The Character of a True Christian, Pt. 2
Luke 6:23-26
Many people are, of course, fascinated by the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, fascinated by His birth which is, or course, signified in our worldwide Christmas celebrations. Fascinated by His miracles, fascinated by His ability to heal the sick, raise the dead and cast demons out of people, even fascinated by His death, fascinated by His resurrection. Without question the life of the Lord Jesus Christ is marvelous beyond words, unique, compelling.
And yet, it is not His life by which men are saved, it is His teaching. The way He lived, the miracles that He did wouldn't mean anything unless they were explained to us. His life can only be explained in the sense that He is God, that's why He was born of a virgin...that's why He had divine power. That's why He lived a sinless life, died a substitutionary death. That's why He was able to conquer death and rise a third day. He is God.
And that would be taking it a step in the right direction to understand not only the fascination and the amazing miraculous character of His life but to understand that the only explanation of that is that He is God is moving in the right direction, but in the end the only way that His life and His work can be applied to us is to understand His teaching because, after all, it is a matter of believing in the message that Jesus brought that saves. The world is full of people who are fascinated by His life. They might even concede that He was, in fact, God in some form. But in the end it's a question of believing what He said. His message is most critical.
Salvation from sin, escape from judgment and hell, eternal joy, heavenly glory doesn't come to people who are fascinated with Jesus Christ. It doesn't come to people who believe that He is God in human flesh. The devils believe and tremble. It isn't enough to feel sentimental about Jesus, it's not even enough to have respect for Him. Salvation comes to those who believe His message.
And so, as we work our way through the gospel of Luke from fascinating incident to fascinating incident, from powerful divine display to powerful divine display we find ourselves in the most critical of all portions when we come to sections which indicate His teaching. It is the words of Jesus that have life. And so we find ourselves in one of His greatest sermons, often called the Sermon on the Mount in Luke chapter 6. Let's open our Bibles again to Luke 6 and verse 20.
The initial message that Jesus preached was a message about sin. Obviously He hadn't died and He hasn't risen from the dead so He's not preaching the cross and resurrection the way the Apostles did after those events. He was really preaching the way John the Baptist preached. He was preaching the way the prophets of the Old Testament, the true prophets preached. He was preaching repentance. He was preaching that people were sinners, that they are desperate sinners, that they are incurable sinners, that they are powerless sinners, resourceless sinners and that that sin is catapulting them into eternal judgment. And their sin is defined by the law of God. God gave His law, the prophets articulated it. John the Baptist obviously referred to it, Jesus as well. And sinners are therefore measured against the perfect standard of God's law and they all come short of that and therefore having violated God's law fall under His just and eternal condemnation. That is Jesus' message.
Everybody is a sinner headed for divine judgment which will catapult them into eternal hell where there is outer darkness, fire never quenched, a worm that never dies, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in eternal conscious punishment. That was His message. And the remedy for that was to recognize one's sinful condition and helplessness and cry out to God for mercy and forgiveness, realizing that one could make no contribution to that. That was His message. That was the message of John, repent. That was the message of the true prophets of old.
Now this is not a popular message. This wouldn't be a popular message in a pagan culture. This wouldn't be a popular message in an outright agnostic or atheistic culture. And it certainly is not a popular message in a religious culture because religious people convince themselves that their religion makes them good enough.
I was riding the other day, the gentleman who was taking me to a meeting I had and I said to him, "Do you have any particular belief in God?"
He said, "Oh, I believe in God...absolutely I believe in God." And he said, "I've always believed in God." And he said, "I just figure that I'm just a good man, I'm just a good person and there's just no way God could refuse me heaven."
That's a pretty typical, if not always articulated view of a religious person. And that's exactly the way the Jewish people thought. The Judaism of the day of Jesus was literally built on a system by which through your external, superficial morality and your ceremonial religious activity you certainly had offered to God enough to purchase your salvation. And the message of Jesus was, you're all wrong...you're all wrong. And they killed Him for it because that's not a popular message, particularly with religious people.
Jesus came preaching repentance. He came defining sin in absolutely no uncertain terms. His message was so clear that nobody could miss it. And essentially what He was saying to the Jews in His preaching was...You are sinners separated from God, alienated from God, outside the Kingdom, outside the Covenant, outside the promise...even though all of that came to you by His revelation. They were deeply religious. They were widely moral on a superficial level and thus convinced they needed no repentance because they were pleasing to God.
As John the Baptist had before Him and had Isaiah and the other prophets before them, Jesus then came preaching repentance. In fact, His message was absolutely opposite what was politically correct and conventional wisdom. He called them essentially to overturn their entire self-assessment and to evaluate them the opposite way they were evaluating themselves. Recognize that they were not in the Kingdom of God, they did not know God, they were not His children, they were not headed for heaven but on the other hand, they were in a desperately wicked condition without God, without salvation, separated entirely from Him by sin. And they had covered their truth with their blanket of self-righteousness but the truth was under there, nonetheless. They had all demonstrated, as all people do, the inability to keep the law of God and to break it at one point is to be cursed by all of it. This was His message.
