We're going to be in verses 20 to 23 this morning, Luke chapter
6, verses 2023. We're going to end up reading
this passage together this morning as a church.
It's been 13 days that I was travelling around Egypt and
Lebanon, and one of the joys was to be able to bring brothers and
sisters in the Middle East. Greetings from their brothers
and sisters here. And I would get up every time
that 9 or 10 times I got to speak and I said, hey, you got
brothers and sisters in Ontario, Canada who love you, who are
cheering you on and who bring greetings.
And so they wanted me to bring back greetings to you.
So it's also my joy today to bring greetings to you from your
brothers and sisters amongst Sudanese refugees, amongst the
Egyptian people, amongst the Druze and the Kurds, in the
Maronites in Lebanon. They want to send their
greetings to you. Do you know there are people
across the world right now who are praying for us this morning
here and for church? Isn't that a neat thing to think
about? Let's read these words together
from Jesus starting at verse 20. Why don't we stand together to
read God's Word together? Read with me.
They're on the screen. If you don't have your Bible
open, you can read along there. Then looking at his disciples,
he said, Blessed are you who are poor because the Kingdom of God
is yours. Blessed are you who are hungry
now because you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now
because you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate
you, when they exclude you, insult you, and slander your
name as evil because of the Son of Man.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy.
Take note, your reward is great in heaven, for this is the way
their ancestors used to treat the prophets.
May God bless the reading of His word.
You can have a seat. If someone came up to you, they
asked you the question, do you want to live a blessed life?
How would you answer that question?
Yes, I would assume most of us in this room or those who are
watching online or if you hear this later, you'd say, yeah, I
want to live a blessed life, sign me up.
But what if they asked you that question and then they wrote,
read those words of Jesus to you?
Would your answer still be yes? I mean, the words that Jesus
speaks here, how he defines blessing, that's not how most of
us define blessing, right? Our definition of blessing is
good job, stable, comfortable, housing, at least a roof over my
head, good friends, peaceful family life.
Our definition of blessing tends to involve words like safety,
stability, comfort, happiness, abundance, success, prosperity.
When we define blessing, when someone come comes up to us and
says would you like to have a blessed life?
Isn't that what our mind goes to?
I mean, those are the type of blessings.
If we're honest, those are the type of blessings that we tend
to count on a day like Thanksgiving.
And yet here Jesus gives us a radically different definition
of what it means to be blessed. Last week, Pastor Kirk started
off our series in this section of Luke chapter 6 that we've
called different. It's a section of teaching
that's referred to as the Sermon on the Plane.
It's kind of a counterpart to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount.
And what we're going to see over and over and over and over again
as we walk through this over the next number of weeks is that
Jesus is offering to us a very different way of living and
being in the world than anybody else is offering.
We're going to see that if we're really going to be serious about
following Jesus, it's going to require a change of thinking.
It's going to require changes in our priorities.
It's going to require a way of seeing the world differently.
It's going to require changing in the ways in which we interact
with others. It's going to require changing a
whole bunch of definitions that we have absorbed over time.
And, and I'll be honest, I've been super excited about getting
to this series. I I couldn't wait to get to
October because I just think that there is no better time in
my lifetime to do a series like this than right now.
Because what I see you when I engage with people, when I
observe our culture, is that there is very little that people
seem to be able to agree on these days, except for one
thing. Everyone seems to agree that
what we're doing isn't working, that we need something
different. And I believe with all of my
being at the core of my being, that the teaching of Jesus in
this section of Scripture, that it is the different way of
living that we need. Yeah, as we go through this,
you're going to find it's alien, it's foreign.
It sounds so counterintuitive at times.
We're going to read through stuff.
In fact, maybe it's this morning where you're going to encounter
stuff where you're like, that is the last thing on earth that I
want, and yet it's the exact thing on this earth that you
need. See, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe
we have finally come to a point where we've tried everything and
realized that nothing we're going to try on our own is going
to work. Maybe that's where you're at
this morning. I love this quote from GK
Chesterton. He says, you know, the Christian
ideal hasn't been tried and found wanting.
It's been found difficult and never tried.
