Well, today we’re beginning a new series of messages called Cringe, and we’re going to start today in
Luke chapter 6. So, if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn to Luke 6. It’s in the New Testament. It’s one
of the Gospels. And as you are turning there this morning, I just want to take a chance and welcome
you. I’m really glad that you’re here today, especially if you’re visiting with us, or if this is the first time
to be here, my name is Aaron and I’m one of the pastors on staff and I’d really love to meet you
sometime soon.
This last week, I had somebody stop me in the hallway and they said, “You know whenever you say that
you’re one of the pastors on staff, do you really mean that? Is that false humility? What exactly do you
mean by that?” I never really thought about that before, so if you’ve ever wondered that, I just want you
to know that I really do mean that. I am just one of the team. In fact, there are many people here who
are called, and gifted, and used by God in a variety ways both paid and unpaid. God’s working through
here and I’m just running in my lane doing what God’s called me to do. I’m not the king. I’m not the
president. I don’t rubber stamp every decision and say, “Yes, thou shalt do this; and no, you shall not.” I
don’t do that sort of thing. I’m just on the team. I really do mean it. I would love to meet you here.
There’s really only one lead pastor here and his name is Jesus. I think it’s a bit dangerous to have a
church built around one or two personalities. So if you’re here for any other reason other than Him, I’m
going to let you down. But if you’re here for Jesus to know Him, to make Him known, then the odds of
things going much better for you are all the greater.
I’m glad that you’re here and let me just tell you – coming up in this series in two weeks, a guy by the
name of Vince Antonucci is going to be here to preach and if you were here on Easter and saw the video
that we showed of the guy in Vegas who ends up getting baptized in the hot tub, that’s Vince’s church.
Vince moved out to Vegas to plant a church on the strip in Vegas about three years ago and they are
reaching people that very few of us would be gifted or able to reach. It’s really inspiring to see. In fact,
on Friday I watched an hour long documentary on their church and there are several people in that
church that have responded to Jesus Christ and are telling their stories. And it was a former skinhead, a
drug dealer, a pimp, strippers – it’s like all of these people that have come out of the shadows of life
there in Vegas running from something, and God has gotten a hold of them with the Gospel message.
It’s so powerful to see. Vince – I’m so thankful for him – he’s gifted to speak into those people’s lives and
share with them the Gospel. He is going to be here two weeks from today sharing with us, so you’ll want
to be here for that.
On Father’s Day, Michael Franzese is going to be here. He’s a former mobster from the east coast. He
was born into that. His family was part of that industry so to speak. In the 80s, he was arrested and sent
to prison. He gave his life to Christ there. He experienced a pretty dramatic transformation and he’s
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going to be here on Father’s Day to speak and I think he’s going to share some things that we’ll all be
able to relate to, but I think especially he’s going to be able to speak to the hearts and minds of our
men. So, if you’ve got somebody in mind – a neighbor, a family member, somebody that has shied away
from church for a variety of different reasons – take a chance, pray it over and invite them to come on
Father’s Day because I think that Michael will have a word that will speak directly to their hearts. And
then plan to stay afterwards from 12:30 – 3:30, we’re having a wide variety of activities on our campus.
There will be food and other activities. I’ve been told that there’s going to be some actual Nascars on
our property which I’m going to steal and take for a few laps. They told me I cannot drive one, but I’m
the lead pastor, I’m going to drive one. I’m just kidding. So, that’s all coming up on Father’s Day and so
you can be looking forward to that.
With that in mind, let me pray and we’re going to jump into our passage today.
Lord God, we come toYou now and I pray that You would settle our hearts and our spirits. I pray that in
these next few moments, we will literally hear from You through Your Word, and I pray that You would
use me as a mouthpiece to amplify that and not to block it. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Have you ever said something that you wish you could immediately take back? Did you ever just open
up your mouth and you just wanted to insert your foot? What about this – have you ever been around
somebody that says something and it just makes you cringe because it’s uncomfortable to hear?
I remember when I was in college. My favorite professor was a guy with a last name of Zustiak. We
called him Dr. Zustiak – Dr. Zus for short and he was one of the most passionate, energetic men that I
have ever been around my entire life. He acted like he had a constant IV drip of Red Bull coursing
through his system all the time. Have you ever been around somebody like that? He’s just always
excited. He’s always passionate. He’d get up to teach class and it would be 7:00 in the morning. I had a
seven o’clock class every semester that I went to college so you can pray for my recovery. So he would
get up and speak and he would come out of the gates so passionate, so energetic and because of that,
he would oftentimes say some things he didn’t mean. It was highly entertaining. We were always
wondering, okay, what’s Dr. Zus going to say next?
