SE062109
Remember going to the fun house as a kid and seeing those mirrors that would make you look big or skinny or short? Well, we all grew up with imperfect people in imperfect homes. And very often those people did not reflect back to us the truth about ourselves. So people often grow up with a fun house mirror permanently fixed to their self image.
We get distorted images of ourselves. So who am I really? What’s the truth about me? What is the truth about me on my own? And if God comes into the picture, how does that change things about who I am? Does it change things?
That’s the subject for the next two weeks here.
OUT OF MY LEAGUE
All last year I was out of my regular workout schedule which includes playing basketball at the Y. At the Y there are two gyms.
- the 40’s and older gym,
- the 20’s and older gym. This is filled with a bunch of run and gun, jump out of the gym, extremely competitive ball hounds that live eat and breathe the sport. We affectionately call it the NBA Farm League.
Now, I can hold my own in the first gym in which I’m one of the youngest guys. I’ve found this to be true: You can feel pretty good about your performance when you make sure your opponents are mainly the old and the infirm.
Now, when I got back to working out this fall, I had no legs, and no wind. But the only gym that was open was the 20’s gym. – NBA Junior. No problem I say, I can stay with these guys, I’ve dominated the retirees!
Well, 5 minutes into the first game, and I’m done. My shooting touch was on permanent vacation, and I had no stamina. My clock gets cleaned. It gets so bad they actually stop guarding me halfway through the game to double team others. I wind up taking the last shot – an air-ball – it’s ugly and these uber competitive guys let me hear about it.
As I’m catching an earful, I’m thinking, these guys, are out of my league. For a little while I thought maybe I could compete in their gym....but no, they’re way out of my league. Some of you might be able to identify with that. Maybe you play tennis and you had a really good game and you say,
"I'm pretty good!"
Then you go to a place where there are professionals playing and it looks like the balls are coming out of shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. And you say “whoa.... if I got on the court with that guy, I'm likely to get hurt. They’re out of my league.” Golf, same thing. You hit a decent shot and think, if I just played more… I could be good.
Then you play with a scratch golfer and think,
" I need to quit!”
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Well, in the first century A.D., there existed a small group of men.... who were widely revered as being the religious elite. They were the unchallenged superstars of spirituality. In fact, they put the bar of spiritual expectations so high that the average man or woman on the street would say, of the Scribes and the Pharisees,
"These guys are out of my league. I could never compete in religion against these guys....I'd have to quit my job....to obey all the rules that they've put into effect for me to be made right with God. In fact, there are so many hoops, I'd just feel like quitting!"
I mean, they were like us, they wanted to be right with God, they wanted to have a relationship with God just like people in this room, but maybe also like people in this room, they knew there’s no way they could compete for God’s acceptance. Now against that cultural backdrop....enter, Jesus.
Jesus the most amazing man that ever lived. Look at this life sometime friends and you will be blown away. He comes crashing onto the scene talking as if he had always lived. As if he knew God better than anyone, as if he WAS God. But he wasn’t in your face about it, he was matter of fact about it, like,
“watch what I do,” he would say, “and see if it doesn’t match what you would expect if God were to show up.”
Then he would do miracles. I mean not the Jonathan Edwards, cold reads. Not the slight of hand of some TV charlatan preachers. No, verifiable miracles that were confirmed not only by his friends, but by his enemies too. The people who opposed Jesus never discredited his miracles, they just discredited how he did them… they said he was demon possessed.
So that’s what were kind of left with about Jesus:
- He said such wild things and did such wild things, we have to conclude that he was nuts and the kind of person a modern society would lock up and throw away the key…
- Or he spoke uniquely for God and from God.
So this intriguing, exasperating Jesus – love him or hate him – starts talking about heaven. Really, it’s the “Kingdom of heaven.” And he’s saying that it starts now, on planet earth. If you want God later, it really is just a continuation of a life lived under God’s rule now, Jesus said. So people want to know:
- what’s it like in the Kingdom? And:
- how can I get in?
So Jesus sits on a hillside on the north side of the sea of Galilee. And people show up by the droves. With blankets and igloo coolers – that kind of thing. And they wait with baited breathe to hear first hand what the Kingdom of Heaven is like and how to get in on it. I remind you most people thought it was out of their league.
What's Jesus’ first word? "Blessed." He starts the greatest sermon in history with the word "blessed." "Divine favor is coming your way" he says. And then he finishes the sentence:
BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT
Let me say it again: Jesus tells the crowd:
I want to announce to all of you today.... that a windfall of benefit is going to come to the bankrupt among us. If you are spiritually bankrupt I want you to know that you are welcome in God’s kingdom which is your destiny.
