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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Rev. Rodney den Boer > The blessed life in Jesus' kingdom | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Read: Luke 6:12-26; Sing: Ps 113:1, 2, 3; Ps 30:1, 2; Ps 49:1, 5; Ps 126:1, 2, 3; Hy 81:1, 4, 5, 6, 7 Questions for reflection/discussion
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Dear brothers and sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ,
When you think of a good life, what sort of things come to your mind? What is success? The world tells us that a good life is one where you are successful in your business, you have financial security, you managed to buy a house at a fairly young age; you eat a lot of good food, you feast often, you enjoy some fine wines; you have a lot of fun and laughter, good times, holidays; and you are popular, everyone likes you, you’re the cool kid at school.
Our Lord Jesus Christ speaks about that sort of life and says, “how terrible.” It ought to shock us. This morning, we’ll see how our Lord Jesus Christ takes the world’s values and turns them upside down, and says that life in his kingdom is the opposite. A good life, a blessed life, is not to be rich, but poor; not to be full, but hungry; not to be laughing, but mourning; not to be respected, but to be reviled. This morning we’ll see that:
The blessed life in Jesus’ kingdom is the opposite of what the world values
- Blessed are the poor
- Woe to the rich
1. Blessed are the poor
One of the central activities of our Lord was preaching, because he knew that the people needed to hear about his good and gracious kingdom. He said in Luke 4:43, “I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, because for this purpose I have been sent.” He wanted to tell people about the good news that he had come as the king, he had come to destroy sin and the devil and to put an end to suffering, he had come to bring freedom, healing, and restoration, that’s what his kingdom was all about. He knew the true need of every human heart and he preached to them the good news that in his kingdom that deepest need would be met.
Isn’t that also what we need, brothers and sisters, even as we come this morning with our hurts and burdens and concerns, and guilt and shame, we need to hear the voice of our King telling us about his kingdom. Notice in 6:20 how our Lord lifts up his eyes to them, he makes eye contact with them, he speaks to them personally. That’s how our Lord Jesus speaks. And you know, he is personally speaking also to you this morning, he tells you about the good news of life in his kingdom.
He starts by saying, “blessed are you poor.” The word “blessed,” is one that means “happy” or “fortunate.” It’s a word often used in the OT, for example in some of the psalms. Psalm 1 says blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the ways of the wicked, but who loves God’s law and follows his ways. Psalm 2 says blessed is the one who trusts in God’s anointed King. God told his people that following his ways and trusting him would lead to a life of blessing.
Jesus says that this blessing is for the poor. He is speaking about the economically poor, people who have little money, who barely make ends meet, who live paycheck to paycheck, who sometimes don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That was a lot of people in the Roman empire, including many of Jews in the crowd to whom Jesus spoke. Blessed are you.
Luke, in his gospel, has a particular concern for the poor. He shows how the good news of Jesus’ kingdom is especially good news for the poor. When Jesus was born, to whom did the angels announce his birth? It was to lowly shepherds, ordinary, poor people in the fields watching their sheep. When Jesus announced his ministry in Nazareth and read from the scroll of Isaiah, what did he say? The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor (Luke 4:18). What is special about poor people?
Being poor is blessed because it naturally leads people to depend on God. It is not the condition of poverty itself that is blessed. The poet Agur prayed in Proverbs 30: “give me neither poverty nor riches…” he didn’t want to be poor because he would be tempted to steal. Poverty is not a blessing in itself. But it is a blessing insofar as it leads one to depend fully upon God.
Throughout much of the OT, the poor people were mistreated. They were supposed to be well-cared for among God’s people. But the prophets rebuked the Israelites, because the rich exploited the poor, they indentured the poor people as servants, they didn’t give them fair pay, they didn’t care for them. And so, many of these poor had nowhere else to turn, and they turned to God, they cried out to him, they depended on him completely. That’s what is blessed about being poor, it naturally leads one to depend upon God, the one who promised to arise and take up their cause.
That dependence on God is what Jesus says is most blessed. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “blessed are the poor in spirit.” Blessed are those who know they are weak, who know they have no resources in themselves to meet the demands of life, and who turn, in that poverty, to God, the one who can and does help. Sometimes trials or other hardship make us realise that, too. Life is so fragile, we are completely dependent on God, and Jesus says, “blessed are you poor.”
Luke further explains the blessed people as those who are hungry, weeping, and hated. Blessed are you who hunger now. Think of Jesus’ parable in Luke 16 of Lazarus and the rich man. The rich man ate very well every day, but Lazarus was a poor beggar and he wanted to be fed with crumbs from the rich man’s table. He was hungry. He was blessed. Or think of the apostle Paul, who described his life in 1 Corinthians 4:11, “to the present hour we both hunger and thirst, and we are poorly clothed, and beaten, and homeless.” Paul knew hunger, for the sake of following Christ. Blessed are those who hunger now.
