The Good Life
Luke 6:20-26 ·April 23, 2023· Erik Bonkovsky
Part of: Luke
Rev. Erik Bonkovsky is pastor of City Church of Richmond.
Transcript
Show
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors. Select a time to jump to that point in the recording.
Well, it's great to be with you this morning, and it reminds me a little bit about one of my first memories with Joel when we were at Grace Community up in Mechanicsville. One of my first memories was sort of touring through where we were going to hold worship as a church plant there in Hanover County, and it was a cafetorium not unlike this one where we got together, and that church is still meeting in that cafetorium, and it's so great to see the ways that churches start and grow and the ways that we can encourage one another and make an impact in our communities through the work of church planting. But you know, there are challenges, of course, to being a church planter and being a part of a church plant. Maybe some of you have already experienced this, or maybe this is something you'll get to experience in the future. As a church planter, you get asked a lot of a lot of weird questions. Some are naive, and some are, you know, innocent, but you still have to process through those a little bit. So one of the classic questions you get if you're planting a church, or if you say you're a pastor, people say, well, where's your church, right? And for you who come to New Creation, maybe you've said that to neighbors or co-workers, and they say, well, where's your church? And they, of course, mean, where's your building? And you're like, well, our church is all throughout Chester.
It's where the people of God are. But that's a question that I continue to get. We still meet in rented space ourselves, but people have trouble understanding this idea of church and plant at the same time. Another question I got, and this was, I don't know, maybe a year or so into our work at City Church, and I had just, you know, led the service and preached my guts out. And some guy who was visiting that day came up to me afterwards, and he was like, so what do you do? Like, what's your job? And I kind of was like, I kind of looked at him, I was like, this is it. What you just saw, that's my job. And then he kind of doubled down on it. He was like, no, but what else do you do?
And I was like, no, this is really my job. Glad you liked the message. All of this to say that there's something kind of in between about a church and a church plant. And even now, I've been at City Church for 15 years, and I don't know if I can still call myself a church planter, right? When do you stop being a church plant and just become a church? I think it's actually healthy and good for a church to always think of itself as a church plant, to be engaged in mission, and to be planted, but always replanting. That's the work of the gospel in our lives. And the reason I share that is because I think there are a lot of things in our life where the answer is to an either or, the answer is both, right? Are you a church or are you a plant? Yes, both. You see, there are a lot of these false binaries throughout life, and if we can learn how to diagnose some of those false binaries, we will be helped. Should the church do evangelism or should the church do justice? Both, right? Both.
Is the life of being a Christian, is it based on God's grace or is it done with human effort? Well, both. Recognize these false binaries and we are advancing in our understanding of the truth. So I share that by way of introduction because it's related to what I'm going to talk about today from Luke's gospel, Luke chapter 6. So I think these words are printed in the worship guide, or if you have a Bible, I encourage you to open up and follow along with God's word as I read it aloud for us.
I'm going to read Luke 6, verses 20 through 26. Here's what it said. And he, that's Jesus, lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven, for so their fathers did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. This is the word of the Lord. Lord, thanks be to God. Please pray with me. Father, we ask now that the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. So this passage, I understand that you've been working your way through Luke's gospel, and this passage here in Luke 6 is the beginning of what is known as Luke's sermon on the plain.
It's a companion piece to what is a better-known sermon in Matthew's gospel, which is the Sermon on the Mount. And this part in particular contains a list of Beatitudes. You may have heard that word before. Beatitudes take their name from the word blessing. And we see here, beginning in verse 20, the word blessed repeated multiple times. Blessed are the dot, dot, dot. Other translations that are trying to modernize that word, because that's a very churchy, kind of an old word, right? Blessed.
What does blessed mean? Well, modern translations will say, happy are those. And that's helpful. That gives us a little bit of insight. Maybe another way to understand that word would be to say, invited into flourishing are. These types of people. But again, all these don't, they're a little wooden, they don't really fit. Who talks about like, well, I was invited into flourishing today. What does Jesus mean? What does the Bible mean when it talks about blessed? Here's the gloss that I want to give to you. I hope this will be helpful for you. They're talking about the good life.
