can receive a blessing. He is saying that the state of being a believer is a blessing in and of itself. Both Matthew and Luke include the Beatitudes of Jesus in their accounts of one of His sermons (compare Luke 6:20–23). It’s quite possible that those two writers recorded different teaching occasions. But if that is the case, there is at least a significant overlap in what Jesus said at both times. The general form of the Beatitudes is (1) to pronounce a certain group of people “blessed” and then