not have the great faith Jesus honored in the centurion, and that we have dishonored our Savior with so many episodes of unbelief, we find God blessing us with the hunger and thirst for the “righteousness of faith”. It is a blessing to feel this hunger at the most real experience of our poverty of spirit because now God can satisfy our hunger in a way he could never honor our good works.
5. “Blessed are the merciful…” Once we are hungering for the righteousness of faith by grace instead of any good works, we know what mercy feels like. We can‘t judge others weak faith because God has mercifully addressed our own! Instead, knowing how God has blessed us in his mercy, we become merciful to others who struggle with their faith. As Paul said, “As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions” (Romans 14:1). Once we have been blessed on the downside of the Beatitudinal Valley, we begin the upside journey by relating towards everyone from a merciful heart.
6. “Blessed are the pure in heart…” Weak faith is a double-minded faith. We want to trust Jesus, but we trust other things more (like the self-protection of our unbelief). As God humbles us through the Beatitudinal Journey, we find ourselves wanting to simply live by faith in every situation. We cling to Paul’s “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). We want “the prayer of a righteous person” that “has great power as it is working” (James 5:16). We simply want to be “the righteous shall live by faith” in everything.
7. “Blessed are the peacemakers…” This is a faith issue. Church folk who do not labor to bring people to have peace with God do not have faith that God would use them, or that the good news of great joy is the only hope of escaping God’s wrath against sin, or that Jesus alone can grant eternal life to those who believe. By now we should see how the Beatitudinal Journey gets us here so that our mercifully pure hearts are desperate for everyone we know to have peace with God, and so we tell others about Jesus by faith that we are joining God in his work of saving souls.
8. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness…” I hope we can see why this is not the first step of the Beatitudinal Journey! But once we have experienced the blessing of God in the first seven Beatitudes, we are so in love with leading people to have peace with God that we can at least grow in our sense of blessing that any persecution that comes from this way of life is a joyful evidence of our fellowship with Jesus Christ our Lord.
Now, while this On This Day sharing is a bit longer than most, this has still been a very brief example of how to apply the Beatitudinal Journey to today’s lesson about Jesus’ view of our faith. It should give us all hope that we can feel blessed by God as we face our poverty of spirit as much as if we were already on-fire-for-the-Lord peacemakers being persecuted because we are causing so much trouble to the world, the flesh and the devil.
The bottom line is that Jesus marveled at the great faith of the centurion and the great unbelief of his hometown folks. I’m not sure whether he still marvels at things in his ascension to the right hand of his Father, but how he views both faith and unbelief will not have changed. Today’s lesson from Scripture calls us to step out in faith to grow up in faith, and this includes whatever steps of the Beatitudinal Journey God is focusing on today (and tomorrow, and…).
© 2025 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)
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