Upside Down Living #1 - Humility in a Time of Arrogance
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund begins a new series on the Sermon on the Mount and this week looks at Matthew 5:1-3 and the idea of humility when the world around us is filled with arrogance.
Message Transcript
Hey, welcome to Orchard Hill. It's great to be together this weekend, wherever you're participating, whenever you're participating, at home with friends, if you're in the Chapel, Strip District, or Butler County. This weekend, we are starting a new series and our time in the country, our cultural moment, is probably best described as being unprecedented. You've heard people probably use that word between COVID and some of the other challenges that our country seems to be going through right now, some of the political turmoil. The temptation as somebody who teaches the Bible, kind of as my profession, as well as some other things, is to say, well, maybe if I come up with the perfect series, I can address all that's going on. But as I just prayed about it, thought about it, worked on it, and knew that we were ending a series and starting a new one, I thought that what we typically do here at Orchard Hill is really the best approach. And what I mean by that is what we typically do is we take a section of the Bible and we work our way through it consecutively. And so, the reason I think that's the best approach is it means that I don't choose week by week what we talk about. What I do instead is, I choose a passage, and then that passage shapes what we talk about week by week, and I thought that this time would be wise for us to go to probably the most famous message that Jesus ever gave, which is called the Sermon on the Mount.
We find it in Matthew chapter five, verse one, all the way through the end of chapter seven, and then again in Luke six, a shorter version. And this is maybe Jesus most famous sermon because it was the time that when people read it, they go, this really shows us the ethic and the thinking of Jesus. I thought that rather than me trying to shape something for our cultural moment that we'd let Jesus shape it and let the Bible be our text, as it always is, and then if it touches into a cultural touchstone in these weeks, we'll go there, and if not, we'll just plow through this text. And this I'm calling Upside Down Living because what Jesus does is, he takes a lot of the ideas that were true in that day, and he turns them upside down. And it's true in our day, that some of the ideas that we have that we think you know what, this is something that is true in our culture, and Jesus turns them upside down. He makes them different than they would be if we didn't think about it.
And so today we're going to talk about humility in a time of arrogance. And in a sense, right off the bat, you can see that Jesus' message from 2000 years ago is actually very timely to where we are today because we live in a time of great arrogance. But before we talk specifically about kind of the first beatitude, that's what they're called, where it says, blessed are those who... and you get eight of them in the beginning of Matthew five. Before we talk about the first one, I need to take a few minutes and set the context for the Sermon on the Mount, so that we understand some of how this section works.
There are some different views that people have expressed about how we read this, and you say, well, why don't we just read this and take it? Well? Yes. But for some people, they read this primarily as a checklist. In other words, this is a to do list, this is a rulebook, and this tells us how we should behave. It's in essence, Jesus version of the Old Testament law. So, in the Old Testament, you have law. Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and he gives the law and the people say, okay, that's the law and that this is Jesus almost reenacting Moses's thing by going to the mountain, it was actually a kind of a natural amphitheater, but wherever it was, it was his way of saying, here's the new law. Here's the New Testament checklist, and here are the things that you must do.
Now, there's an element of truth to that. But I believe that this is actually much more than that because Jesus here is not just giving us rules to keep, and he's not setting a standard that's so high that we can never attain it. And it's not even a playbook for the followers of Jesus in this day and age to help usher in the kingdom, or to bring dominion to the earth, or to dominate the seven spheres that are seven mountains that are out there, that none of that is what Jesus is doing here in my estimation. As much as what he's doing is, he's saying here's a standard and the standard is perfection and you cannot and will not attain it. And so, it's Jesus way in many ways of utterly destroying our religious notions.
