JESUS CAST A VISION OF A BETTER KINGDOM
Sunday, April 14, 2002
TEXT: Matthew 4:23-5:12
We’ve have been doing a series during this Lenten season leading up to Easter which climaxed on Easter Sunday on celebrating Jesus. As I looked at the series, I realized we didn’t have enough time to complete it, so I removed Lesson 6 and we are now going to back up today and complete this lesson.
There is still one more vital quality in the life of Jesus that really is attractive, and that has to do with his vision for our lives. What is your vision for your life? How do you see the world? Are you optimistic about the future, or are you pessimistic? What expectations do you hold about the world and about your future, and what is the prognosis for your life? Have you thought about that? How we see the world and what we expect from the future will guide and direct how we will act and behave today.
For instance, as you know I have been telling my story in the Messenger. I told you that at one point in my life my understanding was that there was no God, that when you die, that’s the end. On a yearly basis I would go into deep depression for about a month because of this. Every once in a while the vast meaninglessness of life would hit me. When I was diagnosed with cancer and the prognosis was that I had less than three years to live, with the other perspective of life that there is no God and there is no future, it made my life very bleak.
The problem, however, was not with life itself or with God, but with my vision of life and of God. You may have noticed that I am not a depressive person anymore. The reason for that is because I have discovered a better vision for my life, and I would like to share it with you.
If your expectation for the future and your understanding of the way the world is going is causing you despair, trouble or fear, I invite you to become captivated with a different vision for life now and for the future. It is a vision we see in the Beatitudes starting with Matthew 4:23.
If you are concerned about the events in the Middle East and wonder what the future will hold, if you are concerned about your children and the world around them and how they will make it, if you are concerned about the schools and the government, your community or your neighborhood, if your mortality gives you fits at times–again, I invite you to catch a new vision that Jesus offers us about our future and about our life now.
TEXT
The first thing I see in the Beatitudes is that Jesus reveals God’s vision for the future, and you see that because he uses future terms such as “you will,” “I will,”“they will.” The best way to look at the Beatitudes first and foremost is that it is a statement about the future. It is a wonderful vision of what God wants to do in our lives. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”–those who are utterly dependent on God. What will he do for them? He will give them the kingdom. God is willing to turn over heaven and all its resources for us.
“Blessed are those who mourn”–those who mourn over their sinfulness and over their losses as well. They will be comforted. God promises he will comfort us. Isn’t that good news? We don’t have to despair.
“Blessed are the meek”–those who don’t have to be number one. Because they are servants, they will inherit the earth. God will provide for everything we need. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. We don’t need to grab everything in this life because one day we are going to own it all. What a wonderful future we have!
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst.” If you feel empty inside, God’s going to fill you and satisfy you.
“Blessed are those who are merciful.” If you forgive others and are gracious and patient with them, one day God will forgive us and not hold our sins against us. That’s good news!
“Blessed are the peacemakers.” Do you see yourself as a child of God? What a wonderful vision for who we are.
“Blessed are the persecuted”–those who are doing what’s right and being ridiculed for it. Theirs is heaven itself. I think there is no greater promise than heaven itself. Again, I remember those bleak days when I really believed there was nothing else to life and that death was simply a black hole–that I don’t know that I don’t know... What a horrible thought that is. Then I had this vision of Jesus where he said, “No. I’ll resurrect you and offer you eternal life. I will offer you the best that you can possibly imagine–utopia itself.” Man, that sounded good to me at that moment and I grabbed hold of that vision and accepted what God had promised.
One of the best sermons I ever heard was when the preacher said, “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” It’s true, God has a wonderful plan for us, but most of us are convinced that God is a very harsh tyrant. That we sin and that God will punish us for it. That he will rebuke us and discipline us. That’s not God. God is willing to give his entire kingdom for us.
Matthew 7:11 always blows my mind: “If you, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give gifts to those who ask him?” Now, I don’t consider myself evil, and I know how to give my children good things. Yet God is saying that in comparison to him, we are evil. That’s how good he is. How much more will God do for us than we would do for our children. Get the comparison. It will blow your mind how good God wants to be to us.
I chose Chapter 4:23 because this includes healing as well. The hope that we have in the future is captured again in Revelations 7:16: “Never again will they hunger. Never again will they thirst. Never again will they experience death and pain and suffering. I will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” What a marvelous future we have. What a wonderful hope. If you don’t have this for your own life, just accept God’s vision for your life. It will lift you up, change your perspective and give you hope.
Since my profession of faith, death has no longer bothered me. You know where all my trouble comes from? Life. How about you? Where is all your trouble coming from? For me its life. Still, there is good news because the Beatitudes gives us a prescription for success in this life. If we implement and incorporate these eight qualities into our lives, things will go well for us–beyond our imagination.
I can’t take every one of them one at a time and tell you how this works, but I can take a few of them and show them how they really work in real life. For instance, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are the meek.” They really go hand in hand because the meek aren’t out for themselves. Instead, they are dependent upon God for their provision. Does that work in real life? Yes. A great book to read is Paul Johnson’s The Intellectuals. He touches on this very premise:
“The people we laud, that we strive to emulate, and who are featured on magazine covers are not the fulfilled, happy balanced people we might come to think. In fact, it is quite the opposite.”
The people that he chose to study were Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, John Paul Sartre and Edmund Wilson and Berthold Brecht. People who were highly successful in their fields. You think they would be happy with their success, but they were miserable people. In fact, as he studied this group of individuals as well as others, he discovered that they are the most miserable, egomaniacal and abusive people on the planet. In fact, if you take any magazine that deals with pop culture or read autobiographies of the stars, you will get the same sense that these people are miserable. They’ve had troubled marriages and multiple marriages and broken marriages. They are addicted to psychotherapy and they are tormented by self-doubt.
