Tables and turn to the Gospel of Luke chapter 6, Luke chapter 6
and it's page 915. If you're using one of the
Bibles in the seat around you just as you're opening to that.
I want to welcome a few new members to our church family.
So would you join me in welcoming Grace Van Weingarten,
Bob Nugent, and Pearl Dale to our church family today?
If you consider forward to be your church home and you're not
yet a member, I want to encourage you to take that step.
It's a great way to covenant with each other to live together
as a family on the mission that God has called us to.
Luke chapter 6. I want to begin reading at verse
24 today. But woe to you who are rich, for
you have received your comfort. Woe to you who are now full, for
you will be hungry. Woe to you who are now laughing,
for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all people speak
well of you, For this is the way their ancestors used to treat
the false prophets. So let me remind you where we
are in Luke chapter 6. A couple of weeks ago we started
into this series called Different.
Jesus had been up on a mountain praying with some of his
disciples. He came down into a level area.
This large group of people are gathered together in this area
to hear from Jesus, to hear his teachings.
And last week Jesus talked about how even in the most difficult
circumstances of life, you can be blessed.
You can experience the blessed life.
This week, Jesus takes the exact same physical circumstances that
he described last week, and he flips it on its head and he's
looking at it from an entirely different perspective than what
he did last week. And this week he uses a word.
Whoa now, most of us don't ever use the word woe in our everyday
language unless somebody does something shocking or annoying
and you're going woah, hold on a second there, right?
That's not what Jesus meant when he uses the word woe in this
passage. Woes in the Bible were generally
an exclamation of God's judgment.
You should consider a woe to be a warning sign.
It's like Jesus is saying, if you do this, this is what's
going to happen, or maybe a better way of looking at it
because you do this, this is what is going to happen.
This is the consequence that is going to come.
Now, if we're honest with ourselves, most of us don't
really respond well to warnings. Most of us ignore warning signs
that come to us in life. Want to put a picture up on the
screen? It's a picture from the Dolomite
Mountain Range in northeastern Italy.
It's a beautiful area and beautiful pictures of mountains
from that area. This past July, there were a
series of warnings that were posted throughout this mountain
range and also into some of the Alps.
A series of rock fells, rock falls had taken place throughout
the area. And so hiking paths were shut
down and people were told, hey, you can't go into these areas.
So you see a sign there, it says close, It says it in multiple
languages to tell people. And the signs were everywhere
all over this mountain range. Well, on July the 19th, there
were two Belgian hikers who were out hiking and they just walked
right on past all of the warning signs that were on all the
trails in this mountain range. And believe it or not,
shockingly, they found themselves trapped by rockfall
and a rescue helicopter had to be sent in to rescue those two
hikers out that day. Within just two weeks, a British
hiker was in almost the exact same area.
And he thought to himself, these warning signs don't know what
they're talking about. I know what I'm doing.
I'm going to go for a hike in these trails.
And shockingly, the British hiker found himself in the exact
same spot that the Belgian hikers had found themselves.
Rockfall happened. He was trapped.
They had to send in helicopters to rescue him and pull him out.
They actually charged, I don't know why they charged the
British guy but not the Belgian guys, but they charged the
British guy $16,500 US to cover the cost of the rescue
operation. Now, most of us, we think, well,
that's good. He was dumb for going and
ignoring all the warning signs that were in front of him.
But but the reality is we all don't pay attention to warning
signs. There's something inside of us
that says I don't need to pay attention to a warning sign.
If a police officer ever pulled you over and gave you a warning
for speeding, how much longer is it before you're speeding again?
Right? We don't all listen to warnings
that come at us. There's just something inside of
us that says when you warn me about something, you can't tell
me what to do. I know better than you.
I'm willing to take the risk. It's fine.
Don't worry about it. And I want to say that as we
come to this passage, whatever you do, don't treat Jesus the
same way that you would other people.