Now you may say, Kurt, where do you get this? And here's what we see at the end of chapter five, verse 48, Jesus says, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." In other words, what Jesus is doing is he's saying, here are the standards. And this standard is a mountain you can never scale. I don't know if you've ever stood and looked at a mountain, and said, I would like to climb that. And when you look at it a little closer, you say, there's no way that I could ever scale that. That's a little bit of what Jesus is doing here. And ultimately, this isn't about you. It isn't about me, and it isn't about our behavior. It's about Jesus having been perfect on our behalf and us being exposed to our lack of perfection. Now, having said that, that doesn't mean that we don't attempt to live the things that this message entails. It doesn't mean that we simply say, well, since I can't scale the mountain, I won't try. What it means is that we're constantly exposed to our need for a savior in this section of the Bible and that in being exposed to it, we actually come to a place where we say my real transformation is in knowing who Jesus is and in letting Jesus do his work in me, not just merely in my effort.
So, this is what we read as we begin, verse one, it says, "Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them." Sitting was a way that teachers taught in that day and it actually keynoted authority. And then it says this, and if you have a little heading in your Bible will say the Beatitudes, that's where we get this idea. And it means be something that you're going to try to do, blessed, and it says this, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." So today we're just going to talk about this one beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit. And the idea for blessed, is a word that has brought about, again, just some different ideas, some translations just translate it happy, and they say it's equivalent to the Old Testament idea of living in bliss.
But a commentator Don Carson put it this way, he said, "As for happy, it will not do for the Beatitudes." He's talking about this as a translation. "Having been devalued in modern usage, the Greek describes a state of an inner feeling on the part for whom it is applied, but of blessedness from an ideal point of view, in the judgment of others." And here's what he's saying, if you simply reduce this idea to this idea of blessedness, that you're going to look for an internal state of saying, I feel happy when I'm poor in spirit, I feel happy when I'm mourning, or I feel happy when I'm meek. And what he's saying is, you may be happy, but your blessedness is more than that. It's bigger than that. It means that you've come to a point where you say, this is what it means to live the best possible life I can live. And what Jesus is doing here again, is he's turning everything upside down, because he's saying, you think in your culture, and we think in our culture, that blessedness doesn't come from being poor in spirit. It doesn't come from being meek. It doesn't come from mourning. It comes from being happy, and jovial, and full of laughter. It comes from being big, not small. And Jesus is just saying, I'm going to turn these things upside down for you.
Thomas Watson, who was a puritan, put it this way, he said, "The things of the world will no more keep out the trouble of spirit than a paper sconce will keep out a bullet. Worldly delights are winged. They may be compared to a flock of birds in a garden, they stay for a little while, but when you come near to them, they take their flight and are gone." You know what he's saying? He's saying that all of the things that you and I longed for, desire their winged, they're like birds in a garden and they may stay for a while, but as soon as you get close, they get up and they fly away.
And if 2020 has taught us anything, it's taught us this. I have a son who graduated from high school this year. And we were just talking the other day as a family about all of the things, and we didn't use the word winged, but that were winged in his senior experience. He was planning to go on a trip with a student group from here to Peru as a ministry trip, canceled. All of the senior big events canceled - prom, graduation, and KidsFest at Orchard Hill, canceled. And you just realize that so many of the things that we take for granted, so many of the things that we say this is what gives my life purpose right now, they are winged. And Jesus is saying you're blessed not because of all of the things that you have in your life, but because of something that transcends all of the things in your life. That's what Jesus is talking about here.
So, blessed are the poor in spirit, and when we come to this idea of poor in spirit, you may say, well, what is the teaching here? In fact, in Luke, which is the parallel to this, it just simply says, "Blessed are the poor." And when it uses the word poor here in Matthew five, it uses the harsher of the two Greek words that would normally be translated poor. There's a word for working poor. And then there's a word for absolutely destitute. And the word that Jesus used here is the word that means absolute destitute or somebody who has nothing. Now, certainly, there is a peril in terms of our worldly wellbeing. The Bible's particularly clear that we have certain temptations that come into our lives because we have wealth, a temptation to peril, and sometimes poverty can bring a temptation to peril as well. It's one of the reasons that the Proverbs writer said, give me neither wealth nor poverty, just let me live kind of somewhere in between so I don't have the temptations of either. But here it isn't so much about material poverty as it is a disposition. Poverty of spirit means that we're destitute of our own spirit.