Maybe we're at the point where we're actually ready to do the
hard work of following Jesus, and that would begin to change
everything. And I think part of the reason
that so many of us, including so many people who would claim to
be following Jesus, feel a deep dissatisfaction in their souls
and in this world is because the blessing that we're longing for,
that we're living for, is not the deepest, truest blessing
that we have misunderstood what it really means to be blessed
and where blessing really comes from.
So my question to you this morning is just this.
It's really simple. What if we let Jesus redefine
for us today what it means to really be blessed?
Well, what if we did that? What?
What if we actually took Jesus at his word in this passage of
Scripture? Look at what he says.
Luke 620. He starts off by telling us that
it's the poor who are blessed. Blessed are you who are poor
because the Kingdom of God is yours.
It's the poor who are blessed. That is so upside down to what
everyone and everything in this world has to tell us about what
blessing is about. In this world we define blessing
by wealth. We define blessing by
prosperity, poverty. Being poor is seen as a curse
and Jesus flips this whole thing around.
He says actually poverty doesn't disqualify you from blessing.
In fact, being poor is what positions you to receive the
greatest blessing. Blessed are you who are poor.
Here's what I need you to see this morning.
The Kingdom of God belongs to those and only to those who
understand how deep their need really is.
I told you I I've been gone the last two weeks in Egypt and I
literally got back in yesterday morning, flew overnight, took a
red eye. And I've spent a lot of time
with people who the world has taken no notice of, spent a lot
of time in places of tremendous poverty.
And over and over and over again, I encountered people who
considered themselves to be blessed.
I went to house visits and I used the the word house
generously because many of us in this room, we would struggle to
believe that the places they were living could be considered
a house. And in place after place,
encounter after encounter, I found people who the world
considers poor, who know what it is to truly be rich.
I have people who I found. I encountered people who humbled
me with their joy in the midst of the most difficult of
circumstances. And this is the pattern that you
can see if you're a student of history, if you're a student of
the church, that throughout history and right now in the
world, in this moment, it's the poor who are most likely to
trust in and receive Jesus and receive the greatest blessing
that could ever be received. And it's not just happening over
there. Let me just bring this a little
closer to home. I can show you data right now
that says God is doing a new thing in Canada and in the West,
and he's doing it in the people that most of us in this room
would have assumed we're the least likely people that God
would do something in. He's doing it in Gen.
Z, He's doing it in Gen. Alpha.
And in particular, he's doing it in men, in Gen.
Z, in Gen. Alpha.
And I've been thinking of why is it?
Why are we seeing at a greater rate, especially in places like
England? We're now 22% of young men are
attending church regularly. That's gone from 4% to 22% in
about 9 years. Why?
Because we have a generation of men who've grown up poor.
Poor in male role models, poor in friendships, poor in
understanding what love and intimacy look like in a world
that they have grown up in that's saturated with online
porn. Got a group of men who've grown
up being told to expect less, that they will have less than
the generations that came before them.
We've got a group of young men who have grown up and the most
common word that they've had attached to their masculinity is
toxic. They have known poverty and you
can look and see that they're searching for somebody who would
be a savior, who would show them a better way.
And so some of them have turned to the Andrew Tate's and the
Jordan Peterson's of this world. But a lot of them are realizing
that those so-called saviors don't actually have what
satisfies. Many of them are understanding
that what they deeply need is a is a better mentor, a better
father, a better friend, a better king.
We have a generation of young men who have grown up poor, but
because they've grown up poor, man, they're going to be rich.
Because so many of them are understanding that what they
need most deeply is Jesus and him crucified.
They need to know the God who became poor so that through him
they could inherit all things, the one who died so that they
could live. Going to look more at this next
week, so I'm not going to dwell on this too much, but it is so
hard if you consider yourself rich.
And many of us in this room wouldn't consider ourselves
rich, but we would live as if we're rich.
It is so hard if you feel like you have so much to lose, to
follow a Jesus who calls you to give up everything.
We were like kids. You ever seen a kid who somebody
gives them one of those plastic rings and they think they've got
something real, they think they've got something of value.
So if you offered them a piece of paper that had $100 or $200
or $1000 on it, they think the papers not worth anything.
This ring is worth everything. And we've confused what really
matters for the baubles and trinkets that have no value.