Contrast this in the same book with a study on those who serve people, who set aside income for the betterment of people. They studied doctors and nurses on the mission field, people who run homeless shelters, social workers who serve in the backwaters of Mississippi and relief workers in the Third World. These are people that we would pity, people we wouldn’t want our daughters to marry, people that we admire but we don’t envy. What they discovered about these people is that they are the most contented, fulfilled, sweet, joyful, stable people of character on the planet and their faces radiate this joy. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
“Blessed are the pure in heart.” How does that work? Well, ask any young, single teenage mother who got in trouble. Which is better? Is it more blessed to be pure in heart, or to have temporarily lost control? Whose life is more blessed? Ask the parents of Ted Bundy or anyone addicted to pornography or their families. Ask them who is more blessed? Those who have lost control of their passions, or those who live a life of self-discipline and self-control. Ask the family of the alcoholic or the alcoholic himself. Ask the family of the one addicted to gambling or the gambler himself. Who benefits more? Those who have lost control of their lives, or those who kept it in control. Who is more blessed? “Blessed are the pure in heart.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers.” I dare anyone here to say that Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.., were unsuccessful people. Ghandi, through nonviolence, brought down the British Empire and set an entire people free from oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr., in one moment in Selma, Alabama, through nonviolent resistance shamed a nation and brought it to repentance for its sin of prejudice, something that Black Power, Black Panthers and the Civil War were unable to do. In 1989, through the power of peaceful revolution, Poland, Hungary, Czechos-lovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Mongolia, Albania, the Soviet Union, Nepal and Chile, all representing about a billion people, threw off the yoke of oppression because they wanted to make peace. It is the power of the peacemaker.
I remember reading the story of a woman who mourned because she lost her son to AIDS. She was bitter at first but then she wanted to do something positive with her life, so she started to write a newsletter to parents who lost children in the same circumstances. As she comforted others, she said she discovered that God healed her life and gave meaning to it. “Blessed are those who mourn.”
The third thing I see in the Beatitudes is not only does God have a great vision for our future, but he also provides for us a wonderful vision for a better world. John Lennon sings a good song in “Imagine”:
“Imagine all the people living for the day.” Well, that’s the problem with the world today–people are just living for the day and what we need is a new vision:
“Imagine all the people living for the Lord.” We need people living for the Lord. Think what it would be like if people really lived these beatitudes. What would it entail?
Brainstorm with me. How do we become pure in heart? We become pure in heart by realizing our need for God and relying upon his word and trusting it. How do we bless the pure in heart? We bless and care for the people of God who are dependent upon him, those who live for him. We are called to bless them and to help, to restore and to heal.
“Blessed are those who mourn.” How do we bless those who mourn? By taking their pain upon ourselves, by visiting them, loving and praying for them. By not allowing them to bear this alone. How do we mourn? By realizing our need for confession and allowing ourselves to feel the hurt and loss and then expressing it because God gave us emotions.
“Blessed are the meek.” How do we become meek? By becoming servants, by realizing we can’t take anything with us. We are pilgrims and strangers in this world. We can volunteer and serve one another. We can bless the meek by blessing the servants who serve us, especially the quiet ones who do things behind the scenes.
“Blessed are the merciful.” How do we show mercy? By forgiving. When someone falls, we restore them and not destroy them. How do we bless those who are merciful? By showing mercy to them as well.
“Blessed are the pure in heart.” How can we have a pure heart? By reading God’s word and seeing the standard and raising our own lives and our children’s lives to that standard. By setting a positive example and role model. By protecting those who desire to be pure in heart. By living purity itself in our own lives and not giving excuses for our children’s bad behavior.
“Blessed are those who are peacemakers.” How can we be peacemakers? By first having great marriages and providing an atmosphere in which our children can grow up in peace. By showing our children how to fight fairly. Everyone fights, but you have to fight fairly. By teaching our children how to turn the other cheek.
“Blessed are the persecuted.” We have no control over whether someone is persecuted or not, but we can bless the persecuted by raising our voices on their behalf when they don’t have a voice.
Imagine if we all lived these beatitudes what a difference it would make in our world. You ask what you can do. Well, you can do your part. It can begin with you. The mighty Mississippi is made up of rivers, and the rivers are made up of little streams and tiny creeks, and these are made up of little trickles of water which are made of tiny raindrops. Again, alone we can do very little, but as we all work collectively we can produce the mighty Mississippi for our world. What a difference it would make.
Why does God allow suffering to begin with? I will respond by closing with a story by a professor who explained it very well to a seminary student. This was his response:
“When my daughter was two or three years old, she needed to receive weekly allergy desensitizing shots. Of course, it was my job for that horrible duty. I would take her and she would not realize where we were until she saw the white shoes on the nurses’ feet. Once we were inside the office, her grip on my finger as we walked down the hall would grow tight. Once we were inside the examination room, I would take her into my arms. When the nurse would enter with the shot already prepared, my daughter would always do the same thing. She would tighten her grip on my neck, almost to the point of causing me to pass out. Then she would cry out, “Daddy, please take me home now! Daddy, please!” An interesting thing was happening that we must also realize. She knew that I was the one who brought her to get her shot. She also knew that I was the one who would give her the strength to go through the ordeal until I took her home. It’s the same thing with us. We are so limited in our understanding at times. God does allow us to go through different trials and tests, and we, like her, must hold onto God, scream out if we must, but we must not let go until he takes us home.”
Let’s pray.