I’ll never forget in chapel – I went to a Bible college so we had chapel services on Tuesdays and
Thursdays - he was preaching one time in chapel and you could see it coming. He’s all amped up – he’d
had way too many cups of coffee that morning – and he’s getting going and all of a sudden in the
moment, he slipped and it wasn’t like one of those things that was in his heart and came to the surface;
he just honestly mispronounced a word and it came out as a four-letter word.
Now, when that happens in a sermon, there’s no recovering from that. It’s just like shrug your shoulders
and kind of move on. It was as if the air got sucked out of the room. I remember sitting up towards the
back and my physical response to that was to cringe. It was just like, “Oh, he didn’t just do that. How
embarrassing for him!” And we’ve all had those moments.
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Maybe you grew up in a household where your Mom or your Dad had a little bit of a short fuse, maybe
they didn’t have a whole lot of patience so you would be out at a restaurant and the waitress would get
the order wrong and they’d just lay into her. And your response was to cringe – you just wanted to hide
under the table.
Maybe you’re married to somebody today that just speaks his/her mind – just very blunt, just open,
honest, and he/she says stuff, and you’re like, don’t go there, don’t go there. And then they do, some of
you are elbowing your spouse right now – I know that’s happened here.
Maybe you have a child at home and any of you who have little kids between the ages of 3 and 10, be
careful what you say because they are like a parrot and they will repeat the things that you say about
that person right to them. So, you’ve got to be very careful about what you say and we’ve all had those
experiences.
Well, we come to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John which are four different individuals
who write about the life and the ministry of Jesus Christ. It gives us this multi-angled view and approach
of what Jesus said and did and why He did it. And we see throughout the Gospels – if you’ve ever sat
down and read through them – there are these moments when Jesus says things that make you cringe.
You read it and you’re like, “Oh, man, did He really just say that? Did He really mean that?” And it makes
us uncomfortable.
Now, it’s important for us to understand as we go through this over the next several weeks together
that it’s one thing to say something embarrassing because you slipped, and you didn’t mean to say it,
and you just find yourself in that position. “So, when are you due?”
“I’m not pregnant.”
“Oh, okay.”
We’ve all been in that moment when we wish we could take it back – that’s one thing. It’s another thing
to say something because you purposefully want to be shocking. You’re the shock jock syndrome. I’m
going to say this to get a reaction out of you. It’s another thing to say something because you just want
to be mean and tear somebody down.
What’s important to understand is that Jesus didn’t say these things that make us cringe because He
slipped or because He’s trying to be shocking, or because He’s trying to be mean. Jesus said these things
because He genuinely cares for us, He loves us, and He wants us to grow. He wants to see a
transformation take shape in our lives. As we’ve said before in the past, friction shapes. Without friction,
you really don’t change.
So, when Jesus says these things to us that are difficult to hear, it’s really for a redemptive purpose.
Jesus is not afraid to offend you and me, but He does it for all the right reasons and that makes all the
difference. That’s what I want us to have a firm grasp of every week in this series. That’s Jesus’
motivation. That’s the reason why. I really want us to fight the urge as a church as we work our way
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through some of these passages over the course of the next several weeks, to fight the temptation to
water it down, to excuse it away, to marginalize it.
We oftentimes come to these passages and read what Jesus said and then we’ll say, “Well, He couldn’t
have possible meant it like that.” Or, “Here’s what Jesus really meant.” In essence, we strip the whole
passage. We strip those words of their power.
Now, let’s lean into the plate on this one and let’s see what the Holy Spirit might do in and through our
lives through some of these difficult words of Jesus. When it comes to preaching, when it comes to
sermons, there’s not just one way to preach God’s Word – there’s actually several.
One might be what we could call topical preaching where you pick a topic and then you say, “Okay, what
does God’s Word have to say about it?” Not a bad way to preach and the Bible never forbids it. But a
steady diet of topical preaching where we rarely open God’s Word, we just talk about topics that are
relevant for the day – sprinkle a little bit of God’s Word on there – will leave us very malnourished. It’s a
lot like whenever my kids – when Mommy’s out of town – and I say, “Hey, kids. What do you want for
dinner?” They will always pick what’s unhealthy for them. They say, “We want macaroni and cheese
because it’s good.” Macaroni and cheese isn’t bad every now and then, but a steady diet of that will
leave us malnourished. I would say the same thing is true for topical preaching where we very rarely
open up God’s Word and we just talk about topics. We can also get caught up in topical ruts at times if
we do that.
