What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (9 page)

There is an unholy momentum in the nations where more and more people, who, in the name of Jesus, are making Him into the image of what they want in a god. Then they are defining love according to the god that they created. It is not Jesus.

One of the core issues of conflict of the generation in which the Lord returns will be the definition of love. Do we love on God’s terms, or do we love on the terms of the humanistic culture that has no reference to obedience to what He has already spoken? We must love Jesus with the intention to “keep His commandments” because Scripture is our pathway to Him and the standard that we will be evaluated by. We can’t say that we love Him and then refuse the path that leads to Him. That would be like saying you love someone in a foreign country but you refuse to look at them, talk to them on the phone, read their messages, get on an airplane to see them, or even speak the same language as them. This isn’t love.

Jesus’s commandments are the tracks that lead to Him. If you love Him, you will take the train and find Him. That does not mean our obedience is mature or that we never fail. I often fail and come up short in my obedience, but my heart is set to obey the written Word of God, most specifically the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7). It is the clearest definition of love in the Bible. There it is in three chapters.

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Jesus doesn’t only want to forgive us; He also wants to own us. He wants to brand us with His name, to mark us and claim us as His own possession. He wants us to bear His name so that everything that is His is ours. It is the meek who will inherit it (Matt. 5:5). Your freedom is in the yoke of Christ and in binding yourself to Him and throwing away the key. I want to be a prisoner of love, bound by affection, motivated by desire, and clinging to Jesus by giving Him control of my life.

Right at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount He makes it clear that He wants the whole of you, not just your deeds but also your heart. It involves more than a checklist; it involves every part of your being, right down to your thoughts. He wants to fully possess you and transform you into the image of love. We transfer the rights of our life into His hands by obeying His written Word. When you agreed to accept His blood for the forgiveness of your sins, you were entering into a covenant to give yourself to Jesus. You do not own yourself any longer. You belong to a Master, and your freedom is found in His words.

It is the most liberating way to live, to live in love. You were created for it. The good thing about His commandments is His heart behind them. All of His commandments lead us to Him, and they lead us to freedom. That’s the stunning part. Many people are wrapped in the heavy chains of darkness, with the master called Sin standing above them, with a whip of fear, shame, regret, anger, depression, lust, and pride, but they are refusing the yoke of Christ in the name of “freedom.” This is irrational. You will be bound, one way or the other, either by sin and darkness or by Love Himself.

I gladly yoke myself to Jesus, even though it is not always easy and I fail many times. His commandments are a delight to my soul and a lamp to my feet. We want to run the course of His commands, knowing that they create in us His original intention and design and therefore our ultimate purpose.

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There is coming a day when each one of us will stand before the Man with fiery eyes, the same Jesus that John the Beloved saw in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 1:12–17) He is the Man who has fire in His eyes, and only His evaluation will stand. He has not been silent on what His standard is. He both demonstrated it and taught it when He was walking on this earth. Then He sent us His Spirit to help us in our weakness. He enjoys the process of our transformation. We can all have gold in the day we stand before Him if we want it, but it will cost everything. (See 1 Corinthians 3:11–15.)

The true measure of a man can be measured only according to Jesus’s lifestyle and words. Our definition of success can be defined only by Jesus’s words and by looking at His life on the earth and imitating Him. This is the only definition of success that will carry over to the age to come, and this is the only path to eternal purpose and eternal greatness.

Love is demonstrated through lives that imitate Love Himself. Jesus showed us what love is when He walked on the earth. The lifestyle He lived was meant to be seen as the greatest expression of love. Those who want to love Him will imitate Him and be disciples of His words. We want to be disciples of Jesus, not of men, because only Jesus has the standard to measure us by and only He knows what an ideal human should be. We must love Him on His terms. The good news is it is so simple anyone can do it. The bad news is it is so simple few will. It is simple but costly.