The story in Scripture of a rich young ruler who comes to Jesus.
And he asked him this question, what must I do to be saved?
What must I do to have eternal life?
And Jesus ultimately tells me, he says this, sell everything
and give it to the poor. And he says at the end we see
that he walked away sad because he just felt like Jesus was
asking too much from him. And yet all he had at the end of
the day was nothing. Nothing of any significance,
nothing of any value. And all Jesus was offering him
was everything, but he couldn't see it.
We need to be poor. We need to be poor in spirit to
come to a point where we say, Jesus, everything I have is
yours, because without you, nothing really matters.
And yet if I have Jesus, if I'm a citizen of the Kingdom, if I'm
a citizen of heaven, then no matter what I've given, no
matter what I've sacrificed, it's all worth it because I have
everything. Like I said, I got to stand
numerous times over the past number of weeks in front of
Kurdish refugees, Sudanese refugees, Ethiopian refugees,
and I got to look them in the eyes and tell them this truth
because you know, Jesus, although you feel like you've
got nothing right now, one day you will rule and reign over all
things. You have far more than my
neighbors in Canada who think they have all things, but they
have nothing. It's the poor who are blessed
because they understand the reality that they have nothing
to lose. Then he says this.
It's the hungry who are blessed, he says.
Blessed are you who are hungry now because you'll be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now because you will laugh again.
What's the world's definition of blessing?
Isn't it full stomachs? Isn't it endless, endless
entertainment? Constant happiness?
That's blessing, right? And yet Jesus says that's not
blessing. Blessing is not life that looks
like a never ending cruise. Blessing is not living in a
world where there is endless distraction.
Jesus says no. You want to know what it's like
to be brought blessed. It's the person who has hunger
and sorrow. Hunger and sorrow.
They don't mean that you've missed out on God's blessing.
They point to the fact that you have a, a desire in you, a need
in you, deeper satisfaction and joy that you are looking for the
only God can provide. And so many of us, and I include
myself in this, we just go to the buffet of the world that we
live in and we're looking for the next purchase or the next
thing that we'll watch or the next, whatever that we could
find joy in that would satiate this desire that never seems to
be fulfilled. And it doesn't get fulfilled no
matter how many things we buy, no matter how many possessions
we get, no matter how many wonderful meals we have, because
we have a hunger and thirst and longing that has been placed in
us by the Creator of the universe that wasn't meant to be
filled by those things, but by him.
And Jesus is saying, here's the good thing about hunger.
It lets you know there's something that you need that you
aren't getting. I know that some of you are here
today. You've walked in because that's
where you're at. You're just like, I'm just
hungry. I've been chasing after stuff.
I feel like I've got so much and yet my soul is so dry.
And if the world has you hungry right now, if it feels like
nothing in this world will satisfy, if there's no bobbles
and distractions in in this world anymore that are bringing
you joy, then Jesus is saying, great, you're finally getting it
and you're blessed because you're waking up to the fact
that you're not going to find the thing that's missing out
there. You know, I love weddings, I
really do. I love doing weddings.
I love sitting down with couples who are fresh in love and
everything is joy. They're a blessing to do.
But I've learned over time that funerals are where the real
impact takes place. See, at weddings people are
overcome with what they have, but in the grief of funerals
were overcome with what we long for and what we need.
I think one request that every Jesus follower should put in
their will is this, that the gospel will be preached at my
wedding. I mean, there's no better time
to let people know that this world is at the end of the day
going to end for all of us. But there's better available to
everyone. It's Jesus promises that what
you're missing, He came to fill. We could go about 8-8 days, I
guess. I was sitting in the home of a
young woman in Egypt. She and her family had almost
nothing. And this is one of those homes
where I was time. Like you'd be generous to call
it a home. It was musty.
It was dank. It was basically a storage room
under the stairwell. There's no windows, 4 beds, a
stove. And we came and we delivered
some food. We opened up the word of God,
walked through a passage. And then I said, hey, what can
I, what can I pray for, for you and your family?
And this young woman by the name of Maria looks at me with a
smile on her face and she says, pray that we would know and
depend on Jesus even more. She had nothing.
She had a sister who was an invalid in the bed.