And so, what I'd like to do is just simply diagnose what not having a poor spirit looks like and then give a prescription for how this can be something that we embrace. Because you see, arrogance is something that's really pretty sneaky in our world. Very few people would say, oh, I'm arrogant. But it's sneaky. And it's the opposite of poverty of spirit. Tony Reinke wrote an article, and I'm going to refer to the article. In fact, I'm going to use his diagnosis as our diagnosis, the five different things that we use. But he tells the story, as he begins his article about being with his kids on a vacation. And his one son wanted to jump off this cliff into this water and he asked, and the parents looked at it and they finally decided he could do it. And then he said, but I told my son, he said under one condition, and he said the condition is that nobody videotapes it, and you don't share it on social media. And his son said, well, then what's the point? Like, the whole reason I'm jumping off this cliff, is because I want to share it on social media. I want everyone to see it. And he said, he used it. And he said, you know, not sure it was good parenting or not. But he said, I used it as a way to talk about how sometimes in our lives, we end up trying to do things just simply so other people can see them. And that we do things for other people's approval, rather than for the sheer joy of it. And then he goes on and talks about what he called sharenting, which is parenting but sharenting. In other words, where you create good moments, not for your family to have them but so that you can post them on Instagram or one of your social media feeds. And what he's talking about here is this idea that many of us will live our lives more about how other people see us, then how God sees us.
And in John chapter five, verse 30, Jesus says that basically he didn't come to please himself, but he came to please the Father. And yet many people, even of faith, even of longtime faith, live their lives to please themselves, sort of to please others, rather than to please God the Father. And what that is, at least in part, is not a poverty of spirit, this is the diagnosis, it's an arrogance that says everything I do needs to be seen, or it's nothing.
Now, Reinke goes on and he talks about these different ways that we do this. And he ties them especially to social media, but I think they're much broader than that. And here are just some of the ways that we can see arrogance. One is peer approval. Now you tend, and I tend to think about kids when we hear this, students, high school, middle school students, college students, maybe, but I don't think this is defined simply by age. People do things at any stage of their life to gain the approval of others. And what we do sometimes is we organize our lives so that somebody else looks at us and says, I like how you did that. I like how you dress. I like how you look. I like what choices you made here. And what that is a lot of times, is our driving motivation for decisions we make.
Here's what David Foster Wallace said in his work Infinite Jest, he says, "For Kids, and younger people, to be hip and cool, is the same as to be admired and accepted, and included, to be unalone." And he capitalizes the Unalone. "Forget so called peer pressure. It's more like a peer hunger. We enter a spiritual puberty, where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror of loneliness, and excluded engagement in self. Once we have hit this age, we will now give or take anything where any mass to fit in and be part of, or to not be alone." And what you see here from David Foster Wallace, not a Christian thinker, is he's talking about this pure hunger to say, I want somebody to see me, to notice me, to say I'm not alone. And sometimes what happens inside the lives of people who maybe have been followers of Christ for a long time, maybe aren't even convinced of what that means or is, is that they organize their whole lives around other people seeing them do things a certain way. And that is part of a lack of being somebody who is poor in spirit.
Here's the second thing he talks about, and that is a tribal alliance. A tribal alliance is basically where we have in groups and out groups, and we do our best to position ourselves as one of the ingroup. Now we are living in a cultural moment, I believe, where the cultural narrative has changed greatly. And what I mean by that is, six months ago, I could have stood here and talked about how our culture basically says you do you, everyone does their own life and is left alone, as long as they don't harm anybody. But all of a sudden, we've shifted in the last several months to now there is a kind of cultural narrative that basically says, you must think this way or live this way. Now, some of that can be healthy. If our culture is dealing with something that maybe has been unhealthy, that can be healthy, but there's also an unhealthy element to it because there can become a mob mentality and an ingroup outgroup that can be so tightly defined that as soon as you want to feel good about yourself, you just simply insist that you're part of an ingroup, whatever that is.
