Wednesday Night, August 19, 2020 PM

Christ’s Presence, the Hymn of Trust, and the Move to Luke 6

Who you sent for us and given Him to us and given us to Him. We thank You for not leaving us orphans, but even as Christ reigns above, You have sent Your Spirit to indwell us and to fill us that we may worship You and commune with You.

Lord, we know that every prayer that we offer up to You, we know that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us and that Christ is at Your right hand, and that You receive our worship and our prayers, not according to our ability, but according to Your pleasure in Your Son, Jesus Christ.

And it's in His name that we pray. Amen. Let's, in our handles, let's look for hymn number 430. Hymn number 430, I Must Tell Jesus.

I must tell Jesus all my trials. I cannot bear these burdens alone. In my distress, He kindly will help me. He ever loves and cares for His own. I must tell Jesus, I must tell Jesus, I cannot bear my burdens alone.

I must tell Jesus, I must tell Jesus, Jesus can help me, Jesus alone. I must tell Jesus all my troubles. He is a kind, compassionate friend. If I but ask Him, He will make up my troubles quickly. I must tell Jesus, I must tell Jesus, I cannot bear my burdens alone.

I must tell Jesus, I must tell Jesus, Jesus can help me, Jesus alone. I must tell Jesus, and He will help me over all the victory to win. I must tell Jesus, I must tell Jesus, I cannot bear my burdens alone.

I must tell Jesus, I must tell Jesus,.

Luke 6:20–26 and the Blessings and Woes

Let's open our Bibles to Luke chapter 6. Thank you Josiah for filling in last week, teaching from the Psalms. We return this week to Luke chapter 6 verses 20 through 26. So you consider the opening portion of this sermon Jesus gives recorded by Luke.

Many people call it the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Luke, and it's possible these are the same occasion, but it's also likely these are a little bit different. Luke's account and Matthew's account have the same themes and a lot of the same ideas, but possibly two different occasions, especially in the way that Jesus handles some of the situation, some of the teaching, some of the material.

We've been titling this series, Choose Life in Order That You May Live, as Jesus gives out four blessings and four woes, four blessings and four cursings. This is very similar to what we have in Deuteronomy, as all the blessings are laid out and then exactly the opposite is laid out in Deuteronomy.

So here are the blessings, here are the cursings, and everything depends on covenant faithfulness, whether or not Israel is going to keep the covenant. If they keep the covenant, they will have all these blessings.

If they break the covenant, they will have all these curses. And so Jesus comes, and he says in Luke 5 that he's making all things new. He begins to talk about how there's not really an antagonism between old and new, but that there's no happy synthesis between the two.

The old is done away with, so the new is here. And so he comes as the bearer of the new covenant, and if we're going to choose life in order that we may live, it comes down to this, that we have Christ.

And if we have Christ, then we are the most blessed people in all the world. And so Jesus has been making this point. So let's read the text again, Luke chapter 6, verses 20 through 26. And turning his gaze toward his disciples, he began to say, 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 insult you, and scorn 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 are 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 their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.

Why the Poor, Hungry, and Weeping Are Blessed

So Jesus is approaching things with a bit of a surprise. He is identifying a group of people that you would think are the worst off ever. So he's saying blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are the weeping, blessed are those who are hated.

He's saying these people are blessed. The word blessed means happy. The Greek word makarios means happy. It means fortunate, well-off. That's a surprise. How are the hungry, weeping, canceled poor, the happy, blessed people?

Now that's a strong claim, and we've been thinking about what that means. We've been thinking about the poor and the hungry. Why are they blessed? He says yours is the kingdom of God. He promises that they will be satisfied.

Now we come to the third one, blessed are the depressed. The second half of verse 21, Jesus says blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. So what kind of weeping is Jesus talking about here?

The context in Matthew, blessed are those who are poor in spirit, followed by blessed are those who mourn, gives the idea that these are those who recognize their sinfulness, their lack of ability, the fact that they don't have anything to offer to God to enter the kingdom, they don't have anything that God needs, they're the poor in spirit, and the idea of their mourning in the context seems to be more about repentance and a idea of godly sorrow, a brokenness over their condition.

Here in Luke, we've been seeing how Jesus has been getting at the same ideas as we have back in Matthew 5, but he's taking a slightly different approach. He's talking about just straight-up poverty, you know, people who don't have enough, and we talked about what poverty looked like in Christ's day.

The hungry, not necessarily those who are hungering after righteousness, you know, they have a spiritual hunger that we have in Matthew 5, but he's talking about people who actually are hungry, they didn't have enough to eat that day, they're the malnourished, and we think about how terrible it is to combine both poverty and malnourishment together, the fact that you're not getting enough to eat in any given day, and then you add that to your poverty, and then you don't have any way to get out of the malnourishment.