You and I, we need to pay far more attention to the warnings
of Jesus then we do the warnings that we're going to receive from
someone else. Because if Jesus is really the
Son of God, if he's really the Messiah that's been promised
from the Old Testament that we studied and talked about, if
he's really the one who has all power, then his warnings
certainly take on a different significance than the warnings
that we'll get anywhere else in life.
Jesus knows what he's talking about.
In fact, when he gives a warning, it's it's not a
prediction. It's a guarantee of something
that's going to happen. So do yourself and the people
around you a favor and pay attention to the warnings that
Jesus wants to give. What Jesus is warning you today
is this. Chasing the wrong things in life
will lead to disappointment or even disaster.
Now I recognize that in the climate and the culture that we
live in, as soon as I say Jesus is giving you a warning, don't
do this. There's some of us who go, but I
thought Jesus was all about love and compassion.
That feels a lot like fear to me and it and I don't want to like
ever respond or make any decisions based out of fear and
someone scaring me into something.
I I just want love and compassion to come my way.
And I can I just say almost all of us in this room, we are here
today because at some point in time somebody scared us into
something. Let me give you an example.
At some point in time when you were a kid, somebody said to
you, don't cross the street without looking both ways.
Why? Because you're going to get
smoked by a car if you do, right?
They're giving you a warning that tells you not to do
something. Now why do they give you that
warning? They give you that warning
because they love you. They care about you.
And that's what Jesus is doing here.
When Jesus gives us warnings, it's not just because he's out
to be a fear monger to scare you.
He's giving you and I warnings because He does love us and He
does care for us and He does want what's best for us.
And the very first warning that Jesus gives is found in verse 24
and it's this money will not bring you lasting comfort.
The very first woe that Jesus gives us to those who are rich
now a bunch of us, as soon as I say, OK, Jesus is giving a
warning to the rich, you immediately check out and go,
well that's not me so I don't have to worry about this.
I'm good. Did you know that if you have a
household income of $50,000 a year, your income is 3 1/2 times
the global median income for a house and you are in the richest
18% of the population in the world?
As Scotiabank likes to tell you, you're richer than you think.
Now, I get that rich is a relative term.
I understand that cost of living here and cost of groceries and
mortgages and all those things is one thing.
So for some context, the people here in Jesus Day who are
considered the rich were usually people who were land owners,
especially people who owned more than one property.
They would have been classified in the rich.
Business leaders, business owners would have been
classified as being rich. There was an elite to society in
that day. Government officials, certain
religious officials, people who were well known popular people,
they would have been considered rich in society.
And there were other individuals along the way who had who had
substantial personal wealth. All right, we OK, We're going to
find out if we're OK. All right.
Other individuals who had substantial personal wealth
would have also been considered rich.
I want to be clear. Jesus is never against people
having money. If you look at the end of the
life of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is a wealthy man who
uses his tomb to bury Jesus in. Even Luke, who writes this
gospel is a physician. Luke the physician would have
had money, and he writes this gospel to a guy named
Theophilus, who is recognized as a Roman official, and he would
have had money as well. So Jesus isn't speaking out
against having money. Having money can be great.
There are all kinds of benefits to having money.
You can afford a house that other people can't afford you.
You can. You can pretty much go anywhere
you want to on vacation that other people can't go.
You can go and buy clothes just for fun.
You can eat out at the nicest restaurant you want to eat out
at just because you need a break from cooking dinner today.
You can give money to ministries and people in need at a far
higher rate than other people. Can I?
I had a friend who once described his career this way.
He said, Kirk, I am a professional philanthropist.
So what do you mean by that? He said God's given me a unique
ability to make a lot of money. And that also means God's given
me a unique calling to give a lot of money away.
And so my calling in life, my career, is to be a professional
philanthropist. But the problem is not having
money. The problem is when money has
you. That's what Jesus is warning us
about, that when you and I trust money to be the place where we
go to bring comfort and refreshment to our lives,
there's a warning sign there. You will only get as much as
money can buy you for as long as money can buy it.
And what money can buy is never going to truly last.
Now, in my experience, money is one of those topics that in
North America we don't like to talk about.