This is not the message they expected from the Messiah when He arrived. They expected the Messiah when He arrived to embrace the nation, to affirm their righteousness, their godliness, their kingdom state. The message that they thought the Messiah would give them was a message of salvation...you are the people, I'm here for the kingdom, the kingdom if yours, here we go, we're going to launch the kingdom and we're going to capture the whole world. That's essentially what they expected.
His message then was shocking. It was unacceptable. It was downright intolerable. And that's why they killed Him. And it's still the same message today only now we know how God can forgive the sinner through the death of Christ and His resurrection. That hadn't happened yet, obviously, when Jesus was preaching. His message was still repentance of confession of sin and crying out to God for mercy and grace to receive salvation, a salvation which is made possible because Jesus bore our sins on the cross and therefore satisfied the justice of God.
But Jesus preached sin. Not a popular subject then and not one now. He devastated the illusion by making it clear, along with the prophets before Him and the Apostles after Him and all faithful preachers throughout all of redemptive history, that it is not religious people who go to heaven, it is not superficially moral people who go to heaven, it is people who are overwhelmed with their sinfulness who go to heaven. It is people who are overwhelmed and oppressed by the reality of their condemnation and inability who reach out and cry out to God for forgiveness and are granted that forgiveness by mercy. Those are the people who go to heaven.
As I said last time, this teaching of Jesus shattered all of man's thinking, literally overturned all of it. And this passage is a classic illustration of that. Let me read verses 20 to 26 and then we'll comment on it.
"Turning His gaze on His disciples," now remember, disciples is a term for that mixed group of people who were the learners, the mathetes, that's the word in the Greek, the learners, the students of Jesus. Some were true disciples, some were false, some were in process one way or another. And He's going to give them the criteria by which they can evaluate the legitimacy and genuineness of their discipleship. So He says to this mixed group of followers, in this case not to be confused with the Apostles who were just identified in the previous passage. They were, of course, true disciples and now messengers, or Apostles. But to the rest of this large crowd of hundreds, if not thousands who followed Him. He says...here's what you need to know...
"Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you and ostracize you and cast insults at you and spurn your name as evil for the sake of the Son of Man. Be glad in that day and leap for joy for behold, your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets. But woe to you who are rich for you're receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well-fed now for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you for in the same way their fathers used to treat the false prophets."
There is in no uncertain terms a very clear contrast and it is backward to the way people thought. Poverty, hunger, sorrow, rejection...a blessing? Riches, satisfaction, happiness and popularity...a curse? And that is precisely the point. What Jesus says is directly opposed to the way they think. That's why they're so intolerant of it.
As we saw back in the synagogue in Nazareth in the fourth chapter, when Jesus went to the Jews in the synagogue and said, "I offer the gospel of forgiveness and salvation to those of you who realize you are poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed," they were so offended that He designated them as poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed, spiritually bankrupt, spiritually imprisoned by their sin and shut up to the judgment of God, spiritually blind to divine truth, spiritual oppressed by their iniquities...they were so angry at that description of them that they took Jesus, and these are His own friends and family and His own town, after He preached that one sermon, out to a cliff and tried to throw Him off. They hate that message, particularly religious people hate that message, self-righteous people.
And here He comes with it again. It's the poor, and the hungry, and the weeping, and the rejected that are blessed. And it's the rich, and the well-fed, and the happy, and the popular that are cursed. These are the paradoxes of blessing and cursing we started into two weeks ago.
Let's remind you the paradoxes of the blessed. The first one is the blessing of poverty, verse 20, "Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the Kingdom of God." It's not talking about material poverty, or economic poverty. There's no necessary virtue in that. It's talking about spiritual poverty. Blessed are those who understand their spiritual bankruptcy. Blessed are those who know they have no resources to buy their salvation. They know they can do nothing to please God. They have no ability to gain what is necessary to please God. Blessed are those who know they are spiritually destitute, bankrupt. They are the ones who receive the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is for the sinners who know they can't save themselves.
And then, secondly, came the blessing of hunger. "Blessed are you who hunger now for you shall be satisfied." It's not talking about people who don't have any food. He's talking about people who hunger for righteousness. Blessed are those who feel the emptiness. Blessed are those who know they aren't righteous. They feel it. They are starved for it. They understand their spiritual bankruptcy and they cry out to be fed righteousness from God, even though they are unworthy of it.
And then also we saw the blessing of sorrow, verse 21, "Blessed are you who weep now for you shall laugh." Those whose spiritual condition produces an overwhelming grief, this is brokenness and contriteness of heart which Isaiah spoke. Blessed are those who because they're so spiritually bankrupt, because they have such a profound hunger for righteousness which they know they don't have and can't earn are therefore in grief, those people will receive the riches of the Kingdom. Those people will be eternally satisfied and those people will have eternal joy.
