When the Good Life Never Comes
Preached by David McHale
October 18, 2020
Scripture Reading
Matthew 5:1-12
5 Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.
2 And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sonsof God.
10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Recently, Jaime and I were on a date and for a bit of fun, I asked her, “Without the constraints, what would be your ideal day? You can go anywhere at any time with anyone, eat anything, but it must all fit in 24 hours.” An hour later, watched the sunrise on the top of a mountain, we had lemon ricotta pancakes, we had visited Paris, listened to a string quartet at the Louvre, had dinner on a rooftop in Italy at which all of Jaime’s favorite obscure musicians played live. It was pretty awesome. It’s a day like that, during which we might kick back and sigh and say “This is the life.”
We are all captured by some definition of what we might call “the good life.” The good life is the blessed life. It is our deepest desire, it is our ultimate ideal, the life we believe will be the most satisfying. As Christians, it is the kind of life that we believe is marked by God’s blessing. These desires, both the dignified and the depraved, drive us and determine our purpose in life, our pursuits, and how we respond when they go unfulfilled.
In Matthew 5, Jesus is saying something about the good life, the life that is blessed by God. What He says is not what we would expect, and most likely one that we would never ask for, BUT, according to Jesus, it is the truly fulfilling life. In the beatitudes, Jesus exposes our dreams, dignifies our disappointments and shows us our only comfort in life and death.
1. Our Dreams
What kind of life do you think would make you happy? What would it look like for your life to “go well.” What would need to change in order for your life to be good? Envision it for a moment. It may look something like this: “My life will be good when…
I have friendships that are fulfilling and encouraging, in which I find companionship, mutual respect, and appreciation.
I have an attractive and loving girlfriend or boyfriend that adores me. I get married. I have a marriage in which there is trust, companionship, romance, and intimacy.
I have kids that stay out of trouble, go to a good college, and get married.
I have a specific career in which my passions intersect with my skills, a salary that provides for my family, job security, and respect from my peers in my field.
I have a good retirement plan, in which I can move somewhere pleasant, still be able to visit my grandkids, and potentially take up a new hobby.
I am happy and healthy and my family and friends are the same.
I have no worry about whether I will have what I need.
I am free from conflict and dysfunction. I am free from anxiety, sadness, and shame.
I am seen as a good person, a faithful Christian who is happy and sacrificial.
Sounds like a great life, right? For sure. Good gifts from God? Absolutely. I have many of these and I am incredibly grateful to Him for it. And we should be grateful. But how close do these resemble the life that God declares to be good?
And what happens when these things become the marks of ultimate blessing from God, when they are the marks of His presence, His love, or even more, signposts of a life that pleases God? We look down on the prosperity gospel that says that the good news from God is that He will bless you with health and wealth. We say it is utterly foolish to believe such a false gospel, but do we live like we actually do? Does our vision of the good life really much different?
The answer to that question becomes clear when these dreams go unrealized.
2. Our Disappointment
These dreams of ours are fickle and we feel that. The good life comes and goes. For example,
Just as your best friend gets a raise and you are fired.
You finish graduate school and as you pursue the career you’ve always wanted, you’re told that you aren’t cut out for it.
Just as you land that job you’ve always wanted, you find that your spouse has a terminal illness.
You get married, but you find that your spouse is living in hidden sin and won’t get help.
You get married, and you’re living in hidden sin and don’t know how to get help.
Your mother adores you, but your father cuts you down in private.
Your child graduates from college, but your spouse looks at you with apathy and regrets marrying you.
You are healthy at 50, but you have no savings for retirement. Or you experience the accomplishment of retirement, but your body is falling apart, or you find that your dissatisfied with what feels like a meaningless life.
Or maybe everything seems to be going well, but there is a blanket of shame and inadequacy within you that you just cannot shake, you walk around feeling unwanted and feel dissatisfied with life.
My brother and sister-in-law experienced the elation of being pregnant only to lose their little boy, Levi, 12 weeks before their due date.
So often we lose what we love, we fail to experience the joy of what we deem to be the blessed life. We experience the pain of the fallenness and fracture of our world, our bodies, and our hearts and our hearts are rent by grief, anger and fear of what will come of us.