There is another way of preaching which would be called expository preaching. Some of you, this is just
review. Some of you, this is brand new. That’s where we go verse by verse, chapter by chapter, section
by section of the Bible and we say, “Okay, what does God’s Word have to say about this in its entirety
even through uncomfortable sections.” Cow Tipping – if you were here a couple of months ago – that
was a verse by verse teaching through 1 Corinthians. What I loved about that was we hit some topics in
that series that I would have never, ever, ever wanted to preach on, but I was forced to because that
was what was next in the chapter. And some of you, if I had just been doing a topical series, would have
thought, “Something’s wrong.” Or, “Aaron’s got an agenda.” But no, that was what was next in the text
and so that’s what we covered. That’s our primary meat and potatoes around here. We want to know
what God’s Word has to say.
I have a personal goal to write and preach a sermon out of every chapter in the Bible before I die. That
and drive a Nascar around the church building. So, one of those will hopefully be realized much sooner
than the other, but if you stick around long enough, the other one will be as well.
Here’s a third way to approach this and it’s what we might call textual preaching. Textual preaching is
where we camp out on a passage for a little while. We just marinate in it. We just look at it from
different angles and some of us might have thought that Marriage Unscripted was a topical series, but it
really was textual because we camped out in Ephesians 5 and we looked at it every single week from a
variety of different angles. I say all of that to set the table to say this. That’s what Cringe is. Cringe is a
textual series where we’re going to be in a passage of scripture, a section of scripture, kind of a genre
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and we’re looking at that and saying, “Okay, why did Jesus say some of these uncomfortable things and
what’s the purpose behind it?” As we come to Luke chapter 6, this really is a teaching of scripture – a set
of teachings – known as The Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are a set of short and concise statements that
pack a punch.
You could consider the Beatitudes sort of the Proverbs of the New Testament. They’re short, they’re
easy to remember – you kind of work your way down through them. They leave you a little bit
uncomfortable and Jesus is going to launch into this set of teachings. They’re wildly abused. They are
often misunderstood when we read down through them. And Jesus, in Luke chapter 5 and the beginning
of chapter 6, He has just called 12 ordinary men to be his disciples. He says, I want you to follow me –
kind of the ultimate 3-year internship – and I want you learn from Me and I want you to learn to lead
like Me, and it’s ultimately what Jesus is asking of you and me today.
He’s not asking you to believe in Him only; He’s asking you to follow Him. He’s asking you to learn from
Him and to learn to lead like Him. And so Jesus has just assembled this group and in Luke chapter 6, they
make their very first public appearance. And look at what it says in verse 17, “And He came down with
them and stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from
all of Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed
of their diseases. And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd
sought to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all.”
While it wouldn’t be unusual for us to know what it’s like to be in a large crowd of people, it would have
been highly unusual for this First Century crowd. Today just about all of us know what it’s like to find
ourselves maybe in an arena, or a stadium, or just a large, congested group. Maybe we’ve been to
Disney World during the busy season. Maybe some of us are getting ready to make plans to go to
Holiday World. There’s nothing like bad tattoos and free soda to draw a crowd. So, you go down there
and they’ve got lots of people in a small, confined space. I was watching the playoffs on Thursday night –
Pacers playing the Heat – and I saw Bankers Life Fieldhouse kind of full for the first time since I’ve lived
here. They’re back – that’s exciting to see.
We all know what that’s like. We’ve had those experiences, but in the First Century this was very, very
rare. You did not have as many people living on the planet. You had little villages of 50-100 people that
are all spread out everywhere. The synagogues would have only seated maybe 20-30 people at a time.
You had people who didn’t have a whole lot of resources. They either lived in the hills where they were
shepherds or farmers or they lived near the water where they would have been fishermen. And so they
would have saved their whole lives to maybe take one significant trip – possibly to Jerusalem. They just
didn’t travel much.
They weren’t used to being in big crowds of people. And yet, this is the magnetic draw of Jesus. They
hear where He’s going to be. They hear that He is going to be teaching and so they got to find Him. And
Luke specifies very clearly what their motivation was. It says that they needed to be healed. This is a
very broad description. Healed of what? Well, you name it. They needed to be healed physically. They
needed to be healed spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. They had all this baggage, all of this junk,
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all of these questions and they go and they find Jesus and they desire something from Him. And Jesus is
happy to oblige that. “You need to be healed? I’d be happy to heal you. Are you hungry? I’ll feed you.