She lived with her sister, her brother who her two parents and
her in that one dank little room.
She said, pray that in this place the name of Jesus would be
known. I said, you like, Are you sure
you don't want me to pray for anything else?
She said, if I have Jesus, I have all that I need.
Those were her words. And I thought, could I say that?
Is that how I would respond in that moment?
If your soul is hungry this morning, if your heart is heavy,
you're not going to find it in anything out there, but you will
find it in Jesus Christ. He's the only place where you're
going to find joy and satisfaction that truly
satisfies. Listen.
Scripture tells us the ultimate satisfaction comes when we're
with Him forever. Listen to Revelation 1969.
This is the picture of what waits for everyone who has come
to understand that in Christ we can be satisfied, he said.
Then I heard something like the voice of a vast multitude that
like the sound of cascading waters, like the rumbling of
loud Thunder, saying Hallelujah because of our Lord God as we've
just sang this morning, the almighty rains.
Let's be glad, rejoice and give him glory because the marriage
of the lamb has come and the bride has prepared herself.
This is the wedding that matters.
This is the wedding we want to be a part of.
Says she was given fine linen to wear bright and pure from the
for the fine linen represents the righteous acts of the
Saints. And then he said to me, right,
Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage feast of
the lamb because that that marriage feast, you'll never be
hungry again. What type of hunger or grief are
you caring right now that God wants to meet with his future
joy? What do you need to just give up
to Him and recognize that in Christ you have more than you'll
ever need. It's the poor who are blessed,
it's the hungry who are blessed, and it's the rejected who are
blessed. He says it's those who suffer
rejection for Christ's sake that are blessed.
Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you, when
they insult you, when they slander your name as evil
because of the Son of Man. Here's what you do in that day,
he says. You rejoice in that day.
You leap for joy. Take note, your reward is great
in heaven. I think for many of us, there is
nothing that we're more scared of than rejection.
There's nothing that feels less like blessing than being
rejected. And yet Jesus says rejection for
following him. That's a sign of true blessing.
One of the families that we did a home visit with in Egypt, I'm
going to put a picture up here and throw that up on the screen.
It'll give you a sense of what so many of the streets of Cairo
are like. There are 30 million people in
the greater Cairo area. At least.
They actually don't know how many because because it's taken
in refugees from all over the world.
They're crammed into every nook and cranny.
And we went and we met with one of these families.
And as we were meeting with them and we were asking them what we
could pray for, they said, well, tonight we're going to be kicked
out of our apartment. In fact, two of our kids are out
right now walking the streets trying to see if they could find
us some place to stay. For the 8 of them, they weren't
being kicked out because they didn't have money for rent.
They were being kicked out because their landlord was a
Muslim who had found out that they had become Christians.
Can I just say this to you, Church?
Be careful tossing the word persecution around.
So many of us have no idea the cost that others have paid to
follow Jesus, and we're unwilling to even allow somebody
to make fun of us. We're too worried to share the
gospel because they might not like us anymore.
You got to expect that there are people who aren't going who
aren't going to like you. If you decide to follow Jesus.
You need to expect that and a lot of Christians in the West,
we need to read these verses carefully because even when we
encounter this, you know what I see in so many of us?
I see a lot of victimhood when people insult us and slander us.
See a lot of self pity. I see a lot of people getting
militant about their rights being taken away from them.
What I don't see a lot of is what Jesus calls us to, to
rejoice and leap for joy because we have been counted worthy of
being rejected for the sake of Jesus.
He says rejoice because great is your reward.
Well, we got to climb up into the Great Pyramid on our tourism
day before we flew out. And let me just tell you, if you
go to Egypt, don't. It's it's the hottest,
sweatiest, most crowded little hallway thing that you climb up
into. And then we get out and we've
crawled through this entryway and you stand up into the place
where the Pharaoh was laid to rest, and all there is is a bit
of broken stone. The guy behind me, one of the
pastors I was with, as soon as he popped his head up, he said,
this is it. I say that because there's a lot
of things that are going to cause you suffering in life.
There's a lot of things that are difficult.
There's a lot of things that you'll do that are hard.
A lot of them aren't going to be worth it in the end.
But suffering for Jesus will never be wasted.