So, let me just give you one that's happening right now. Now, even in saying this, I know I'm going to irritate a few of you. But right now, we have ingroups and outgroups when it comes to mask wearing. And what I mean by that is you have people who will post and say, mask wearing is essential, don't be a selfish pig, wear a mask - science backs it up. And then you have other people who say, mask don't do much. We're not sure they do anything, and you're taking away my freedom. Now, my point is not to indicate which of those I believe is the best approach, as much as it is to say how easily divided people get over ingroups and outgroups. And starting then to say, well, I'm part of the group that identifies this way, or I'm part of the group that thinks this way. And we don't just do it for this, in fact, critical theory which has been a dominant philosophy in our universities for a couple of generations now, defines everything in terms of groups. There are the groups that are oppressed, and the groups that oppress. And all you have to do is figure out which group you're part of, and then if you're somehow part of the group that has had power, you have to apologize and become part of the group that doesn't have power. And you see all kinds of virtue signaling going on, because people say, I want to be part of a group that gets it. Or I don't want to be part of the group that doesn't get it. And it isn't just social media and critical theory, it happens all the time. As soon as you are sitting around with some friends and you say, can you believe what she wore? Can you believe what they bought? Can you believe that their kids did this, and they didn't do anything about it? Can you believe, as soon as you start down that path, what you're doing is you are making a tribal alliance of and you're saying we're part of the good people, and they're part of the bad people. And it's an arrogance that defeats any poverty of spirit.
Here's the third indicator of arrogance in our lives, and that is moral outrage. Now, I'm not suggesting that there isn't legitimate moral outrage. Jesus certainly had legitimate moral outrage. But what I'm saying is that there's a very fine line between self-righteousness and legitimate moral outrage. And self-righteousness comes whenever we say my outrage needs to be ramped up so that everyone knows how good I see myself and how bad everyone else is. And you see this all the time, especially in a political season. But isn't just at a political season. We can do this in goofy ways.
I was in the store recently, just getting some groceries and I was just getting a few things. So, I went to the express line. I don't know if you've ever done this but you roll up to the express line, a lot of long lines everywhere else, so you go to the express line, I counted the items in my cart, and I was right at the line. So, I felt good about my decision to go to the express line. And the person in front of me, did not count their items. And the clerk did not say anything to them. And I stood there as item, after item, after item, went across the conveyor belt, and I'm thinking, you have to be kidding, you're in the express lane. Don't you care about other people who have important things to do like me and go somewhere like me? And I got morally outraged. Now, I'm a very light social media user. So, I didn't go out and like, you know, take a picture of the person and out them or something, which would have been the next level of outrage. But do you see how this is happening all the time? I'm good, you're bad. I'm right. You're wrong. My tribal alliance is good. Yours is bad. And what it is, is it's a way to seek, I'm going to use a theological word here, it's a way to seek justification from our horizontal view of things. I'm better than them. I'm not like them. And as soon as you identify something that you think is wrong in another group and you start to call it out, there's a danger. Not saying that you never call out wrong, but as soon as you do, there's a danger that you start to say, we're the good people. I'm part of the good people, they're the bad people. And there's something in our human condition that loves it. There's something in me that loves to say I'm the kind of person who counts before I go through the express lane at the supermarket, unlike that other person.