Are you thirsty? I’ll give you something to drink.”
And even though there are many things that have changed between the time that this was written and
took place and our world today, there is one thing that just has not changed. And it’s the sense that
every person in this room – regardless of who you are, how old you are, what your background is –
needs to be healed from something. There’s something that you brought in here with you whether you
want to talk about it or not, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, this sort of sense of anxiety.
Have you ever had this moment where things seem to be going okay, but you can’t relax? Things seem
to be fine. You look at all the dashboard of your life. The gauges all seem to be in the right spot, but it’s
like why am I still uncomfortable? Why can’t I sleep? Why am I still restless? It’s because things are not
right. There’s this void within us.
They approach Jesus not even fully knowing where to put their finger on all of this, but they’re going to
come around Him. I would even say today there are a wide variety of reasons for your being here. Some
of you are here today just because this is what you do every Sunday. You just wake up, and you go
through the routine, and you come here, and you sit, and you go home. Others of you, maybe this is
kind of a brand new experience for you. You came at the invitation of someone. You came here kind of
against your will. It’s like, I’m here and I don’t exactly know why and yet there’s still this kind of sense
that things are not right. I don’t know if there is a week that goes by that I don’t have this conversation
in some form or another with somebody. They’ll grab me in the hallway or they’ll send me an email or
write me a letter and they’ll say, “You don’t know us, but we’ve been coming for a month, six months,
two years … and we usually kind of sit off in the shadows.”
I got this email just this last week from somebody who said, “When we first started coming to Traders
Point, I didn’t want to come, but my spouse forced me and I came basically out of compliance and we
sat in the back and I stood there with my arms crossed and I had a frown on my face the whole time and
I didn’t sing; even when you tried to be funny, I didn’t laugh. I just stood there, and I just kind of listened
to this, and I walked out kind of unaffected by it.” Then they said, “But I kept coming and I kept coming,
and I kept coming, and I don’t know when it exactly happened, but at some point I found that I really
wanted to be here, looked forward to being here to be filled up with the Gospel and I didn’t even know
what that was.”
I was like, “That works.”
What I’m saying here is that there’s this big lie that we buy into that gets twisted – that to be here, you
have to look a certain way, act a certain way, believe a certain way, have all the questions answered, get
your act cleaned up. None of that is true. What we learn here is you just place yourself in the path of
Jesus and let Him run into you.
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It’s like that whole idea of you placing yourself out there. It’s so simple. Step up to the interstate and I’m
just going to step out here, and BOOM! It has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do about
where you place yourself, and we get tripped up over, “Well, I have to have it all figured out, and I’ve
got to know, and I’ve got to understand, and I’ve got to go to the Bible, and get up at 5 in the morning
and do my prayers and devotionals. And we trip up over all this stuff and we get caught up in this web of
religion thinking we can somehow get there. And Jesus just said, “Show up.” Show up.
So, that’s what we have here in Luke 6 is this crowd of people that just shows up and Jesus is willing to
meet them where they are. And He knows that’s not what they need.
“Jesus, we’re really hungry.”
“I’ll give you a sandwich, but that’s not what you need though, but I’ll give it to you. I’ll play ball. You
thirsty? I’ll give you a cup of water. You sick? I’ll go ahead and heal you.”
And they think they got what they were coming for and so they reach out, they touch…I don’t know
exactly how this works. Luke doesn’t give us the detail. He just said power went out from Jesus. I don’t
know if it was one of those things where He was walking through the crowd and they touch Him, and
they were getting healed or if He’s going up to people and he’s touching them. I don’t know. It doesn’t
really matter. He just gets done and they have power from Jesus. And they’re like, “Thank you, Jesus, for
filling us up. We’ll be on our way now.” And He’s like, “Whoa, wait a second, I have something I need to
say to you and buckle up because it’s going to make you cringe.”
Look at verse 20. “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples …” I love the fact that Luke includes that little
detail. It shows Jesus’ heart. He’s doing multiple things at once here. He’s speaking to wounded and
hurting people, He’s also raising up His disciples knowing one day they are going to do this too. So, “Are
you guys listening? Are you guys taking notes? Are you paying attention?” It’s like a glance – He looks up
at them. And then He says, “…Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Now that
verse gets so butchered today. It’s this idea that rich people won’t go to heaven and you’ve got to be
poor to go to heaven and you should feel guilty for having things … and maybe you should.