Yet, at the same time, some of our grief is because our own dreams of the blessed life have become our God. Satisfaction itself can become the supreme jewel of which we spend our lives chasing, scratching and clawing to find it and hold it in our hands. But, when pleasure is the prize, we will always find ourselves disappointed, whether we fail to get it or, even if we do. For the pursuit of pleasure leaves us exhausted and caught in a cul-de-sac of futility for even the joy of fulfilled dreams inevitably drains us and leads to a dissatisfaction that requires a new conquest for more. We need to hold onto the things that preserve our comfort and all that threatens those things we need to keep at bay. In this, our dreams become slave-drivers, rather than the liberation we thought they’d be.
For me, I graduated from college, passionate about the gospel, on my way to do ministry offering hope to the hopeless, only to find myself drifting deeper and deeper into a pit in which I was the one who was hopeless. I dealt with depression for 6 years and still deal with it in varying degrees. When it first hit I was frustrated and bewildered at the trial I was facing. I felt numbed by an unseen and amorphous cloud and ignorant as to how to get out. So, I prayed, I sang, I taught, I preached, I cared and still found no consolation. There were moments I felt cursed by God. “God, are you punishing me? I am serving you, why won’t you bring me relief?”
So, I felt a mingling of both pain and pride. I felt like my anguish was a sign of God’s departure from me and I started to believe it. The dwindling of my happy dream revealed that I had mistakenly equated God’s blessing with pleasure. My pain exposed my idol of comfort, the deification of my dream. And in the dark, God was bringing something ugly to light, something in me and something in the world around me. The world wasn’t as bright and beautiful as I thought it was, and neither was my heart. This is what God does when we face disappointment, he actually brings us into reality. But reality is frightening, the depth of the brokenness around and within us is often too much for us to bear.
So rather than going to the Lord for comfort, we try to comfort ourselves. We seek to assuage our pain with distractions. We pour ourselves into our work, we fill our Amazon shopping carts with toys, clothes, and things we “need,” we avoid those that remind ourselves of our sin and suffering, we scroll through our phones hoping to be entertained and even get a bit of approval from our social media followers, or we turn to pornography or alcohol in an effort to fill the void within our souls. In this we are trying to escape what is because we really don’t believe that God wants to meet us right where we are. And in comforting ourselves, we only get more pain, not less. Even our efforts to soothe our affliction fail and leave us disappointed. And in self-soothing we are taking ourselves out of the pathway of God’s healing comfort.
The way to real comfort is not alleviating our own suffering, but lamenting to the Lord. Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn.” God invites us to mourn over our affliction, the affliction of those we love, and the sin that pervades our hearts. In mourning, we talk to God about what hurts. We lay it all out there for Him. He invites us to lament like David in Psalm 38,
“…I am utterly bowed down and prostrate; all the day I go about mourning. For my sides are filled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am feeble and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart. O Lord, all my longing is before you; my sighing is not hidden from you. My heart throbs; my strength fails me, and the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me…But I am like a deaf man; I do not hear, like a mute man who does not open his mouth. I have become like a man who does not hear…But for you, O Lord, do I wait; it is you, O Lord my God, who will answer” (Ps. 38:9-15).
Even as we cry out “how long, Lord?” we hold onto, often times with feeble hands, to the promise that He will indeed answer us.
3. Our Only Comfort in Life and Death
Jesus declares in Matthew 5, that He will. He declares that when we mourn in the way that David does in Psalm 38, we are blessed. How can He say such a thing? He can say it because He can finish the statement. “Blessed are those who mourn, because they will be comforted.” It is blessing to mourn because it ushers us into the consolation that is on the other side of suffering. Mourning isn’t blessed because sin and suffering are a good. Mourning is blessed because it is the good response to what isn’t. Mourning is in opposition to seeking our own comfort and paves the way for true comfort. Even more, what if pleasure on the other side of pain is better than pleasure without any pain at all?
Think about being outside on a bitter cold night. You’ve been outside for hours. Your fingers, toes, and ears are numb. Then, you make it home, get on some warm clothes, a loved one makes you a cup of hot tea, and you wrap yourself in a blanket. What does it feel like? In some mysterious way, it feels better than never having been freezing outside in the first place. And there will be following nights when it is bitterly cold outside and you are warm inside and you experience the same thing. The same is true when you are famished and finally get something to eat or thirsty and finally get a drink. The thought and memory of the pain of the past and the present comfort actually serves to increase the pleasure of the comfort you have received on the other side of it.