Certainly in church we don't like to talk about it.
And also in my experience, most of us live from the sense of I
need to figure out how to get more money so I can live.
But we never really ask ourselves the question, would
Jesus say that I am rich? Would Jesus, what would Jesus be
warning me about in my own heart right now related to money?
We, we rarely ask ourselves that question.
Whether you're a new Christian or you've been a Christian for a
long time, money seems to be a blind spot in our lives.
And a lot of times we convince ourselves we're fine when it
comes to honour and God with our finances.
So I want to give you some kind of diagnostic questions.
I want you to think about these questions to maybe do a little
bit of a heart check of maybe is this warning from Jesus applying
to you. You might be sitting here today
and maybe you're not rich yet, but you believe you are
convincing your heart of hearts that I will be happy and
satisfied in life as long as I can make this much money.
And so everything in your life is focused on how do I build my
career to that next level? How do I get more money into my
bank account? You're obsessed almost with the
point of how do I get more money.
If you are in that place where you are almost obsessed with I
don't have enough, how do I always get more money has a hold
on you. If you can pay for that dream
vacation or that car that you've always wanted or the house that
you've always dreamed of or maybe the cottage that you've
always wanted, but you don't have enough money to truly be
generous to help those who are poor to give money to God and
His ministry. Money has a hold on you.
Honestly, I I've met a lot of people who do have financial
means By God's standards, you are rich and you, you.
When I talk to them about money, quite often they'll say to me,
Kirk, I give a percentage of my income to help people.
I give a percentage of my income to the church.
I give my percentage of my income to ministries.
I want to make sure that the organizations I support, the
church that I'm a part of, that they've got enough money to
reach the budget. So I give enough money to make
sure that they reach the budget. And I want to say if you're
using an organization's budget or a here's a percentage of my
income that I'm going to give, there is a chance that money has
a hold on you. Why?
Because you're using the church's budget as a reason to
not give everything you're capable of giving.
The mission needs to drive your giving.
Your generosity needs to drive your giving far more than did we
reach a budget. If Jesus wanted you to sell
everything that you own in order to follow him, would you?
You might go, Well, Jesus would never ask me to do that, but he
did ask someone to do that in a rich young ruler.
But let's say he doesn't ask you to do that.
Let's say Jesus wanted to live on, wanted you just to live on
whatever you need to live on. So he's going to give you enough
money for you to live on whatever you need.
But then he wanted you to give away the rest, Would you?
If if Jesus wanted you to give up some of your investment
portfolio or your vacation for next year, or spend a little
less on that renovation so you can give a lot more to God's
mission in the world, would you? And if not, you have to ask
yourself, does money have a hold on you?
And Jesus is going to return to this theme again and again as we
walk through Luke. So I don't want to pile on too
much on money, but money is one of those places we don't like
other people having an opinion on.
We don't like it when people talk about that.
But I want you to know Jesus is not giving you his opinion here.
He's giving you a warning of the consequences and the limitations
of putting your hopes and what money can give you.
Because when money has your heart, it is limiting your
ability to discover and walk in and experience the depths of the
comfort and the peace and the rest that can only come from
Jesus. Money is one of those ways that
we pursue life on our own terms. And Jesus also warns us that
living for yourself is going to ultimately be devastating.
In verse 25, when he talks about those who are full and those who
are laughing, what he's doing is he's, he's warning people about
a self satisfied and self indulgent lifestyle.
He he's calling out people who do what they want, when they
want, how they want. And he's warning people, this is
going to end badly. But you, you might sit there and
go, man, my life is good, my life is full.
I got so many blessings. It's all good, he's saying, but
if your hope is in that and how good your life is, there is
coming a day when your life is just going to end up hungry.
You might feel like I, I've built all this stuff in my life,
I've been able to achieve all these things.
I've built this on my own terms. And Jesus is warning us, if
that's the core direction of your life, that you're just
going to do things on your own terms, you will be devastated by
the end result. And while not all of us are
rich, all of us have lived in a culture where the predominant
philosophy of life in Canada has been what's called secular
humanism. Here's how a website
calledsecularhumanism.org defines humanism.