And blessed are you who weep now. Jesus is not talking about any sort of grief. Anyone can cry. Tears can even be selfish. But Jesus is speaking about those who grieve over sin and suffering. They grieve over their own sin because it offends God. And they don’t ignore the brokenness around them by laughing it away, but are drawn to those who hurt and long for restoration. They weep with those who weep. They just get it when Ecclesiastes says it’s better to be in the house of mourning than the house of feasting. Blessed are the ones who just want to be with God’s suffering people. Jesus says, blessed are you who weep, who don’t ignore the sufferings of others, especially your own brothers and sisters, but you weep with them.
And fourthly, blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. This is not a suffering for something you’ve done wrong. But, as Peter writes in 1 Peter 3:14, “If you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you are blessed.” And in 1 Peter 4:14, “If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you…” You ought to be very happy, then, just like Peter and the other apostles in Acts 5:41, when they were beaten and commanded not to speak in the name of Jesus, they went away “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name.”
What is a good life? What is a successful life? It is to be poor, completely dependent on God, to be hungry now, to weep, and to be unpopular because you follow Jesus Christ. Jesus says you are blessed! Why? Because yours is the kingdom of God! And this reminds us of Daniel 7, where the Ancient of Days gives the kingdom to the Son of Man, and it is said in that chapter that the saints receive the kingdom. The saints who will also suffer for the sake of the kingdom, who will be persecuted, who will be made poor, hungry, who will weep, and be unpopular because they serve God and follow Jesus Christ, these will receive the kingdom, they will be filled, they will laugh, they have reason to rejoice already now.
And this is possible because Jesus Christ came to suffer and die for people like this. He made himself poor for our sakes. He was poor in this world, he had nowhere to lay his head, he faced hunger, think of his wilderness temptations by the devil; he fully identified with the suffering of this world and wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus; he was hated by his own people, he was excluded and reviled, his name was cast out as evil, he was the great prophet rejected by his own people. He was made poor.
And he did this to make us rich toward God. The kingdom of Jesus Christ is one where we are filled in relationship to God, because Jesus takes away the sin and misery and death that lies at the root of our problems. The prophet Isaiah invited us into his kingdom in 55:1, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” The invitation goes to the poor, those who have no money. The invitation goes to the hungry, to the weeping, the outcasts: Jesus says, come to me, I’ll never cast you out like the world; come and experience the riches of my kingdom.
Come and be filled and look forward to the great marriage feast of the Lamb. Come to me, I’ll collect all your tears in my bottle and one day I’ll wipe them all away. Come to me and be accepted and loved and valued like you never have before, because I have been banished in your place and I’ll never reject you. Come and know true love, come and have true life.
And come follow me, says Jesus. It might mean physical poverty. That was the case for the Hebrews, who lost possessions when they believed in Jesus Christ, which they joyfully accepted, Hebrews 10:34. It might mean you’ll be hungry, like the apostle Paul. It might mean you experience more suffering and weeping as you weep with the people of God and suffer with them, as you come face to face with the injustice and brokenness in the world. It might mean people will hate you. You may not receive the job you’d really like. You might be fired because of your Christian values. You might face discrimination because you uphold what God says about marriage, or you cry out against the murder of unborn children or elderly people. You might be teased because you stand up for someone who is bullied at school, or because you refuse to laugh at a rude joke and call it out as evil.
But the Lord Jesus says about you, and his voice should matter most to us, he says, then you are blessed. You are the most blessed, the happiest, the most successful people in the world. I ask you, dear brothers and sisters, is this how you think about a successful life? You may not have anything else, but you have Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. Blessed are the poor. Let’s see further how this contrasts with the rich.
2. Woe to the rich
The word “woe” means something like, “alas,” or “how terrible.” It’s more a statement expressing pity over misfortune than a statement of condemnation. It’s like when you hear about bushfires and people losing their houses over east, you might say, “how awful,” or “woe to them.” The Lord Jesus says, “woe to you rich.” How terrible.
As we’ve already seen, rich people in Israel were rebuked by the prophets because they exploited the poor for their personal gain. For example, Isaiah 5:8 says, “woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room,” who just keep getting richer and richer in real estate; and in Jeremiah 5:26, God says, “wicked men are found among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men. Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of deceit; therefore, they have been great and rich; they have grown fat and sleek.” The prophets rebuked the rich because they became rich by oppressing and exploiting the poor.
How terrible if you are rich like this, says Jesus, because you have received your consolation. You’ve had your good times. One die, you’ll die, and you can’t take anything with you. Psalm 49 speaks about this reality: “be not afraid when a man becomes rich, when the glory of his house increases. For when he dies, he will carry nothing away; his glory will not go down after him.” Your riches can give you absolutely no help when you meet God at the end of your life. You can only look forward to eternal poverty. How terrible to have riches for this moment in time that is our lives here, and to have eternal poverty.
How terrible to be full now, and eternally hungry. Like the rich man who ate sumptuously in Luke 16 with Lazarus begging at his gate, you’ve had your fill now. You’ve lived it up and feasted. But, says Jesus, how terrible for you, because you shall hunger.