But understand this, there is a difference between righteous poverty and unrighteous poverty. They are
not the same – being poor and righteous. Well, you lost your job; you had nothing to do with that. If
somebody gets sick, you have to pay hospital bills – you can’t make it. But if you’re righteous, you’ve got
the right motivation, but you’re still struggling. Then, there’s unrighteous ways to be poor. I don’t want
to get a job. I want to live in Mom and Dad’s basement for a while. It’s this whole deal of unrighteous
and poor. There is a distinction there and keep in mind who Jesus is speaking to in this particular setting.
Verse 21, “Blessed are you who are hungry now …” and He said that – this is not figurative, this is literal.
They’re hungry. They don’t have a whole lot. They’ve been traveling. “… for you shall be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now …” life’s tough, but one day you’ going to laugh. Verse 22, “Blessed are
you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and spurn your name as evil …”
but then He gets the motivation for it “… on account of the Son of Man!” The Son of Man – Jesus is
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referring to Himself. It’s His favorite description of Himself. He would often refer to Himself as the Son of
Man and He says, “Blessed are you when people hate you because of Me.” We’re going to talk about
that on the last week of this series. And then He says, “Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold,
your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.”
Now He switches this. Look at what He says next. Verse 24, “But woe to you who are rich …” Now, that
word “woe” does not pop up in our vernacular very often, does it? You don’t ever go up to somebody
and say woe to you. You don’t do that. But the only time you ever use the word woe is if you’re breaking
in horses or – I don’t know when you use that word. Somebody threw out the old reference to Joey
Lawrence in Blossom. Remember that – woe! So, you look at this – you look at this text, and here’s what
you do – the word woe just means how unfortunate – so, you look through this passage. It changes the
meaning a little bit. When you hear “woe to you” and change it to how unfortunate. How unfortunate,
“…for you have received your consolation.” In other words, He says if you found your identity and
fulfillment and your sense of purpose in your riches, congratulations, that’s your consolation prize. It
doesn’t mean that it’s sinful to have riches; it just means if you find your identity in them then that’s
about as good as it gets.
Verse 25, “Woe to you …” or how unfortunate for 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.”
So what Jesus is doing here is He’s flipping the cultural norm on its head and He’s comparing and
contrasting these two ways to live life, and to look at life, and what we value, and what we don’t value.
So, He’s talking about the blessings that come from godliness and He’s talking about the woes that come
from worldliness. And at face value, these words just seem like crazy talk to most of us, don’t they? You
look at them and this is where we say, “Jesus couldn’t have possibly meant it. It obviously means
something else.” Be careful about that. It could be, Jesus said it because He really meant it. And so we
look at this and we say, “Okay, well, how is poverty, hunger, sorrow and rejection a blessing? How are
riches, satisfaction, happiness and popularity a curse?” This teaching just flies in the face of everything
that we are taught, the air that we breathe in our media and our culture. And let’s just be honest,
Celebrity Apprentice wouldn’t be nearly as fun to watch under this set of ethics, would it? Think about it
if everybody started, “Oh, no, you first.” If it were not cutthroat, it would be off the air.
So, what is Jesus doing here? This is what Jesus is doing. He is introducing a counter culture that isn’t
primarily about ethics, it’s about citizenship. Now, the way that the Beatitudes most often get butchered
is when we turn them into a to-do list. So, you go down through the list and Jesus said, “Blessed are you,
blessed are you, blessed are you …” let me try to do that now. Well, it’s impossible. So, you look at this
and you say, “This is a to-do list.” It’s not a to-do list; it’s an in spite of list. That in spite of your
weaknesses, in spite of your deficiencies, in spite of your current set of circumstances, through Jesus
you can be a part of His Kingdom. Jesus can be your King. You have a new set of values.
Here’s another way of looking at this. What things are you foreign to and what are you familiar with?
Have you ever been in a foreign country that’s not your country of origin? Have you ever been in an area
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in which you didn’t understand the vernacular, didn’t understand the culture – felt like a fish out of
water? That’s what Jesus is saying here. Where do you feel comfortable? You feel too comfortable here?
Be careful about that. Where are you a foreigner? Where do you feel like home? What are you homesick
for? And he says to these individuals in this context and to us today, you primarily see yourself as,
perhaps, a peasant in the Roman Empire. You are not. You can be – through Me – a citizen of another
Kingdom. Totally a different set of values, and opportunities, and privileges, and blessings.