Secular humanism incorporates the Enlightenment principle of
individualism, increasingly empowering each of us to set the
terms of his or her own life. We live in a culture that has
said, you go ahead and set the terms of your own life.
You decide what you need to make yourself happy, comfortable,
find peace, find joy, find rest. You set those terms for
yourself. And even though most of us in
this room would say I'm not a secular humanist, many of us
live like we are. We set the terms of our own
lives. We've become consumers in all of
life. Everyday you're bombarded with
commercials and content designed to say to you, here's what you
need, let me give you what you need, let me give you what you
want. And we've bought into that
message. We're soon, we start to think
that everybody needs to give me what I want, when I want, how I
want it. And it's become so normalized.
Consumerism has become so normalized that we carry it into
everything in our lives and we don't even realize it.
We don't even pay attention to it.
I, I hear people say all the time, Hey, Kirk, I, I want
friendships. I want deep friendships with
other people, but they have to be able to meet on this day of
the week at this time of the day and they need to like this kind
of coffee and, and, and I don't want to get too deep because
that's way too time consuming if they need my help with
something. But I really want deep
friendships. No, you don't.
You don't. You just want some companionship
when it suits you. That's living life on your own
terms in marriages. I hear people in marriages will
live with the mindset of, hey, if I'm not getting what I want
from my spouse, if if my spouse doesn't like the fact that I
work too much or I have too much to drink, or I spend too much
money, my spouse doesn't like the fact that I like to look at
porn all the time. It really doesn't matter because
it's what makes me happy. I'll do what I want to do.
We do it with our sexuality. I'll do whatever I want to do
because that's what's going to fulfill me.
Even at church, we live with a mindset sometimes that says,
hey, I'm only going to participate in this activity or
event. As long as it's something I'm
going to have fun at or people that I know and like are going
to be there, that's my criteria for showing up.
And I could go on and on and giving you examples.
Now we might think to ourselves like, what's so wrong with
living for myself? Nobody else is looking out for
me, so somebody has to look out for me.
But here's what happens when you set the terms of your own life.
When you only look out for yourself, you are living like a
functional atheist because you end up living like you don't
really need God, or you only need God in certain parts of
your life when something's going wrong and you need him to show
up. You pick and choose the parts of
your life where God gets to be God.
And the truth is, we all have a God, and there's only room for
one God in your life. Whoever or whatever is at the
center of your life is who you are serving.
They are your God. When you live for yourself,
you've made the decision whether you've used the Word or not.
But when you live for yourself, you've made the decision that
you are God. You set the rules of what's
going to give your life meaning and purpose and satisfaction
when you live for yourself. You decide, this is how I'm
going to spend my time and how I'm going to spend my money.
And the warning of Jesus here in this passage is simply this.
The God of your life is going to take you somewhere.
The only question is, where's the God of your life taking you?
What's the end of the story that the God of your life is taking
you towards? What's the promise at the end of
that story? If you're trying to find life in
anyone other than Jesus, Jesus is warning you here that you
will be devastated by the end result.
Now, some of you, you're here today because you see it.
You, you've bought the message of setting life on your own
terms. And you, you've seen the
results. You're looking at the results in
your own life and you're asking bigger questions and you're
saying there's got to be such a better way to live than
everything I've been taught. And I want you to know the
answer is, yeah, there is a better way to live.
Sometimes we go from one extreme, if I want to do life my
own way to another extreme, the opposite extreme, which is I
just want everyone to like me. And so then we end up becoming
people pleasers in everything, which leads to the final warning
of Jesus being popular and well liked won't matter in the end.
That's what he says in verse 26. Jesus gives this warning that
there's a danger when everyone speaks well of you.
Now, at first that seems like a strange warning.
Why? Why wouldn't you want everyone
to speak well of you? Why wouldn't you want everyone
to like you? And then he compares how much
people like you to the way that people have treated false
prophets in the past. You know what false prophets do
really well? They only tell people what they
want to hear. False prophets at the end of the
day are people pleasers. And you might think, well, but
doesn't Jesus want me to serve people?