So, we have peer approval, tribal alliance, and we have moral outrage. We also have and this is again, according to Tony Reinke, exhibitionism, or shamelessness he calls it. Now he uses the example of TikTok. And he says TikTok is a great, harmless fun app that you can do and enjoy endless videos of just goofiness. But he said, here's the danger of TikTok, what can happen is if you aren't seen enough, that you become shameless in order to become seen more. And he identifies three things, and I'm going to give you some scriptures that he didn't give, but he says, sexually immodest behavior, celebrating worldliness, and crude joking. And here's what he's talking about. He is saying what happens is, you start with something that can be a positive thing. Here's a funny video. But before long, if you're not getting enough views, you say I have to become more compromised. I have to become more sexually explicit. I need to celebrate things that the Bible doesn't celebrate. Or, I need to be crude in my joking in order for that to be seen and monitored.
Ephesians five says this verse three, "But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed." The Bible is very clear. And yet, there are people young and not so young, making videos that are sexually suggestive because more and more people see them and they're saying I have to be seen. And then when he talks about celebrating worldliness, first John chapter two, gives us a very clear statement, verse 15, " Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them." And so sometimes what we do is we celebrate things that the Bible doesn't celebrate in order to be seen. And then back in Ephesians, chapter five, verse four, " Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving." And so, what we'll do sometimes because of our need to be seen is we'll do things that are increasingly outside of what we would like them to be because we value being seen more than being approved by God.
I saw a child the other day, I was in a park and the kid was asking his guardians, he was saying, hey, look at me, look at me, and they weren't looking at him. And so, he continued to increase the daredevil side of what he was doing, until they looked at him and reprimanded him. And what he was doing was something that plays out with kids all the time. I want to be seen, but if you don't see me now, I'm going to do something that's going to cause you to look. And what he ended up doing is, he ended up getting on this table and he started jumping off of the table toward this water thing and it didn't look like a safe jump. But it was his way of saying, I'm going to do something until you see me. And as we grow up, sometimes we keep doing those same things.
Here's one last thing that Reinke talks about as a diagnosis and that is personal piety. In Matthew chapter six, verse five, we're told this, it says, "5 And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
Sometimes what happens with social media is people want to always post the things that they do that are part of their piety. Having a great quiet time this morning, here's a picture of the Bible perfectly propped open, the cup of coffee, the beautiful scene out on the Lake or wherever you are, or maybe it's our deeds, our actions. Have you ever seen people post things like so blessed to be able to do this today? Thankful that I get to help these people today? What we're doing is we're saying notice me, notice what I'm doing. Sometimes it'll be the stands we take.
I saw somebody do this a while ago on social media. This person posted this. He said, "This morning, as I was mopping the floors and he states his business, he said, two different customers made the comment, you're the owner, why are you doing that? Man, my heart sank. I hope I never lose the desire to serve behind the scenes. And behind the line to serve my team members. I also feel bad that this is their experience of other owners in business, that the owner is too good to be doing any of the physical hard work." And he says, "God granted, he names his spouse and I, a gift by allowing us to own this business and our desires to serve and support his mission wherever the opportunities, whether they're defined groups or programs, or in how we work along other staff. Even behind the big names, and he names a couple companies, are many local owners trying to run their businesses mom and pop shop. Our staff, family, and I firmly believe in never asking my staff to do something that I wouldn't do myself. In fact, you'll often find me knee deep scrubbing toilets down here where no one else will go." And all I wanted to do when I read that was say, I love your heart, but you lost it when you posted it. Because as soon as you post it, what you're doing is you're saying I want everyone to know I'm a servant, #blessed. And what we're doing is we're saying I want to be made much of.
Now what you might say is, okay, Kurt, so what you're saying is anything in me that's about me becomes problematic. Well, actually, what Jesus is doing here is He's saying blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. He's saying when you're poor in spirit, that's where you'll find real blessedness. And every time that you step into arrogance and say, I want people to see me, you're actually missing the opportunity to be poor in spirit. C.S. Lewis put it this way. He said, "Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good, above all, that we're better than someone else, we may be sure that we are being acted on not by God, but by the devil."