This is one of the biggest curses, I think, of Christianity in America is that we don’t primarily find
ourselves finding our identity in Christ. We find our identity in other things – you just name it. We’re an
American first. We’re a denominational name first. Jesus says I want you to be a citizen in My Kingdom.
You are going to see things through dramatically different lenses. So, the question for me as I was
studying this last week was, “Well, what does that look like? How do I even know?” That’s what helped
me to say, what do I long for? What am I homesick for?
When I was a freshman in high school – this was 1990 so you are either going to see me as incredibly
young or incredibly old with that – right after church one Sunday night, we went out to eat pizza with a
group of people from church. There was a kid that was maybe 19 or 20 years old who had just come
back from college and I was sitting across the table from him and my Dad struck up this conversation
and was asking him what his plans were – “Where are you going to school? What are you studying?”
And he said, “What’s your long range plan?”
And I’ll never forget this guy, he took a bite of pizza and with a mouthful of food he says, “I’m not really
planning much beyond the year 2000.”
And my Dad was like, “What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t think any of us will live to see beyond the year 2000. I think things are getting bad, things
are getting worse, and Jesus will return before then. There’s no way He’s going to let this thing go
beyond that.”
Now, I’m sitting there eating my pizza and I start running the math –that means at best I’m going to
make it to 24. There are all of these things I want to do. I haven’t even seen Niagara Falls yet! I’m going
through all of this, and here was my fear as I was looking at that. I literally went home and I said, “Jesus,
no offense, but could You wait?” Literally – I prayed that in my room. It’s almost like a parent who goes
to pick up their child from a sleepover too early. It’s like, “I really do want to go home with you Mom
and Dad, but not right now; we’re playing X Box.” So, this idea, this conviction fell over me that I love
Jesus, I just didn’t long for Him. That’s a different thing. I can be interested in His Kingdom. I can want to
go to heaven, but if I don’t long for it, it’s going to change the way I operate in the here and the now.
Jesus is talking about citizenship. He says, where’s home?
So, whenever He says woe to you, you feel too comfortable in this world. He’s not necessarily saying,
“Hey, you shouldn’t smoke and you shouldn’t drink and you shouldn’t curse; shame on you.” He’s
saying, where do you feel comfortable? And we could summarize verses 20 through 26 this way, “That if
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my identity is rooted in this world and everything it has to offer, then this is as close to heaven as I will
ever get.” So live up the frozen yogurt and the beaches and the sunsets because that’s as close as you’re
going to get. “But if my identity is rooted in Jesus as my King and my citizenship is in His Kingdom,” then
take comfort because this world is as close to hell as you’ll ever get – the cancer, the disease, the
depression, and the sicknesses. Revelation says, “I’ll wipe every tear from your eye. I’ll come to redeem.
I’ll come to restore.” So, it’s about identity. “And if this present earth is my heaven – woe to me, how
unfortunate. But blessings await if I’m going through hell on earth because I’m a citizen in heaven.” And
that’s enough to make you cringe, but you’ve got to come face-to-face with that and ask yourself where
you are.
The good news is that Jesus is finished with that section. The bad news is He’s just getting warmed up.
Look at Verse 27. “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless
those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the
other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either …” A cloak is
basically an outer coat; a tunic is a shirt. Verse 30, “Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one
who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do
so to them.” That’s just a restatement of the Golden Rule.
And Jesus does what any good teacher would do. Jesus anticipates the objections. He anticipates the
hesitations, the questions, the pushback. And so immediately, without even giving them a chance to do
it, He reverse engineers everything He just said to go back through and speak to it again and as we read
through the rest of the passage, whenever Jesus says the word “sinner” what He means is somebody
who does not live as a resident of the Kingdom of God. They’re not bound by the principles of the
Kingdom of God. That’s what He means.
Look at Verse 32. “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love
those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For
even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that
to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good,
and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most
High, for He is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.”
And these words sound a little bit like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. If we even finish them. And I’ll
be honest with you. There have been plenty of times when I have read this passage of scripture and in
the middle of it, I’ll start turning down the volume. It’s white noise. It’s like, “I’m out. Tab out. I can’t go
there. I can’t do that.” We come up with all of these excuses, all of these reasons, all of these
explanations to say, “Well, Jesus couldn’t have possibly meant that. He had to have meant this over
here.”
Or, what about this one? What Jesus is saying is this is what we ought to do, but He knows we can’t
really do that. “I can love my friends and my family up to a certain point, but then after that, aren’t they
going to take advantage of me? What about my rights? I don’t even do a good job praying for my
friends, let alone my enemies. [I say] I’m going to pray for you and then I forget.” Right? “I have to pray
for my enemies? I’m not motivated to do that.”