Doesn't he want me to be nice? And the answer is yes, of course
he does. But serving people is not the
same thing as being a people pleaser.
And a lot of us have become people pleasers.
At the core, people pleasing is actually another way of living
for yourself, because people pleasers do everything they can
to make other people happy. For one motivation.
I just want them to like me, so I'll do whatever I need to do to
get other people to like me. People who serve are different.
People who serve do everything to make the other person's life
better, even if the other person doesn't like some parts of the
journey. I I was in the hospital a week
ago with kidney stones. It's not fun and the doctor,
like there are things that happen when you go into the
hospital that you don't like, but you need it in order to get
better. And people who serve live with
that mentality. I don't care if you don't like
me in the moment. I care more about your
well-being. If you really love and serve
people, you are going to have times where you have to have
difficult conversations. And the single most important
conversation that you may ever have is that the other person
needs a savior. Remember I said earlier that
Jesus is looking at the opposite side of the things he talked
about and what we looked at last week.
He's, he's holding up two sides of the same coin in these
verses. And last week he said that you
are blessed when people hate you, exclude you, insult you
because of your faith in Jesus, because of who you are as a
disciple of Jesus. But now he is giving the
opposite side of the story. And what he's doing is he's
giving us a warning on being silent as followers of Jesus,
that if we never take a stand for anything, we are falling
into this warning that Jesus is giving.
Many years ago I was interacting with a well known broadcaster
who also happened to be a Christian and everybody loved
this guy. Everybody thought he was just
the nicest guy in the world, that his his coworkers thought
he was such a great person to work with.
But then I remember one of his coworkers coming up to me and
said, Kirk, that guy's a Christian.
I had no idea that he was a Christian.
I thought, man, you spent all that time with someone and you
had no idea they followed Jesus. It is awesome church that people
think you're a good person, that they think you're a great
person. It's a great start.
You should not be a jerk. If you're a jerk, that's a whole
other problem. But if the only thing that the
people around you know about you is that you're a really nice
person, then it's one of life's greatest tragedy tragedies.
This warning from Jesus forces us to ask the question, What
good have you really done for the people around you if you
haven't pointed them to Jesus? Because every single good thing
you've ever done for other people can only be temporary.
Don't be the Christian who is so well liked that they are not
fully known. Care for people enough to talk
about the things that matter most, and there's nothing more
important than the state of people's souls.
When you take everything that Jesus is talking about in these
verses here, here's the bottom line of what He's telling us.
Don't let the good life become more important to you than
eternal life. I want to show you something to
illustrate what I'm talking about.
I saw this illustration a number of years ago from a pastor named
Francis Chan and asked Paige to come on out and help me with
this. I want you to imagine that life
is like this rope and we got a knot in our lives.
It's OK. Don't worry about it.
We get the idea. No, forget it.
Keep pulling. Why don't you imagine that life
is like, There we go. Imagine that life is like this
rope. And I'm just going to pull this
up a little bit. See this, This rope represents
the life that you are always meant for.
It's eternal life. You are always meant to have
eternal life. But most of us, we live our
lives in this space. In this space.
This red tape represents the years of your life that you have
here on this earth. If you live to be the same age
as the life life expectancy in Canada, you will live to be
about 82 years old. And so most of us make our
decisions, make our choices, live our lives from the
perspective of how can I get everything done that I want to
get done? How can I achieve and succeed
within those 82 years that I have on this earth?
And maybe you're not even thinking that far in advance.
Maybe you're just thinking about like this little window here
that's like the next three years of your life.
How, how can I just make it in the next three years of my life?
What are my goals in those three years?
So you become obsessed and consumed with those next three
years. Maybe if you're in rough enough
shape, if, if life is hard enough, you're not thinking
about even three years, you're just thinking about one week or
one day. How do I just make it through
today? And what Jesus is coming around
and saying to us is when you live your life from the
perspective of just these years, you're going to make choices a
certain way. When you live your life with
eternity in mind, you're going to make a whole different set of
choices with your life. The warning is when you only
live in this space, it has limitations.