They're talking about true life. They're talking about a life well lived. So how do you define the good life? And I mean, when you're not here in church, right? Like the real you, the functional you, every daily decision you make, how are you defining the good life? Maybe the good life comes from money. Maybe the good life comes from stuff. Maybe the good life comes from a fullness of relationships with others. Maybe the good life comes from being well liked by people. All people are at least the important people to you. Here's the thing. Your version of the good life, whatever it is, it leaks out of you. It leaks out of you so that if I followed you around, which admittedly would be creepy, but if I followed you around after watching you for long enough, I could begin to tell you how you're defining the good life. It leaks out in your conversation. The things that you frequently talk about, you always return to in conversation. They're screaming, this is my version of the good life. They leak out of you in social media. The things you post and like and repost.
These show you what the good life is. My version of the good life, as I was thinking about it this week, I kind of boiled it down to a couple things. One, it's comfort. I think the good life is comfortable. How can I have more comfort and avoid hard things and difficult things and hardship in my life? That's the good life. And the other thing, I already alluded to this, but it's reputation. It's being well liked. And not necessarily by all people, but there's certain people who I want to hold me in high esteem. That's how I define the good life. And I want you to think now for a second about those verses from Luke that I just read and compare and contrast your version of the good life and Jesus's version of the good life. Blessed are you who are poor, hungry. Those of you weep. Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you. Now, I'm not going to work through each of these blessings and each of the subsequent woes in Luke's gospel. Rather, I want to present kind of a framework for how you understand these blessings and woes more generally. And I want to do that by working through a few of these false binaries. So here's the first question. Is the good life, the blessed life, is the good life a gift or a calling? Okay? Is the good life a gift from God or something that we are called to do? In Luke's gospel especially, the beatitudes offer the good life as a gift.
These are God's reversal of a world that works in a different way. Maybe you've talked about this some already, but the beginning of Luke's gospel is heavy on this theme of reversal. In the very first chapter, in Luke 1, we're told the Christmas story, the story of Jesus's birth. And there, the Virgin Mary says, she praises God and she says, you have looked on the humble estate of your servant and done great things for me. Do you hear the reversal? She is humble and poor and marginalized and forgotten and God has done great things in her. Another example of this comes in Luke chapter 4. This is the beginning of Jesus's ministry. He goes to the temple and he opens up the scroll of Isaiah. And he says, today this scroll is fulfilled in your hearing. And what does he say?
He says, the Spirit has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. It's a reversal. The poor are lifted up. The humble are exalted. The kingdom of heaven, and this is the point of the beatitudes, the kingdom of heaven. The good life is available to those, especially those who are most beyond all human hope. That's the gospel. Blessedness, the good life available to those that the world has forgotten, that the world has turned away from. So that great sage of our age, or at least of a previous generation, Paul Simon says, blessed are the sat upon, the spat upon, the ratted on. Eugene Peterson in his paraphrase of the beatitudes says, blessed are you when you've lost it all. That's the reversal of the good life of the kingdom of heaven. Or Dallas Willard, another commentator says, blessed are the spiritual zeros. The spiritually bankrupt, the deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of religion. I'm quoting all these other people so that you would have words to understand what these religious sounding words from the Bible are really driving towards.
Here's the last one. The last way that we can begin to see how the beatitudes show that the good life is a gift. It says the good life is available for the flunk outs and the drop outs and the burned outs, the broke and the broken, the drug heads and divorced, the HIV positives and the herpes ridden, the brain damaged, the incurably ill, the barren and the pregnant too many times or at the wrong time, the overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed, the unemployable, the swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced, the parents with children living on the streets, the children with parents who are dying alone, the lonely, the incompetent, the stupid, the emotionally starved, the emotionally dead and on and on and on. Friends, the message of Christianity is that the good life comes to them and to you. The good life is a gift. Did you hear yourself in any of those lists?