So, what's the prescription? Well, here's where what I mentioned at the beginning about how we understand this matter. If I simply say well go and be poor in spirit. Try harder. What I've done is I've just taken the law and I've put it on to you. But what Jesus does in this message is, he says, Matthew 5:17, that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill the law. And here's what this means. And we're going to talk about this several times in this series, that Jesus doesn't simply say, I'm getting rid of it. And he doesn't say you do it, but he says, I fulfill it on your behalf. So, Jesus was the one who was ultimately poor in spirit. Philippians two, he did not think equality with God something to be grasped, but instead, made himself into a human and took on the penalty for sin. And the beauty of this is the thing that can help you and me begin to actually have poverty of spirit, recognizing where maybe we have arrogance, but then saying, I don't have standing because of what I do. I have standing because of what God has done through Jesus Christ on my behalf. One author put it this way, "A failure that humbles you is better for your soul than a success that makes you arrogant." Same author said, "Your greatest moral failure might still be in front of you." What do you do with that?
See, Christianity isn't just I get everything right. But it's I continue to look to the one who got it all right. And yes, hopefully there will be growth, there will be change, there will be development but there's an understanding that says, poverty of spirit means that I know that sometimes I go seeking my own glory. And every time I do, there's a God who has done for me what I can't do and has given me forgiveness. And if I get that, if you get that, that will lead us to poverty of spirit, but there's something else here. And that is in the very grammar of how this first beatitude is set up. It says, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And Daniel Wallace in his excellent Greek grammar says that this is an example of a dependent clause. In other words, we could read it instead of for, because blessed are the poor in spirit because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And I haven't talked much about the Kingdom of Heaven here today. And we'll talk more about that in the weeks ahead. But here's what this means. It means that the way that we start to actually become poor in spirit, instead of arrogant, and we can be part of the solution in this world, is by realizing that the kingdom of heaven is ours now. This is a this is a present tense dependent clause. And what that saying is that the extent to which you and I understand that I don't live in this kingdom. I mean, I live in this kingdom, but I don't live for this kingdom. But my kingdom is the kingdom of God and I'm already in possession of it. What it does is, it means I don't have to get glory from sharenting, from selfies, from peer alliances, or from any kind of tribal group. I don't need to get it from the way that I stand out or from personal piety. I don't need to get it from any of that because I'm in a kingdom where the King of the Universe has invited me to share in all that he has, and I don't deserve it. It's not because of anything in me. It's because of what Jesus has done. And what that will do, if you get that, if I get that, is then instead of saying, I'm going to try really hard not to be arrogant - I'm going to naturally start to become somebody whose spirit is not so taken with myself that I demand accolades and kudos from anybody else in my world, because I have it from the voice that matters most Jesus Christ. It'll begin to make us an upside-down person in our culture. We will be people who can live with humility in a time of arrogance.
Let's pray together. Just before I close us in prayer, I just want to say if you're here today, if you're in Butler, the Strip District, the Chapel, Wexford, Online, maybe today you've realized for the first time that you are proud, and that is an affront to God. And that the poverty of spirit that's talked about here doesn't mean that you try harder to do something better, but that it means that you acknowledge your need of Jesus Christ. Maybe today is just your day to say God, I acknowledge my need for a savior. And I trust Jesus on my behalf. That maybe as we talk today, you recognized some of the patterns of arrogance even if you have trusted Jesus, and you recognize the need to once again say I bring nothing, Jesus has brought everything. Maybe today is just your day to say God, forgive me for trying to get my acclaim from people again, wherever it is, and help me to get it from you alone.
Father, I thank you that this simple verse, Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, reminds me that my true happiness won't come from trying to make much of myself but from knowing that you've already made much of me because of what Jesus has done, and therefore I can be free from trying to demand from people and from culture anything about me. God show us all how that brings real freedom, real blessedness, and a real happiness to our lives. And we pray this in Jesus name, amen.