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Keep in mind when He says, “Strike you on the cheek,” He’s not even necessarily talking about a forceful
punch or assault. He’s talking about insult. It’s like a smack to you. Instead of defending myself, which
usually never works anyway, I’m just going to turn the other cheek. Most of the time, if somebody hits
me; I’m going to drop them with a wicked left hook. Right? If somebody takes my coat, I’m not going to
give them my shirt. And about the only tolerable one out of all of this is maybe verse 31, The Golden
Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Alright, “One out of eight isn’t bad. I guess
I’ll go there.” We look at this, really, through the set of our American rights as citizens and we say if
somebody mistreats us, then they should get what’s coming to them. And in this First Century, this is
what this crowd would have been used to.
One of the pagan philosophers of the day, very well-known philosopher, would often say this, “One
should do harm to one’s enemies and be of service to one’s friends.” And that is an ethic that we don’t
even have to be taught that do we? It’s just ingrained in us. I don’t know how many of you were
watching the playoffs or if you even care, but a couple of weeks ago I was noticing some of the reports
coming out of the NBA in the playoffs and there was a story about the player formerly known as Ron
Artest which – he still holds a dear place in all of our hearts, clearly. But Ron Artest has recently changed
his name to Metta World Peace which is interesting because on the back of his jersey it says World
Peace on it which is incredibly ironic. At the very end of this last season, if you pay attention to any of
this, he ended it by giving a pretty severe elbow to the back of James Hardin who plays for the
Oklahoma City Thunder. He got suspended and kicked out, and they are facing the Oklahoma City
Thunder in the playoffs and so his first game back, they are squaring off with them. So, everybody’s
talking about it. One of the headlines in bold – I couldn’t help but notice it – popped up on my computer
screen one morning. They were interviewing him about it and said this, “World Peace refuses to shake
hands with James Harden.” That’s so ironic, right? World Peace refuses to be at peace. And this is the
ethic we commonly see.
It’s easy to look at individuals in the media and to diagnose maybe their lack of grace; man, it’s rampant
within all of us, isn’t it? We just have the privilege of not playing those things out in front of lights and
camera for millions of people to see, but it’s there. We play through that in our minds. And the common
teaching of the day – in fact, even the rabbis would quote Leviticus 19:18. If you’re familiar with that
passage, that passage says, “Don’t take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own
people, but you should love your neighbors as yourself.” And the rabbis of that day would take that
verse and would say that what it means by your own people is just the church. That’s your Biblical
community; the people who are friendly to you. So, even the rabbis were teaching you don’t really need
to be friendly to your enemies.
That’s why Jesus says in this passage, “But I say to you…” and He would often do that. He would often,
as He’s teaching through the Gospels, quote maybe a philosopher or a rabbi of the day, “You have heard
it said, but I say to you…” and He flips it on its head. He doesn’t modify it – He body slams it. And He
says, “That’s totally wrong. If you’re going to be a citizen in My Kingdom, then you need to understand
that.”
And Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” That word love is the word agape which we have covered before.
Not all words that describe love are the same thing. This word agape is a love that is humanly
impossible. Agape love is the supernatural love that comes from God through you, and it’s not a mistake
that Jesus uses that word intentionally. He didn’t say philia; He doesn’t say, “Love them as a friend.” He
says, “I want you to agape your enemies …” which means you place yourself in this vulnerable, broken
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position to let God love that person through you. And you’re going to hate it, and you’re not going to
want it, and you’re not going to want to do it, and in the process of that, God shapes you. That’s why He
teaches this very difficult thing.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the name Corey Ten Boom. Corey Ten Boom and her
sister, Betsy, were hauled off to a Nazi prison camp in the 1940s and they smuggled in a Bible and she
read this passage while she was in prison. It was Romans 8 and this is what she read, “Who shall
separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble, or hardship, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness,
or danger, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors…” And she would say that
this was the passage that really helped her to keep her sanity and her hope while she was in prison. That
even though all of these things were awful for her she said, “I’m more than a conqueror through the
love of Christ working through me.” Listen to what she would write later. “More than conquerors is not
just a wish, it’s a fact. We knew it. We experienced it minute by minute; poor, hated, hungry, we are
more than conquerors. Not we shall be, but we are. And life in prison took place on two separate levels:
one the observable, external life which grew every day more horrible; the other, the life we lived with
God which grew daily better. We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
Once she was released from the concentration camp, after the war was over and after the dust settled,
she found herself one Sunday in a church service, and she ended up bumping into a man and he did not
recognize her, but she immediately recognized him as one of the guards who had abused and
mistreated her – did unspeakable things to her – in prison. I want you to hear directly from her words.
