I’d like to ask you a very simple question. What kind of life would you like to have? When you ask for God’s blessing on your life, what kind of blessing are you thinking about? What is the picture of your life in your mind that you want?
The assumption here is that all of us want to be blessed. Just about every time I pray for someone, for anyone, I pray that God may richly bless them. It’s good religious words, but depending on what our understanding of blessing is, it can mean very different things.
That is what this passage is about. This passage is about how we measure the blessings in our lives. It demands that we recognize in ourselves how we measure the blessings in our lives. There are two basic measures of blessing. There are worldly measures, and there is a Godly measure. Jesus only has one measure. But the world has many. The Jews of Jesus’ time used worldly measures of their blessings. Many Christians today also claim worldly measures of blessing for themselves.
This passage gets right to it. By the world’s measure, if you are rich, successful, happy and popular, that means you are blessed by God. By the same token, the world says that if you are poor, miserable, ugly and rejected, you have a disability, then you or someone in your family has done something to displease God. Blessings, by worldly standards, are understood as circumstances. The are possessions, independence, fame, power. All those things are located in the realm of this world.
But Jesus has a whole other meaning to the word ‘blessing”. Jesus’ words show that it is a virtual reversal of the worldly understanding of “blessing”. The word ‘blessed’ for Jesus refers to the condition of one who lives their lives in the Kingdom of God – who submit to God’s rule in their lives. It’s not about circumstances. It is about knowing that God rules your life within your circumstances. If you know that. You are blessed. But if all you know are the promises of this world, then that’s all you’ll have. And no matter how successful you are in this world, that is not enough to be a blessed.
We are so engulfed in this world, it is hard to understand what Jesus says. I’m going to try to clarify a couple of things about what he’s saying, and then give some examples – talk about what this passage means for us.
The first thing I want to say is that Jesus is not saying that you have to be poor and persecuted and hated in order to be blessed. He’s not saying that it is a prerequisite to blessing. He’s not saying that you are blessed because you are poor and hungry and crying and hated. There are lots of poor, hungry, crying, hated people who are not blessed at all – who don’t know and certainly don’t live in submission to the reign of God at all. Too many are just angry and mean and despairing that they, by the standards of the world, have no blessing.
But Jesus is confronting the world and saying that if you are poor, if you are hungry, if you are crying and hated, it does not mean that you are not blessed. As a matter of fact, you know you can’t rely on the circumstances of the world. You know your weakness. It is right there if front of you. You can’t get away from it. Jesus reaches out to all the poor so that they may know that exactly where they know their life to be out of control, they can rely on God and live in God’s grace.
The flip side of that is also true. Just because you are successful by the world’s standards of blessing, does not mean either that you are blessed, or cursed by God. But if those worldly circumstances are all that you identify yourself by, since they are so good, then that’s all you’re gonna get. Woe to you, because that stuff – those riches, that food, that laughter, that popularity – it doesn’t last, you’ll have your time of knowing just the opposites. If you rely on money, you’ll know poverty. You may be full now, but you’ll get hungry. If you rely on good laughs, you’ll end up crying. And if you get by on your popularity, people will begin to hate you.
Pam Stenzel talked to girls at Niagara a couple months ago. She talked to girls about the world’s lie that what really matters is what you look like. Even if you lie there comatose, as long as you look pretty, everything’s all right. And if you could lose 20 pounds. And your hair is too frizzy or too straight. And girls get pounded with this lie about what blessing really is day after day. Pam expressed concern over her 14 year old and how she would react to this lie about where blessing for girls lay.
And then Pam started to talk about herself. The night before her talk, she went over to a friends house. She’s allergic to cats, and the friend, without her knowing it, had a cat. Pretty soon, her eye, just one eye, started to swell up. It swelled shut before she got back to her hotel room. She said she looked like a Cyclops. She woke up the next morning, and it still looked pretty hideous. And she told God, “why is this happening to me. This is the first time I’ve spoken in 3 weeks, and this happens now?” And God said to her, “Does it matter what you look like?”
And the Niagara people came to her and asked her to wear a Niagara shirt they gave her and some jeans. She tried wearing the shirt untucked, but she said it just looked sloppy. So she tried tucking it in. She’s had three C-sections, and she turned sideways, and looked in the mirror, saw the Cyclops eye, and said, it looked like she had three C-sections. And God said, “Does it matter what you look like.” And then Pam Stenzel’s voice began to crack as she said, “and you know what, girls, I gotta tell you, I love Jesus to my toes. And all I want is to be his woman. That’s all I want. But even I am affected, and even I worry about, “what is someone else going to think.” And you know what, that is not from God. That is from a world that screams at us, and says that if you don’t look like this and you don’t dress like this and you have zits or you’re carrying extra weight where you shouldn’t have it then you’re not okay. And what we create is a culture of women, of young women, that believe that what makes them valuable is what they look like.”
So what is the bottom line in all of this? When the standards of the world guide you, you will have great woe. But when you let God determine who you are, you will be greatly blessed. When you let your looks, your poverty, your hunger, your sadness, and your lack of popularity be the final word about the meaning and significance of your life, you will be in hopelessness and despair. But when you let the kingdom of God have the final word about the meaning and significance of your life, you will have true joy.
If you let the world call the shots, you’re going to be easily torn down. The people who hate you and abuse you will destroy you. One Pastor [Edwin Peterman] says, “Those who make great and unreasonable demands on you will be able to lord it over you, and you will feel as though you amount to nothing. What Jesus is saying is that you are now free not to give the world that much control over you. You are now free not to let your enemies have the final word in your life. … His disciples are blessed because they trust God above everything else.
I have been blessed in recent months to see that God is working powerfully in a number of different people’s lives in this congregation. Many of you have come to me with stories of things that God is doing. And, as a pastor, nothing is more exciting. But the thing is, these stories, they are not about victories. They are not just about healings and triumphs and inspiration and understanding. God is moving amongst the people here at Bethlehem. But a lot of what he is doing is showing us our poverty. He’s bringing a greater realization to people of their sin. He’s putting people in places of impossible hardship and speaking to them the clear word, “trust me right here.” The poverty, and not just spiritual poverty, but spiritual and real, financial poverty, the genuine hunger for food, the place where all you can do is literally cry real tears, and some of you are experiencing people who are enraged at you and hate you. I can look around and all these things are happening amongst us.
I’ve had a couple people who know many of the circumstances that are filling our church these days come to me and say that Satan has stepped up his attacks. I believe that is true. God has been doing something at Bethlehem, and Satan is getting more active. But I also want to invite you to see that when God works, the circumstances that result are not always going to be easy. One of the first is that we are going to know our own poverty, our own dependence upon God, in a real and dramatic way like we never have before. And it is up to us to either look at our circumstances the way the world does and say that God cannot be in this. Or are we going to look at them the way God does and know that in our poverty, in our hunger, in our tears, in the face of our enemies, that we are truly, truly blessed.
I want to encourage you, to look at your life, and re-evaluate where your blessings are. So much is going on for so many of you. It’s happening so fast. We are so completely bombarded with the world’s viewpoint that everything can get skewed. Our feelings, our false sensitivities, our misperceptions can be devastating. I invite you to look again through the tears and simply trust that not any of that other stuff matters except what God thinks of you. If you rely on the world’s picture of who you are, it may even look good for awhile. But there cannot be anything really there. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face. And when he’s looking back at you, what you’ll see reflected in his eyes, is love for you.