And then the fourth, where we dropped off last time, comes in verse 22. "Blessed are you when men hate you and ostracize you and cast insults at you and spurn your name as evil for the sake of the Son of Man." This is the blessing of rejection to be added to the blessing of poverty, the blessing of hunger, the blessing of sorrow comes this upside-down blessing of rejection. I'm assuming that the people, even including the Apostles, would have assumed...Boy, here's the Messiah, we believe the Messiah, we're not His messengers, we're going to go out and preach this message, isn't it going to be wonderful? We're going to proclaim the message and people are going to hear about the gospel, they're going to hear about forgiveness and certainly their hearts are going to be open and the Messiah is going to establish His Kingdom and it's all going to be wonderful. And Jesus tells them at the very outset, get ready, you're going to be hated, you're going to be ostracized, you're going to be insulted, you're going to be spurned. That's how it's going to be, blessed are you.
The first three deal with how the sinner sees himself as poor, hungry and sorrowful. The fourth one is how the world sees the sinner. They hate him. They alienate him. They ostracize him because he has a true understanding of his sinfulness and a true understanding of his need for grace from God. Four verbs are used there in verse 22...hate, ostracize, cast insults, and spurn, just summing up the vitriol, the hostility that's going to come from a sinful world.
You're going to be hated. You're going to be excluded. You're going to be slandered. You're going to be rejected. This is a sort of sequence of evil attitudes directed at believers. They're going to spurn your name. What does that mean? John, and Bill, and Saran, and so...? No, your name, Christian...Christian as evil because of the Son of Man. Jesus said, "Because of Me they're going to hate you because this is My message, this is My gospel, this is My salvation, this is really My call to repentance."
I'm not preaching My own call to sinners, I'm just echoing the call of Christ, right? I'm just echoing the Word of God. And so here Jesus has just called His disciples together, those that are going to be Apostles. He's pulled the Twelve out of a larger group of disciples, identified the Twelve. Very soon after that, of course, He come down the mountain, He starts into this sermon called the Sermon on the Mount and right off the bat He says, "I want you to get ready, guys, because if you're going to be identified with Me it's going to be persecution, hostility. They're going to hate the name that you bear because they hate Me."
Turn to Matthew chapter 10, it's worth taking a deeper look at this issue from Matthew's account. In Matthew chapter 10 we have the occasion where Jesus gave power to His Apostles, and we'll come to that in Luke 9, this is a parallel passage to Luke 9. But I want you to notice what Jesus says to them when He gives them instruction...go down to verse 16. You can...they've been given, obviously, the title of Apostle, they have been given the ability to heal the sick, they've been given the ability to cast out the demons so they have power over the physical world and the spiritual world. They might sense that everything is going to fall into place, it's all going to be great. And so He tells them in verse 16, "I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves." You're going to go out there and they're going to try to eat you up. Verse 17, He takes it further, "Beware of men, you're going to have to be wily, you're going to have to be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves, be aware of men because they will deliver you up to the courts and they will scourge you in the synagogues." This happened to the Apostle Paul five times, he received 39 lashes from the Jews. They literally whipped him in the synagogue. Talk about church discipline. They whipped him with 39 lashes...whipping and tearing his flesh because of what they viewed as heresy, because he was a Christian.
And Jesus is telling the Twelve, they're going to take you to court over this. And they're also going to lash you in the synagogues. "They're going to bring you, in verse 18, before governors and kings for My sake as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. And when they deliver you up, don't become anxious about how or what you will speak, it will be given you in that hour what you are to speak, for it is not you who speak but it is the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you." And that would still be true, we don't get direct revelation now but when you get in that situation if it happens today, you just speak what the Spirit has spoken in Scripture, you just speak the truth of God's Word.
"Brother...verse 21...will deliver up brother to death. A father will deliver his child to death. Children will rise up against parents, cause them to be put to death," literally killing is going to happen in the family over this identification with Jesus Christ. Verse 22, "You will be hated by all on account of My name." And there is the issue again, that identification with Jesus Christ is so repulsive particularly to religious sinners that you're going to suffer.
Down in verse 24 He says something I think is very important, "A disciple is not above his teacher, a slave is not above his master." Point being, if I'm your master and they mistreat me and I'm your teacher and they mistreat me, don't expect to get any different treatment. That's how it's going to be. They're going to persecute you the way they persecuted Me.
This is still going on even today. Christians are being persecuted today. I think more are dying, according to the statistics I have today than any time in history, mostly at the hands of radical Muslims. I want you to turn to John chapter 9 because I think we need to understand what the Lord is saying to these Apostles. They might have thought, you know, when they were identified as being the Twelve Apostles, Jesus pulls them out, they might have been sort of congratulating each other on this wonderful honor and then they're immediately hearing about what it's going to cost them, because the message is so contrary to the wicked hearts of people.
In John 9 Jesus healed a blind man and people came to the blind man's parents, you remember, he was born blind so he had congenital blindness, or some blindness that occurred at his birth.&