Great is your reward. What risks of rejection might
God be calling you to enter into and embrace for His name?
Who is God calling you to have a conversation with where it's
risky? What stand is Jesus calling you
to take for Him that might cost you if you get the opportunity
to do it? Stand up, because great is your
reward. See, Thanksgiving invites us
into the space where we count our blessings.
But what if this year we didn't just count our comfortable
blessings, we counted the costly ones too.
Because the blessing that Jesus offers, the blessings that he's
talking about here, they aren't just different, they're better.
Because his blessings are the blessings.
These blessings that he's talking about, they're the
blessings that never end. They're the blessings that truly
satisfy. They're the blessings that
always pay off, even when they're hard and even when
they're suffering. So, so this Thanksgiving, let's
let, let's do this. Let's move from counting our
treasures to treasuring the Kingdom.
Let's move from avoiding pain at all costs to trusting God even
in our suffering. Let's move from living for the
approval of others to finding joy and what it means to belong
to Jesus Christ. Maybe you're here today and
you're in that spot. You've been listening to this
and you're like, hey, that's I'm coming in feeling poor or
hungry, weeping with grief. Maybe today you have come here
because you've realized that chasing the world's definition
of blessing has left you feeling empty.
I just want to say Jesus is inviting you into something
better. The the blessing that he's
invited you to is not just comfort with no end.
It's life with no end. It's forgiveness for your sins.
It's a place in His family. It's a future where you'll never
hunger again. It's a future where you'll never
cry again, where rejection leads to eternal reward.
It's possible because Jesus became poor for you and for me.
He went to the cross, taking my sin and your sin and our shame
so that we could receive the riches that He deserves.
And if you would turn to him in faith today, if you would trust
that he is the one who would satisfy your heart and your
soul, if you would say Jesus, you're my treasure, you're my
Lord, you're my savior, then today all of the riches and
blessings belong to you in heaven through Christ Jesus.
When we're poor, when we're hungry, when we're weeping,
we're rejected. Let's rejoice and leap for joy.
I want to finish with two more stories, two stories of how I
saw this work out in people's lives.
The 1st is this. We sat down with a bunch of
chaplains and in Egypt, if you're in jail and you're
wearing red, it means that you have been sentenced to death.
One of the chaplains talked about working with a woman who
was dressed in a red dress, sharing the truth that although
she was headed towards death, life was available to her
through Jesus. And ultimately having her come
to a point where she placed her faith in Christ.
And over the couple years that she stayed in prison, God began
to transform her in radical ways.
She became a blessing to the entire prison.
And on the day when she was being led to her execution, she
looked at those who are weeping and she said don't cry for me,
don't cry for me because Jesus died for me.
Where I'm going, I'm going to live.
When I was in Lebanon, I got to stand up and deliver a message
to a group of prisoners, ex prisoners and their family
members. And one of the men there was a
man who had been falsely imprisoned for 25 years, 25
years he'd spent in prison for a crime that he didn't commit.
You'd think that a man would be bitter, but he had the biggest
smile on his face. And he had the biggest smile on
his face because he said if God had not brought me to a place
where he had stripped me from everything and brought me to
this prison, I would have never heard the gospel.
He took me to prison so he could set me free.
That's what it looks like to understand the true blessings
that Jesus is talking about. To take our eyes off of the
comforts of this world and put it on to the blessings that God
offers to any who would follow him.
Let me pray for us, Father, I'm I am so thankful that you became
poor so that we could become rich through Jesus Christ Jesus.
So easy for us in a place of abundance and prosperity to lose
track of what true blessing looks like.
Even as your followers, even as those who should know better.
It's so easy for us to come to a Thanksgiving like this and be
pitying ourselves, be angry with you because the things of this
world that we long for, we haven't necessarily been given,
got to help us to have a clearer vision of what it truly means to
be blessed in Christ Jesus. Help us to understand how truly
blessed we are. And I pray for anyone who's here
today who has a hunger and a thirst, who feels a deep need
and feels their poverty, that they would come to place their
faith in the one who truly satisfies God.
Give us boldness, give us the strength, be willing to reject
the approval of this world so that we could live for your
praise alone. And pray this in Jesus name,
Amen.