THE RICH IN SPIRIT
Now listen friends, this is what he meant: There were two groups of people in the crowd that day....there was a group of people who were rich in spirit, and there was a group that was poor in spirit. Jesus is saying,
"I have good news....for those who are poor in spirit....I have no news for the rich in spirit.”
What's the difference? The Scribes and the Pharisees in the crowd that day....would consider themselves rich in spirit.
- Rich in spiritual knowledge;
- Rich in spiritual piety;
- Affluent in lifestyle.
- They had no spiritual need.
- These people don’t even know what Jesus is talking about.
Now poverty of spirit is the first attitude that moves a person toward God, so it’s deeply important to know what this is and what this is not. So who in our day is rich in spirit? Well, frankly, I see a lot of spiritually affluent people – many who are not particularly religious.
I meet and talk to many people who live with a different attitude than poverty of spirit. I know because here’s what they say:
- I’m basically a good person
- I not a bad person, I wouldn’t hurt a fly
- I have a good heart, I mean well
- God would never condemn anyone who’s sincere…
See the assumption is that we’re all spiritually rich. We’re affluent, rolling in credit on our own. So for Christianity to make sense, we have to recover the truth about us without God. And just so you know, Jesus Christ assumes that the truth about you and me on our own, is that we are spiritually bankrupt.
Until we feel this assumption to be true we are not a part of the audience that Jesus came to usher into his Kingdom. It means you’re still thinking you’re spiritually rich and Jesus held out no promise for them. You’re on your own.
If you attempt to become a Christian without walking through this first beatitude, the result is that you are bound to always feel resentful against God. You feel things like:
Geez, why is God always so inexplicably angry? He always talks in the Bible like he’s so riled up about stuff – what did I ever do to him? The worst I ever did to him is leave him alone, why can’t he just return the compliment? Why doesn’t God just live and let live… get off our backs?!
So we chose to believe in a God that doesn’t get on people’s backs. We choose to believe that we’re doing alright and that places like hell and a day of judgment are archaic remnants from a bygone era. Why do people assume they’re spiritually rich?
Well, CS Lewis wrote in the 1940’s ahead of his time about this:
He predicted, our culture will soon lose this idea of spiritual poverty, because they’ll focus so exclusively on one particular virtue: kindness or tolerance – that none of us will think anything but acceptance is truly good, and nothing but intolerance is truly bad. He called this a lopsided ethical development
Tolerance or kindness is a fine virtue if we’re going to key on one of them, but here’s the problem: If you focus on one virtue and say the others don’t matter, you always wind up violating that one virtue in the end.
For example
- a parent who values only kindness, never disciplines their child, does that child enormous disservice by spoiling them, which winds up being very UNKIND to them in the long run.
- Or a person who values tolerance and unconditional acceptance finds that when they’re pressed by someone they think is intolerant, they suddenly turn angry, and start to sound not unlike an intolerant person themselves!
Surely you’ve seen this sort of lopsided ethical development yourself. We claim to be the most tolerant society ever, but we have the highest rates of criminality and broken homes in the history of our country. What does it reveal about who we are without God?
ARE WE WORMS?
Now, some of you will respond pretty harshly to this: Rick this is just another go around of the Christian “I’m just a Worm” tripe. But friends, we’ve been so inoculated against seeing our own brokenness without God, we can see it. Here’s why:
1. We are deceived by looking on the outside. We do the moral comparison thing with our neighbor. We say, “I’m not much worse than Mr. X, and I’m certainly better than Mr. Y.” But you have no idea how much Mr. Y’s outward appearance is just a trick. And why did you select him for comparison anyway? Are you really in his league?
2. We have this idea that mere time cancels sin. We talk about things we’re ashamed of in our past with a chuckle and say ‘boys will be boys’. But aren’t all times present to God who is above time? Is not that horrible disappointment before his eyes now as if it was present, even right this moment?
3. We have this idea that there is strength in numbers. If all people are spiritually bankrupt as Jesus implies, then it must be pretty excusable. If everybody gets an “F” in the exam, then maybe the exam was too hard! That might hold until we realize that in the other school district, 90% passed the same test.
a. When we start to look outside our little group we realize that people like Jeremiah, and Paul and Mother Teresa, Buddha, Gandhi all lived much better lives than us. We get this uneasy feeling like maybe the reason I’m not a better person, is because I don’t want to be.
