One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.
13 When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles:
14 Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew,
15 Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot,
16 Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. 17
He went down with them and stood on a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coastal region around Tyre and Sidon,
18 who had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. Those troubled by impure spirits were cured,
19 and the people all tried to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all.
20
Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.
23
“Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
24
“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
What is it that makes you happy? How do you seek happiness? Is it wrong to seek and desire happiness? Sometimes
when we complain that we are not happy we are simply being discontent, thinking that “my happiness” is what matters when in truth our holiness, not our happiness is what matters! Happiness is not a right and God never tells us that the aim of the Christian
life is to make me happy.
However, Jesus’ famous “Sermon on the Mount”, which we read this morning gives us food for thought about
happiness. The word blessed may not be the best translation for the Greek word that is used or for the Hebrew word that lies beneath it. There is a Greek word for “blessed” that specifically refers to an individual who is blessed BY God. But that is not
the word that is used here. The word used here is better translated as “fortunate” or “happy”. Happy are the poor…happy are those who hunger. And so we might conclude: “Ha! God DOES want me to be happy!” Yes, yes, He does, but proceed with caution!
The word happy is not being used in terms of an emotional or mental state, or even a subjective feeling, but rather the condition of one’s life. It is more an objective description than it is a subjective one. The word speaks to a recommendation of
a specific life while at the same time carrying with it a deep sense of gladness of heart, a subjective happiness based upon the objective condition that one finds himself in due to his setting his heart and life ON that condition.
We have the Lord’s instruction about what the Christian life looks like, how the Christian views the world
and life lived for the glory of God. The beatitudes are a description of Christian character. They set forth the attitudes and the heart of a Christian’s life and the corresponding favor of God that rests upon that life, concluding in happiness, in the objective
condition of one’s life beneath divine favor.
We could look at each one of these lines and that would be greatly beneficial. Martin Lloyd Jones preached
10 sermons on the beatitudes alone and 60 on the entire Sermon on the Mount which is but three chapters long in our bibles! But I want us to consider the whole of the beatitudes in light of redemptive history, and in light of our calling as the blessed of
God.
Some have thought of the Sermon on the Mount and the beatitudes of Jesus as sweet, kind, and sensitive
sayings. Many who have no love for Jesus quote them and use them to bring comfort and peace to those who are in difficulty. Secular psychologists have said that Jesus’ words here are helpful to all men, something for all men to understand and live by. This
is nonsense. These words of Jesus, if they are really understood, would chase every faithless man or woman as far away from Him and the life He is describing as could be possible! These words are helpful for NO man, nor loved by any man who is not willing
to give up everything he is and stand in complete antithesis to everything man offers under the guise of happiness. No one in the flesh, no one without a sight of the unseen, would in a thousand years jump on this and get excited about what Jesus is saying.
These words are revolutionary, the most radical and revolutionary words that any man has ever spoken.
They literally turn everything in this world on its head and force the hearer to choose…to choose a way of life…to choose one of two roads in the pursuit of happiness and purpose. Read the text again, what is Jesus saying to us?
Blessed are your poor
For yours is the kingdom of God.
The idea of “poor” has more of a theological sense than it does an economic sense. Even in the OT we read
King David referring to himself as “poor and needy” and he is not speaking of material wealth, he was king, he was very rich! The term “poor” was a traditional characterization of Israel understood in terms of its suffering and humiliation at the hands of
the nations. In other words, outward physical things push us to understand spiritual realities, now this is no surprise to any of us as we have made much of how the Bible speaks this way.
The poor have no other recourse but to trust and hope in God. They rely upon Him because they know they
cannot rely upon themselves. They have no resources to meet their needs and disciples of Jesus know that this is true of themselves, spiritually. And notice that Jesus says the kingdom IS theirs, not, will be theirs, but IS. Regardless of what it looks like,
regardless of what the world thinks and what faithlessness declares, for those who know themselves destitute and without hope save in Jesus Christ, the kingdom, its reality, its benefits, all of its promises, is ours NOW. It is the same thing with the verse
21:
Blessed are you who hunger now,
For you shall be filled.
The hope of the New Heavens and the New Earth is set before the disciples, that NOW is the day of hunger.
NOW is the day of seeking and searching to be filled, as we seek the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. And we shall be filled. The day is coming when we will not be hungering for righteousness, because we will be filled to overflowing with it! Nonetheless,
we are blessed NOW as we live in the reality of being filled at the end. We hunger, we yearn for righteousness for holiness, to be what Christ has made us to be as his disciples, just as a starving man yearns for the banquet.
Blessed are you who weep now
For you shall laugh.