There's no hope. Think about that kind of group of people, and that Jesus is calling them blessed. Those are strong claims. That really stretches your faith to believe that that is the case, but even more so here with the weeping, even as we understand the physical and temporal reality of poverty and malnourishment, so also here with the weeping.

The word he uses here is the one for audible weeping. I mean, the kind that you can hear, the kind that that you can actually see. You know, Jesus says, blessed are those who mourn in Matthew, for they should be comforted.

Then someone can mourn without weeping the whole time, but Jesus has weeping here. He's talking about the actual tear-laced convulsing. That's what he's talking about. Blessed are the weeping. Now, most would wish that such involuntary expressions of grief be hidden from view, but God sees us in our deepest sorrows.

So Jesus is saying, blessed are those who weep, and he's talking about even the weeping that nobody else sees except for God. Now, it's important to recognize that the poverty and the hunger of the previous two stanzas are not staged.

This isn't taking a kind of a vow of poverty or, you know, getting rid of most of your wealth so that you can, you know, ascribe to that idea of holiness. You know, I'll be holy by getting rid of all that I have, that kind of vain grab for holiness.

And it's not staged in the terms of hungering, in terms of fasting. Fasting is a good thing to do, especially if you do it for the right reasons, but not that kind of hunger. It's not an artificially induced type of hunger.

These are actual poor people that he's talking about. These are actual people without enough food. And so also with the weeping, this is not staged. This weeping is not playing funeral. It's not generating lament.

This is not referring to the games that the children play in the marketplace and then sullenly demand that others join in, that Jesus talked about, about him and John the Baptist, were criticized for jumping into the games.

This was just crying. This is plain crying. So Jesus is identifying a group of people with everything seemingly going against them, and then he pronounces upon them a fourfold blessing. Why? Because they have him.

Here's the point he's aiming at. If the impoverished, malnourished, depressed, canceled, are blessed because they have life in Christ, then everybody else who has life in Christ is just as blessed. In the same way blessed, blessed irrespective of the categories which seem to be so idolatrously all-important for mankind.

The first two beatitudes, fortunate are the poor. That's hard to believe. Well off are you who hunger now. That's hard to believe. But the third one really begins to to press us. Happy are you who weep.

Now, that's hard to say. Happy are the weeping? It's like Charlie Brown, Good Grief. It's a hard thing to believe. Why is Jesus saying, well it's true, absolutely true, but why is he saying it this way?

Because he's pressing the claims of his good news, the claims of the gospel, to the absolute maximum. Can it really be true that the hungering, weeping poor are blessed because they have Christ, because they have his kingdom?

It is true. Now, why would anybody who knows Jesus weep? A few of our hymns talk about, you know, if you know Jesus then you're happy all the day, never weep again. In a sense, that's true. But why would anybody who knows Jesus weep?

Well, we have a lot of different reasons, don't we? We weep when sickness hobbles our family. We weep when death steals our loved ones. We weep when we watch family members and friends collapse under the chains of sin.

We weep when our brothers and sisters in Christ lose their jobs or their homes or their liberty because of persecution or because of wickedness, because of somebody else's folly. We weep when Christ's bride is slandered or prostituted.

We weep when we see the deep sadness of those oppressed by sinners and by sin. And we may even weep for ourselves if we are lonely in our isolation or reeling in our failure or hungry in our poverty. We may indeed weep.

We're but bleeding sheep. We're like crying children. But why are we blessed? Because our Heavenly Father has not abandoned us. He doesn't hide his face from our sorrow. He has taken account of our wanderings.

He has put our tears in his bottle. They are all notated in his book, Psalm 56 says. So we are indeed blessed. Psalm 42 talks about tears being our food day and night. Well, when that's the case, what are we to think?

Do we still have Jesus? Does he still hold us fast? Absolutely. So choose life in order that you may live. Because life is not found in the abundance of riches or in lavish food or even in the avoidance of sorrow.

Life is found in the living one, Jesus Christ. And this is so much the case that even if you are poor and hungry and crying, you are blessed because you have his life. And whatever stretches our faith also deepens it.

The Laughter of the Kingdom and the Promise of Joy

So blessed are the weeping, for they shall laugh, he says. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. So what kind of laughing does Jesus Christ mean? Well, even as we were looking at the one side of the equation where he talks about poverty and hunger and weeping, and we're talking about those in their basic sense of the idea that we're not spiritualizing those things, because I don't think the context demands that we do so.

It's just basic poverty, basic hunger, basic weeping. But on the other side of the equation, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God stands over here, and everything else that comes past that is set in that idea.

So blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. In what way shall you be satisfied? There's a satisfaction that comes in the promises of the kingdom. Your hunger is temporary. The satisfaction is forever.

And then in the same way, well, what kind of laughter are we talking about? It has to be a laughter that is related to the kingdom of God. It has to be a laughter that is related to the promises of God.

We have to place this laughter in the context of the kingdom. You know, sometimes we hear laughter from across the room, and you immediately feel left out. Like, I wish I was over there to hear whatever it was that was so funny.