4. We compare our societies virtues to the others. We think, 21st century Americans are not spiritually bankrupt because we are so kind and humane compared to the middle ages, let’s say, when they were so brutal.
a. But do you think God should wink at the sins of the middle ages because they excelled in virtue, chastity and courage? When you see how awful the barbarism of past ages looks to us, you may get some idea of how our softness and sensuality looks to them, and hence, how all of us must look to God!
Think about it friends… is this modern, pervasive idea that we are all spiritually rich a statement of reality, or is it a nice sounding illusion? If it’s illusion it’s a fool’s paradise, because believing it will keep you isolated from the very blessing Jesus said comes only to the spiritually bankrupt.
POVERTY, GOOD NEWS
For as soon as you accept the attitude of spiritual bankruptcy (bad news), then Jesus offers you the world! Amazing good news! Accepting the bad news is good news! If you get through all the complex disguises that hide our inner poverty, the moment you feel real guilt, not false guilt, is a moment of truth.
And truth Jesus said, will set you free. Because you’ll be breaking into the attitude that leads to restored relationship with God.
At that moment, our illusion of being rich in spirit vanishes away! Our spirits realize that we can justify a lot of things, but this thing, that God is pointing out now in my heart, this is inexcusable. Have you ever felt that kind of guilt? Where you knew what you did was reprehensible and it didn’t matter if anyone saw it or not, you know it was there in your heart and it was abhorrent to God!
Friend, that’s the bad news, and at the point you accept it, you have the first attitude required to be a Christ follower – “poverty of spirit.”
- You are among the people who listened to Jesus that day on the mountainside who knew they were not members of the spiritual honors society.
- You are among the people who knew they were not setting righteousness records at work every week....
- You are among those who knew they were not too impressive: spiritually, morally, ethically.
- You are among those people in the crowd that day who might have hung their heads low, realizing their spiritual net worth was downright scandalous.
Can you imagine the impact of that first beatitude....on spiritually poverty-stricken people in the crowd that day?
"Excuse me! Excuse me! Did I hear you right, Jesus?.... The kingdom of God is open to spiritual debtors like me, even if I don't have a penny of personal righteousness to put on the table? The door is open to me?"
It’s not just open to you, it’s ONLY open to you and no one else.
I met someone who was so twisted inside because he had experienced the pain of infidelity. Yet he was digging in his heels. Why can’t she forgive me? And he was actually getting angry at the wife he had betrayed. He was having a real hard time adjusting to the idea that he was reaping a harvest that he had planted!
So I said to him,
You know, maybe if you can’t fix this by muscling up it will help you see who you really are. You're broke, friend! You're busted! You're spiritually bankrupt. But that bad news is good news if you’ll admit it, because the doors of the kingdom, are open to you."
This first beatitude rocked a certain group of people in the crowd that day – I mean, it rocked 'em....they started saying to themselves for the first time in their lives,
"Is it possible? Is it really possible....that someone with my grades could get into Harvard?"
By virtue of what Jesus is gonna do on a cross some day? Can you see friends, that just acknowledging this truth, just living in this truth is the first step toward God? It’s just admitting the truth about the universe… there is a God and I don’t measure up to his perfection, I never could, he’s out of my league.
But somehow He turned heaven’s gate upside down and said,
it’s not going to be the spiritual superstars, it’s going to be all the spiritually bankrupt, the humble, those willing to get in touch with their need, willing to accept the hard truth about that need.
Because no one in My kingdom will Boast Jesus said. No one will look down on their brother or sister. No way, because it’s my grace from first to last – so God gets the credit!
Those who think they don’t need grace are still living in that fools paradise,
- where you’re more moral than God,
- where you’re telling God who he can and cannot have mercy on,
- where you’re telling God why your moral code is superior to his…
o well, those are the spiritually rich and Jesus has nothing for them.
But I sense there are people in this room, who know down to their bones, that there is a lot of red ink on the spiritual ledger of their lives. There’s people in this room I believe who know you are in spiritual arrears. There’s people in this room who just might own the words of this old Christian song:
- nothing in my hands I bring;
- simply to your cross I cling; naked;
- I come to you for dress; helpless;
- I look to you for grace;
- I to your fountain fly;
- Wash me, savior....or I die.
Poor-in-spirit people feel that kind of desperate need.... And they empty out the pockets of their life and bring God nothing, not a single thing, but a needy, sin-stained heart. A heart that requires redemption. Jesus says,
"I have good news for you! For those of you who are almost giving up....blessed are you who know that heaven is out of your league. Because I’ve made the door wide open to the humble, the faithful, the spiritually poor; come on in!"