In this life there is a mourning, a weeping that the disciple knows and understands. There is a weeping
that promises to give way to laughter and joy. There is a weeping over one’s sin. There are tears shed on account of our loyalty to our God and the desire to see his glory revealed in the world. The psalmist says, “My eyes shed streams of tears, because
men do not keep your law.” Jesus is saying that the disciple’s life is lived in the reality that weeping is part of our experience, but always with an eye to the laughter that is to follow, when all tears shall be wiped away…forever.
And then of course there is the blessing that is ours when men hate us and exclude us, count us as irrelevant
and destroy your good name by slander and gossip. Even to the degree that they make your name to be thought of as evil, due to your seeking to honor the Savior. In this one Jesus commands a present response, that of rejoicing. You should rejoice and leap
for joy at such circumstances, even as the disciples in Acts rejoiced when they were beaten for their association with Jesus.
Jesus’ words about being disciples overturn every natural expectation that we have.Jesus puts things together;
happiness, blessedness, and reward with the very kind of things, the very kind of experiences in which we are least likely to think we would find happiness, blessedness and reward. Jesus is telling all who would be considered disciples, not only that
their lives are to be different from the world, different from those who do not follow Jesus and who do not believe in Him…But that their entire orientation of life is different, in fact it stands what is normally the case on its head. We are being called
to think antithetically…to see upside down, for only in doing this, thinking and seeing this way, will there be true blessedness, true happiness.
Jesus says there is a sadness that is indispensable to being happy, and the Christian not only knows this, but
embraces it. Are you not sad at the sin of your own heart? Does it not make you sad when you offend God with your words, or actions? Or what about how little you care for those in need because you are consumed with your own comfort and wants? Are you
sad that you don’t care more than you do for what is holy, right and just? Does it not make you sad to consider how much suffering comes to mankind because he will not submit to the Lord Jesus?
As one put it, “This is sadness without which there can be no happiness because there can be no integrity.
There can be no honesty, no true understanding. This is sadness that is the beginning of joy. This is the kind of sadness that makes spiritually sick people well and spiritually weak people strong. It is the kind of sadness that gives life meaning.” The
one who refuses this sadness, this poverty of spirit, this holy weeping, has no hope for the future, because the blessings are made to the future. But he also has no hope for the present because he will not be amazed at the love of God…he will not be overwhelmed
by the peace Jesus brings and where will he find the power and the motivation to love others as he loves himself?
You see the point? The world says seek happiness and seek it for happiness’s sake. But Jesus begins with
the opposite, seek happiness by first being sad, being poor, weeping and hungering and what about verse 23? The world tells us that happiness comes in being successful and the more successful you are, the happier you will be. And there can be little doubt
that our culture, the day that we live in, is the most successful era in history in any objective way you could come up with to measure success. But are we happy? It sure doesn’t appear so. The natural man does not admire the man who is hungry, we admire
the man who is NOT hungry because he sits down at the table. Jesus’ words make it clear that the hungry man is looking for something he does not yet have, but will have at the end. To the world, hungering is not happiness, but just the opposite. To the
worldly mind, happiness depends upon getting, but Jesus says happiness is about seeking…even seeking the whole of one’s life, and never obtaining the whole thing in this life, nonetheless, never slacking off in the seeking.
A man who hungers for what God loves is someone who will have God’s favor upon his life. A man who is
conscious of his failure to live a Christ-like life as we all are, and nonetheless remains determined, even in the face of his failures, to do all that he can to live as God would have him live… A man whose days and nights are marked by a raging, never satisfied
appetite for holiness, and in the awareness that he is NOT what he is raging to be…THAT, Jesus says is the happy man, the blessed man.”
Does the world understand this? Does the world set such things before its eyes? Oh, my NO! Only faith
even begins to understand this, but the better question this morning is, do we?
Do we see what Jesus is doing as he addresses the universal issue of happiness? The beatitudes turn upside
down the typical way of thinking regarding happiness and prosperity. The world leaves the Lord Jesus and God’s approval completely out of the equation of what happiness is.
But for disciples, those on that day listen intently to what Jesus was saying and for those who are listening
this day to what he is saying…Everything is viewed in terms of God’s love, God’s favor, God’s promise, God’s future and God’s blessing. And, that is why the world does not understand the beatitudes nor can they make sense out of them…but for us, they are…well…happiness
itself!
Prayer: Father, forgive my wanderings and my seeking for a happiness that is as a vapor instead of seeking
my life in the Savior of my soul. I confess that there is no happiness, joy, rest or peace apart from Him and I want this day to rejoice in the seeking…to find my happiness in the knowledge that You will lead me to the green pastures and the still waters,
and that true and unending happiness will be mine in fullness when You bring me to Your home and mine, through Jesus Christ my Lord, Amen.
Hymn: The Sands of Time are Sinking