I hope you did. And I think if you're honest with yourself, you heard yourself somewhere. Could you believe that God is offering the good life to you? That's the remarkable reversal that's intended by these beatitudes. That Jesus, starting his public ministry, stands up on that plane and he says, you want to know who gets the good life? The last person you'd ever expect. He does it. He gives the good life to the poor and the bankrupt through his cross and resurrection. Jesus can say, blessed are the poor because he was made poor for you. Though he was rich, he emptied himself of all to give you the gift of the good life in Christ. We could stop there, right? Some of you kind of feel like, oh, that's probably enough. Maybe you should stop there. But the good life is not just a gift. It is also a calling. The good life is a gift and it's a calling. And to understand this, I have to tell you that this language of blessedness is pulling on two strands in the Bible's overall teaching.
It's pulling on a strand from wisdom literature and prophetic literature. And in both of these strands, they emphasize blessing as a reward or a calling for living in a certain way. So we heard earlier in the service, Psalm 1 was read. Psalm 1 begins with the word blessed. Blessed is the man who lives a certain way, who acts a certain way. You see, Psalm 1 and other Psalms like it are laying out for us the calling of a life lived in obedience to God. Live in this world in line with how the world was made and in line with how you have made. And that is how you live the good life. You see, the good news of God's reversal, the gift of the good life, is then subsequently followed by our living lives in Christ, following his calling as his calling as his disciples. I want to be clear here. The Beatitudes, these blessings in Luke 6 are not how-tos for achieving blessedness. They are the therefores of those who have already been blessed. If you have been blessed, if you have been rescued, if you have received the gift of Jesus Christ, live this way more and more.
You see, as we understand them that way, they become an invitation for us to walk in a Christ-patterned life. They provide for us a roadmap of the good life. So is Luke 6 verse 20 a gift, sorry, is it a gift to the poor or is it a call to be poor? Yes, both, right? Beware the false binary. The outpouring of the Spirit's power on the poor produces in us tangible faithfulness that is expressed by becoming poor, by laying it all down because Christ has laid it all down for us. This is where divine rescue meets human efforts that we might even renounce, begin to renounce wealth as the source of the good life because we found that true riches, true treasure comes in Christ, our Savior. So that's the first question and the longest one. Is the good life a gift or a calling? Well, it's both. Here's the second one that these beatitudes lead us to and it's this. Is the good life present or future? Is the good life present or future? That is, do we get the good life now or do we get it at some point in the future? Look at verse 20 again. It says, blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God. That's present tense.
But then look at verse 21 says, blessed are you who are hungry now for you shall be satisfied. That's future tense. What is Jesus getting at? Well, he's saying this, the good life is yours now and the good life will be fully yours then. Theologians talk about this as the already and the not yet. The blessing of the good life, the blessing of Jesus is present in our lives, but it's not fully realized yet. That waits until glory. Jesus is saying to his followers and he's saying to us today, here, take a token of the good news now and it will be your full possession. It will be all you know on that day in heaven.
As I was thinking about this this week, the illustration that came to mind is it's as though you're playing a game that you know you've already won. And imagine, you know, if it's a sport that you're playing and your team is so far ahead and there's no way the other team can catch up. Think about how much freedom you play with. You're just out there having fun. You're still playing the game, but the outcome is certain. You're not tense. You're not scared. You're not yelling at your teammates.
That is how the kingdom of God works because the future, the end is secure. And yet we act in the present in line with the good life. Now, especially in Luke's gospel, right? I contrasted already Luke's version of the Beatitudes with Matthew's version of the Beatitudes. Especially in Luke, he puts a particular emphasis on the future. Theologians, again, use a fancy word to describe this. Luke has an eschatological approach to the good life. Eschatological just means having to do with the last days. So his mind is looking to the future. Again, it's this reversal that I was talking about. And all throughout Luke's gospel, he is trying to prepare us for this great reversal when God is going to take a broken and sinful world and make all things right. And this is rooted in an understanding of the prophets that were looking forward to the judgment that God would bring on evil and the blessing that he would bring to those who followed him. And what Luke wants you to understand is that the blessings have arrived. The good life has arrived. It's interrupted the present in the person of Jesus Christ. As he walked around the earth, he was embodying the good life. It's here.