But the sensation of being left out is even more pronounced when you are in the group and somebody says something that is immediately funny to everybody else, but you don't get it. Then you really feel left out.

Like, I was here for the laughter, but I didn't understand why everything was so funny. That's not exactly a nice feeling. I think the point is obvious. Laughter depends on you, first of all, being in the group, and then secondly, you have to be in the know.

Laughter depends upon you being in the group, and then you got to be in the know. The laughter that believers are promised depends on us entirely. It depends entirely on our being in the group, and our being in Christ, and then being in the know, understanding his kingdom, understanding the values of what real life in Christ is all about.

Once we see the world from Christ's point of view, we are free to laugh at the absurdity of raging against him. Psalm 52, verses 5 through 7. But God will break you down forever. He will snatch you up and tear you away from your tent, and uproot you from the land of the living, land of the living, Selah.

The righteous will see and fear God, and will laugh at him. Who's the him? Saying, Behold, the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and was strong in his evil desire.

Who's laughing? The righteous, when they fear God, will look at those who rage against God, and think that power is found in riches, and seeing through on their evil plans, and they will just laugh at them.

It is a righteous, God-fearing response to laugh at the absurdities of folly and sin. Laughter is a righteous response to absurdity, and it is an expression of wisdom. Proverbs chapter 1, verses 24 through 27.

Wisdom cries out, and she says, Behold, I called and you refused. Because I called and you refused, I stretched out my hand, and no one paid attention, and you neglected all my counsel, and did not want my reproof.

I will also laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your dread comes. When your dread comes like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. That's wisdom in Proverbs.

She's laughing at the outcome of absurdity. If we do not have a category of humor, wherein we laugh at absurdity and folly, and do so without sinning, that we recognize that it is fearing God, that it is an actual wisdom, it's actually godliness to cultivate that kind of hope-filled response.

Rather than be faced with the wicked absurdities of man, and fret, and worry, and wring our hands, it would be a faith-filled, God-fearing response to laugh at those who would try to rage against God.

This is something that we see in the scriptures exemplified more than once. When worldly comedy is tagged with a warning for mature audiences, it's a very clear indication that the comic will be engaged in the most immature, crude forms of humor possible.

It's a cheap hack. Mature humor among God's people includes laughing at the fool while still caring about his soul. And if you don't have that gear for humor, cultivate it by reading Proverbs. Now, the laughter, notice, is also promise.

It's not only laughing because you have the kingdom of God point of view, and thus you can spot absurdity and laugh at it, but notice it's a promise. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

It's a promise. And when the promise comes to pass, we're going to laugh in joy. We laugh when the too good to be true comes to pass. When the too good to be true comes to pass. Isn't that what happened in Genesis 21 6?

When Sarah had a baby, what did she say? God has given me laughter. Now, she laughed at the first because she scoffed at the idea. Remember that? And she lied and said, I didn't laugh. He said, no, but you did laugh.

But later on, when she had her baby, she laughed for joy because God's promises came to pass. There's that kind of laughter as well. Turning your Bibles over to Psalm 126. Psalm 126. This is in the Songs of Ascents.

When the Lord brought back the captive ones of Zion, we were like those who dream. That our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with joyful shouting. And they said among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them.

We are glad. Restore our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south. Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting. He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed, shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.

And the glorious psalm, seen only from the perspective of the grandchildren of the exiles. Sometimes the way in which God works is one generation may sow in weeping, and another generation will reap in laughter.

But blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. This will come about in the sovereignty of God. Ecclesiastes 3, 1, and 4. There is an appointed time for everything, and there is a time for every event under heaven.

Why is that the case? Because God's in charge. There's an appointed time. He's in charge of it, including a time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance. There's an appointed time for everything.

God is sovereign over that. There are times to weep, and there are times to laugh. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. There is the blessing of moving from weeping to laughter is focused upon the kingdom of God having his perspective on the matter, having a long-term gospel perspective, and also in the fulfillment of the promises of God.

One more passage for us to consider, and it's just a preview, in Luke chapter 7. Luke chapter 7, verses 36 through 50. I won't read the whole thing, but the story there is about a woman who was weeping.

The woman came and was weeping over the feet of Christ, and she was weeping in faith, she was weeping in repentance of her sin, godly sorrow, and verse 48, after he deals with those who are objecting to her display of tears over him, verse 48, then he said to her, your sins have been forgiven.

I don't know any other thing, more than anything else in the Bible, that lets me laugh, that takes the chains of anxiety or sorrow or despair or depression or anything else that busts all that up and lets me laugh, other than just this, your sins have been forgiven.

I can laugh now. I can see things from God's point of view, I can rest in Christ, I can think about the promises that he has kept, and I can laugh, I can rejoice, I have that freedom because of this great promise that those who were weeping, those who weep now, will laugh.

So praise God for that. Well, let's turn our attention to time of prayer or prayer requests.