“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him. The former SS man who had stood guard at the
shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbrűck. It was the first of our actual jailers that I had
seen since that time. And suddenly, it was all there. It all came back to me: the room full of mocking
men; the heaps of clothing; Betsy, my sister, her pain blanched face. It came to me as the church was
emptying and he walked up to me and he said, ‘How grateful I am to think that He has washed away my
sins.’ And he thrust his hand out to shake mine and I, who had told so often to the people there at
Blumendahl the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled
up within me, I saw this sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man. Was I going to ask for more?
Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile. I struggled to raise my hand
and I could not. I felt nothing; not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed the
silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him; give me Your forgiveness. And as I took his hand, the most
incredible thing happened from my shoulder, along my arm, and through my hand a current seemed to
pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not our forgiveness any more than our own goodness that the world’s
healing hinges, but on His; and when He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command
the love itself.”
Now, here’s your homework for this week as we come back. I want you, as you go back into your sphere
of influence – your home, your neighborhood, your community, your workplace, your school – to begin
to think with a Kingdom ethic that’s fueled by the love of Christ, to see yourself as a foreigner here and a
citizen there. And really call yourself out on it. Am I too comfortable here? Am I longing enough for
there?
Here’s the second thing I want you to do and it’s infinitely harder. Sometime today, I want you to sit
down – you don’t have to talk to anybody about this, just do this between you and God – and I want you
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to think of at least one person in your life, past or present, that you despise. I’m not talking about a
group of people. I’m not talking about unknown people. I’m not talking about somebody you’ve never
met. I’m just talking about somebody that you know in your life that you really, really dislike. And you’re
annoyed with them; you might even say you hate them because of something they’ve done to you,
something they haven’t done for you. And I want you to visualize that person. I want you to think of
their name and for the next 30 days, I want you to pray for them.
Now, don’t pray that they would get hit by a bus. I know some of you are, “Oh, I’ll work that angle. Dear
Lord Jesus, I pray that Ted would lose a limb. Blessings, blessings!” No, no, no. It will be forced. You’ll
feel dead. You won’t feel like it, but whoever it is that you would just … Now, understand what the
outcomes will be. It could be a reconciliation of sorts, but maybe not. It could be that there is great fruit
that gets yielded out of this; perhaps not. Don’t pray for them to change. You’ll be defeating the whole
purpose of this. Just pray for them. It could be 30 seconds, it could be 30 minutes. What I want you to
do is stay disciplined to that and in fact when you don’t feel like it, fall back on this prayer of Corey Ten
Boom and say, I’m dead, it will have to be Your power flowing through me to do it. What I want you to
do at the end of the 30 days is just ask yourself if God did anything different to your heart? And I think
there’s a good chance at the end of 30 days you’ll find yourself operating more as a citizen of His
Kingdom and Jesus as King than you ever have.
You see, most of the time we think it’s another Bible study, another sermon, or another piece of
knowledge that will get us there. The work of sanctification is God blowing through the sediment that
has settled around your heart. That’s why Jesus says, “You agape your enemies because you can’t, and
only I can, and when I work through your heart, you’ll be the one that will be changed.”
And today, we’re going to respond to this teaching through communion. So, if you have accepted Christ
into your life, then I welcome you to take this. You take the bread and the juice that represents His body
and blood and spend some time communing with Him. I want to challenge you not to tune out right now
because this is the most important part of the morning and we’ll just take this for a few minutes and
then if you need somebody to pray with, prayer counselors/ pastors will be down front.
Let me pray.
Father, we come to you right now and I thank you that Your Word is sharper than any double-edged
sword. Forgive us when we doubt it. Forgive us when we try to water it down and to tame it and read it
and say, “Well, Jesus couldn’t have possibly meant that. That’s too hard; that’s too offensive.” And we
end up missing the whole thrust of Your teaching and what it is You desire to do in and through us. God,
if we would be a church that would operate as citizens of Your Kingdom and make you King of our lives,
then we would literally turn this world upside down – not because of anything we would do, but because
our hearts are finally pliable enough for You to work through them. I thank you God that you are a God
of justice, and you’re equally a God of grace. Help us to never underestimate those two, but to come to
you on Your terms. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
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