Could it be that this is true of life with Jesus in a fallen world too? I experienced this. When I sing songs of God’s faithfulness, when I look at my beautiful wife, when I go on a walk by the river downtown, I remember the nights when was on my face in hopelessness and I didn’t want to live anymore. The pleasure of my present hope in Jesus is deepened because of the pain of my past and Jesus’ saving kindness He showed me there.
This reality makes absolutely no sense if pleasure is the prize in life. The beatitudes only make sense when we know and abide in the truth that the good life at its very core, at its very heart, is knowing Jesus, even more, it is Jesus Himself. Jesus prays in John 17:3, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” That word eternal life does not mean physical life, but fullness of life. Jesus is saying here and in Matthew 5 that fullness of life is knowing the living Jesus. So, even if I lose everything, I am blessed because I have Him. C.S. Lewis said, “He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only” (Lewis). So the question for us to sit with for a bit is, who is Jesus?
Jesus is a friend to the weak, wounded, and wayward. He invites us to come, to not tarry until we are better, but to come in our weakness, in our poverty. He says, “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Poverty of spirit is living with empty hands and bent knees, it is an acknowledgement that all we have is the Lords and trusting that in Jesus He declares that all He has is ours. Sometimes God has to take what is in our hands, the things we want, in order to give us what need and what will ultimately satisfy, Himself. He takes in order to give the very thing that qualifies us to come to him, need. In affliction, Jesus weans us off of our independence, our self-reliance, our “I can do it on my own” mentalities, in order to show us the blessing of dependence on Him. Jesus is a friend to those with small bank accounts, failed marriages, the unfulfilled, the disappointed, disillusioned, and discouraged. He blesses those that fess up to the fact that they don’t have what it takes in life.
Jesus dwells at the end of your rope, where we are in over our head. He is the friend of you who are hiding in shame, too fearful to come out into the light with your sin and weakness. Jesus bids you come. Come with your mixed motives. Come with your anger, your fear, your confusion, your cynicism about Jesus’ words in Matthew 5. He doesn’t ask that we come with pure motives, but simply that we would come with empty hands of faith. Jesus says, “When you lose, come, I will give you all you need. When you sin, come, I will wash you. When you fail, come, I will meet you with embrace. Come, I will give you myself. You are mine and I am yours. Abide in me and I in you” And much of the time as quickly as we come, we flee to our own comfort, and so we return again and again. Return, receive, abide again and again and again.
As we come, Jesus changes our sin and suffering. He transforms our pain into a purposeful tool in His hand. Hear these words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 1
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4).
Our mourning, joined with the comfort we receive from God, fuels our faith in our divine Comforter and our love for those who are afflicted. Our mourning weakens our knees and brings them to the ground that we would bow to bless our good God with poverty of spirit. And it is in bowing that our legs are strengthened to walk in love for Him and the people around us. The blessedness of mourning doesn’t minimize our pain, but gives it meaning. What if we were a community of comforted mourners who actively lamented in hope? What if we were a community in which, like Jesus, the afflicted felt at home? What if we were a people that were increasingly dissatisfied with the world and increasingly satisfied with the living Jesus?
As a community, our sin and suffering can now serve as agents of grace that can build up those who are suffering. For the comfort we receive from Jesus is not just for the present, but for our future. We lament in hope that one day all will be made new. Jesus declares in verse 6,
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
The word Jesus uses for righteousness means to be as one ought to be. As we mourn we become acutely aware that this world is not as it ought to be and we ourselves remain bent toward sin. When we suffer loss and endure affliction of various kinds, we start to hunger and thirst less for what is and more for what will be. We are comforted by Jesus’ life in us right here right now and we are comforted by the promise that the suffering we endure now will in the end dissolve into peace.
Jesus promises you, there is a coming day when your weeping will end, when your tears will be dried up in divine love forever. Right now, the Spirit of God is groaning within us with wordless prayers to the Father. He pleads for us and applies the promise of God that we will be satisfied finally and fully, for we will taste and see that He is good. We will see His face and in seeing Him as He is, we will be made like Him (1 John 3:2). We will finally know the glory that isn’t worth comparing to our present suffering. And we will understand the mysterious and holy truth that, beyond our comprehension, in love, God was working out all of it, the good, bad, and ugly for our good. Even when we couldn’t see Him, He was holding us fast in love. That is the hope in which we were saved, in which we find comfort today, and of which we cling to until our final day comes.
