A large store posted its core values where everyone could see them. They included friendliness and good customer service, but one clerk was providing particularly surly and reluctant service.

When a customer pointed out, as gently as he could, that she was not living up to those core values, she snapped that she considered them as just words on paper.

The Beatitudes are the core values of the church. There is probably no other passage in the New Testament that is so widely known and admired.

Some people even hold them up as the be all and end all of Christianity.… Read the rest