But it won't be realized fully until that day in the future. Okay, what does that mean for us? This is all just sounding so abstract, right? It means that in response to the present blessing that we already have in Jesus and the future promise that we have of heaven, we begin to live now in line with the good life. We align our lives. We steady our steps in the trajectory of the good life. So knowing what our destiny is, we become poor, we weep now, we accept the ridicule and hatred of others now because we're guided by our future. So are the Beatitudes a present blessing or a future blessing? Yes, both, right?
You're catching on. Last question that this passage makes us ask. Is the good life for the materially poor or the spiritually poor, right? Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God. And this is a sort of a classic question in the history of the interpretation of Jesus's words here. Is Jesus talking about literal poverty or poverty of spirit? Now, here's where the difference between Luke and Matthew comes out again. In Luke, it says, blessed are you who are poor. In Matthew, it says, blessed are the poor in spirit. Not unexpectedly, in wealthy contexts like ours, you can guess which version is preferred.
It's Matthew's. Because there's a tendency to want to spiritualize these blessings, to spiritualize the good life and to say, well, the good life is just being spiritually poor. The Bible consistently throughout draws a close connection between material poverty and spiritual poverty. And I think it's important to note here, too, that our virtue of humility, right, kind of spirit, being spiritually poor was not a value in the ancient Near East the way it is today. And so that makes Jesus's teaching so much more shocking. And the reversal that God brings of exalting the humble, so much more shocking because we, in our culture, still have a little bit of a sense that humility is a good thing. It wasn't so in the ancient Near East. But the Bible wants you to understand that usually it's the materially poor who are poor in spirit. That there's a connection between those, kind of this unseverable connection between material and spiritual poverty. Here's how I want you to think about a definition of the poor. It's those in desperate need, socioeconomically, who are driven into dependent relationship on God. You see the way that that holds these two types together? I think it's true for us as well. When we are poor, we become more dependent on God. Because all these other things that we go to for the sake of the good life, to define the good life, they're stripped away from us.
So that the reality, the true good life, the true blessedness of life with Christ becomes all that we have. We could put it this way, blessed are the beggars. Are you a beggar before God? What sources of wealth, whether material or otherwise, are you relying on that is keeping you from being a beggar before God? You could be relying on your educational wealth, your vocational wealth, your relational wealth. And all of those things can prevent you from being a beggar before the God who wants to give you the gift of the good life.
We sing a song at City Church, maybe you sing it here sometimes, that says, Come ye sinners, poor and needy. It goes on to say that all the fitness that God requires is for you to feel your need of Him. That's what it means when Jesus says, Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. The consistent way that God works is that He must undo us. He must strip us of all the things that we're clinging to as sources of the good life before He can give us Christ and remake us, reshape us.
I grew up as the son of a doctor. And yet my sister and I sometimes joke about the fact that we were well into high school before we realized that we were wealthy. We thought we were poor growing up. And this is partly because my dad was a son of the Great Depression and had immigrant parents. So I thought I was a beggar. I really wasn't. But I had to learn through my life to become a beggar before God. Have you ever learned that? You see, riches in our life can become a threat because we begin to believe that our blessedness comes from them and not from God. Jesus is unequivocal.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. It's unfortunate, but too often our material circumstances shape our spiritual circumstances. An ability to ask for help is the beginning of the good life. It's the beginning of a dependent relationship on God. And it's why the poor and the marginalized and the pushed aside and the forgotten are often so much closer to Jesus and so much closer to the good life than we are. Maybe it's those women in the correctional unit that have something to teach us. Now that I know whose I am, I can begin to understand who I am. And not just who I am, but who I will be.
As I begin to live in line in the trajectory of these blessings, these great reversals that make no sense when conceived according to the wisdom of this world. Why? Well, because they speak forth a wisdom of a different world, the world to come, the world of Jesus. Is Luke 620 a blessing for the materially poor or the spiritually poor? Yes, it's both, right? We've talked about the good life today. I hope you've thought about how you've defined this term. And as you go from here today and this week, and you begin to recognize all those places where your definition of the good life is leaking out of you, remember that the good life includes both your material life and your spiritual life.
The good life is both present now and future. And the good life is both a gift from God and a calling from God. Let me pray.