How terrible to laugh now. It doesn’t mean that laughter is bad. Our Lord Jesus Christ was truly human, we can be sure that he experienced times of great joy, that he laughed with his disciples and his dad and mum and siblings. But he speaks here about those who ignore their sin, who laugh it away; Jesus speaks about those who do not weep with the people of God and are not sensitive to the suffering of their brothers and sisters, who are so self-absorbed that they carry on with their own pleasure and entertainment as their number one pursuit. How terrible, because you shall mourn and weep. For such people there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal misery.
And how terrible if everyone speaks well of you because you valued popularity over principle, because you valued the praise of man more than the praise of God. Then you’re just like the false prophets. You know the prophets who spoke, “peace, peace,” when there was no peace. One example is the prophet Hananiah in Jeremiah 28, when Jeremiah was telling the people about a seventy-year exile, the prophet Hananiah came and said, “no, no, it’s not going to be that bad at all, in fact, in two years time, God is going to rescue us from Babylon and destroy Nebuchadnezzar.” It was a nice message, but it was false. Hananiah was preaching what the people liked. People maybe said, “he’s a great preacher, that Hananiah! Jeremiah, he’s always preaching judgement, I don’t like him.” How terrible to be like Hananiah, valuing the praise of man above the praise of God.
You see the picture Christ gives here is someone who seeks treasure on earth, rather than in heaven; one who lives for himself, rather than for God. How terrible to live like that, because you might seem to have a good life now, you might seem successful in the eyes of the world, but is that really a good or successful life? It’s going to turn out terribly for you when Christ returns. Woe to the rich.
Dear brothers and sisters, there are some situations in our lives when the emptiness of riches is very obvious to all of us. When we go through trials and hardship, what good can money do then? When we’re confronted by the fragility of life, when death comes close, who cares what car you drive or what nice things you have in your house? The Lord teaches us through these things that riches are meaningless, but he brings comfort, he is present in times of trouble, he has come to set us free from the power of the devil, from the fear of death, from the root cause of all our misery, which is our sin. Jesus gives us fulness of life in his kingdom and is with us through every trial. What are earthly riches in comparison to that?
So, this text comes with a warning for us. Because many of us do have earthly riches, we are far richer than many of those Jesus preached to, richer than many in our world today. And that can place us in a precarious position, it can be deadly for our spiritual lives, and the danger is this: riches tempt us to be self-sufficient. I don’t need God. Have you thought that? Maybe it’s not an explicit thought, but you live like you don’t need God. You hardly pray. You hardly think about God. You are a practical atheist. Further, being rich can tempt us to look down on others who earn less or drive less fancy cars or wear certain clothes and don’t have certain types of expensive shoes.
Jesus said, “it’s hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” He said at other times that to enter the kingdom of God we need to come as children, fully dependent, not bringing any status or anything else. Riches can be baggage that make us too large to fit on the narrow road. We need to come with empty hands. And so, dear brothers and sisters, is there anything that is preventing you from following Christ? Are your riches preventing you from walking the narrow road? Is there any pride or self-sufficiency which you have not renounced?
Jesus says to us today, how terrible to trust in yourself, in your own financial security, to be full and to laugh now, how terrible to please man rather than to please God. When Christ returns, the first will be last. The Lord Jesus Christ will himself be their judge, and they will be cast into eternal condemnation. How terrible, how awful, how woeful.
But the poor who belong to the kingdom of Jesus Christ are blessed, eternally happy in his presence. Having him as your Lord and Saviour is worth giving up absolutely everything else. Do you believe that? That’s what Paul says in Philippians 3:7, “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” Being in Christ, receiving his kingdom, is worth everything.
So, what do we do with our possessions? The church of Jesus Christ is where his Spirit works and it begins to take the shape of Jesus’ kingdom. As the Spirit changes us, our possessions become meaningless to us, but we want to use them, not for ourselves, but to help others. So, we give to the poor. We certainly don’t look down on others who have less than us. We use our possessions to be hospitable. That’s exactly how Luke describes the early church in Acts 2 and 4. In Acts 2:45, they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And in Acts 4:32, no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common… there was not a needy person among them. That’s how the Spirit works, that’s a taste of the kingdom that Jesus Christ is bringing in, that’s how his redemptive rule is shown. Do you have an open hand, an open wallet, an open heart for the kingdom of Jesus Christ?
Dear brothers and sisters, what is a good life? What is a successful life? We’ve seen from the teaching of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that it is the opposite of what the world values. So, let’s think like Jesus thinks. Let’s live in full dependence on him, trusting him for our daily needs, humbling ourselves before him because of our sin, reaching out to the sorrowful and hurting around us, embracing suffering for the sake of following Christ, and confessing him faithfully before men, and rejoicing when we suffer for his name. That’s a blessed, a truly happy life. Amen.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Rev. Rodney den Boer, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
(c) Copyright 2026, Rev. Rodney den Boer
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