It also has consequences. When you live with eternity in
mind, it changes everything. It changes how you are going to
live every moment of your life. Last week when we looked at the
people who were blessed, even though their life was rough,
they were blessed not because of the moment they found themselves
in. They're blessed because of the
bigger picture of who they are as citizens of God's Kingdom.
They know that the end, that the story that they're in today is
not the end of the story because there's all of eternal life
still waiting. And when you are here in this
moment today, on the opposite side of the coin, the warnings
of Jesus, is that living your life when there's only 80 years
to life, there's so much damage to your soul.
If life is only 80 years, of course you're going to look to
make as much money and have as much fun as you can.
If life is only 80 years, of course you're going to do things
your own way so you can experience the best life
possible. If life is only 80 years, of
course you're going to do everything to just get people to
like you. Because really, I don't want
people to not like me. But Jesus came to show us that
life is not only 80 years. Life was always meant to be
eternal. If you're here today and you are
not yet a believer in Jesus, John chapter 3 verse 16 says
that God so loved you that he gave his only Son, that if you
believe in him and follow him, you will not perish.
You will not die. 80 years is not the end of your story.
You will have everlasting life. And if you're already a disciple
of Jesus, eternal life is not meant to be something that
happens right after we die. Eternal life is meant to be
something we experience right now.
In John 17 verse 3, Jesus described eternal life as this,
that they know God the Father. Eternal life is not an event.
It's a relationship with God. It's knowing Him intimately,
powerfully in your life. It's my brothers and sisters in
Christ Jesus. Our Savior and our King is
warning us today. Stop living like you've only got
80 years to live. So many of us, we are so caught
up in all the things that the world says is important and you
don't even have time to read your Bible or pray you.
You say you can't wait to have eternal life with God, but you
can't spend any time talking to Him now.
Why do you want to spend eternal life with someone that you can't
bother talking to today? For some of us, our, our primary
goal has become how much money can I make and how much fun can
I have? And God becomes a secondary part
of our lives. And when we, when that happens,
you know what we're saying. I need this life to give me
something more than God can give me.
And you're doing damage to your own soul when you do that.
I, I know there's a lot of us who are struggling in different
areas, but sometimes we're struggling in part because we're
choosing to do life on our own terms instead of being shaped by
Jesus. There are a lot of marriages in
our church that are struggling. And I got to tell you, in many
cases it's because you're choosing to do things on your
own terms instead of Jesus way. We have an equipped class
starting next month for marriages.
You need to register if you want to be able to learn how to do
marriage the way that Jesus wants us to.
So many of us, we are holding on to our riches.
We are pursuing life on our own terms.
We just want to be liked by everyone.
We're living for now instead of living with eternity in mind,
and anywhere that you're focused on the temporary instead of the
eternal is a missed opportunity. Don't ignore the warning of
Jesus. Don't waste your life on things
that only last 80 years. I'm going to ask you to close
your eyes, please. I want to ask you to just take a
moment and ask the Holy Spirit to turn a mirror on your heart
and your mind, to ask the Holy Spirit to do a deep check on
your life. With this question.
Say, God, where am I letting the good life become more important
to me than eternal life? Father, I know that listening to
warnings like this can sometimes be uncomfortable for us.
But God, I am grateful for your faithful, everlasting love that
you care enough about us to warn us of things that can harm our
souls. I pray in the power of the Holy
Spirit you would turn a mirror on my heart, on my mind, on our
hearts and minds as your children, and you would help us.
To see the places where we have placed a higher value on what
the world calls a good life instead of a higher value on
eternal life. Give us a greater vision, God,
of the things that truly matter. Cleanse us from our sins.
Help us, help us, oh God, to be set free from these things that
are holding us back from really knowing you deeply and
intimately in our lives. In Jesus name I pray, Amen.
Amen. Let's stand together and sing
this last song.