It costs everything to love Jesus the way He loves us because He gave everything. This is why He asks us to do the same. The Sermon on the Mount defines love on God’s terms. He is not asking us to do anything He did not do. He ran the race ahead of us to show us the way it is to be done (Heb. 6:20). He showed us what it means to be human. Jesus lived before the eyes of His Father, committing His ways and His destiny to His Father. Even when His life looked in vain and as though He had spent His strength for nothing (Isa. 49:4), He cast Himself into the hands of the Father and lived before His eyes without defending Himself or making sure He “got what He deserved.” So much of the Sermon on the Mount is about transferring our confidence in making our lives matter from our own hands into the hands of the Father.

Jesus is meek in His heart. This is not passivity; this is “power in restraint.” He is the God of all creation who walked the streets of Jerusalem, hid His glory, and even died at the hands of the people He created in order to show the lengths love would go. How can the Genesis 1 God be so passionately humble? It is His glory that causes Him to be like this. The yoke of meekness is the yoke that He wears. He wants to bind us to Himself in it, because it is how He is at the heart level (Matt. 11:28–30). The Sermon on the Mount is the way into the yoke of Jesus. It is the “easy yoke” once you get it on but putting it on requires “spiritual violence” (v. 12). This is the true measure of a man, and it seems inside out and upside down.

I love the way Jesus set up His kingdom. It is upside down right now, and things look backward. He has made it so simple. To go high, you just go low. To become rich, you become poor. Anyone can go low and poor. Anyone, everyone, can serve and walk in humility. I adore Jesus, because He says that “they [the meek] shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5), and “the first will be last, and the last will be first” (Mark 10:31). No one can accuse Him of being unfair or unjust, because anyone can do this and therefore fulfill his primary life purpose by being pleasing in His sight. Literally anyone can do it, except the proud. I think that we will be shocked at some of the men and women He “crowns and robes” in that day, because they were men and women we overlooked or shunned in this age. We cannot measure one another, because we cannot see what He sees. He knows the heart of man, and He sees in secret (Matt. 6:1–6, 18).

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The Sermon on the Mount is the way to walk out the first and second commandment. Yet the more I tried to live it, the more I seemed to fail. The more I tried to love God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love others, the more aware I was of my need for Him. It is impossible to love God without supernatural help. I looked at the Sermon on the Mount as an expression of love for Jesus and for mankind, and I saw how short I was falling. I would cry out for help and weep in my immaturity, and then, to my surprise, this whole exercise ended up producing the very attitudes Jesus called blessed!

I will never forget the day I was crying in failure, feeling as though I would never love Jesus and that I was doomed to a life of continually coming up short. My heart was breaking because of how easily I strayed from truth and how quickly I turned from the Lord. I was weeping because I genuinely wanted to love Him but could not seem to get there. As I cried, a friend looked at me and said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” He went on to say that the emotion I was feeling was the evidence of love, not the absence of it. He said that my mourning for righteousness was proof that the seeds were growing in the soil of my soul and that I would, in time, reap the fruit of it if I persevered. This is stunning.

Right at the beginning of Jesus’s sermon He is saying that longing to love Him and to walk in righteousness is a blessed thing, even before we attain it. Trying to live the Sermon on the Mount and failing created this spiritual mourning, which was what He wanted in the first place. It caused me to lean on Him and not my own strength. When my friend said this to me, it was as though a light went on in my heart, and I began to realize that what Jesus was after in this life was not perfection, as we define it, but humility and perseverance. He values humility and perseverance more than instant perfection. That is why life and love are a process.

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I never was a fan of process. Being a very impatient person, I always want to “get to the point.” I am the type who wants to get to the punch line, and I am often perturbed by process. Jesus is very different. His kingdom is like a seed that takes time to grow and bear fruit. One of the primary purposes of life is the process and what it produces in us. If everything were instant, what would we do for all of eternity?

Jesus loves the process and is patient with us in our weakness. The Sermon on the Mount starts the process of transformation that happens in the soul and life of the person who loves Him. It has the power to transform you. It’s the law of the kingdom that starts internally and seemingly insignificant. This sermon is bizarre in its application, because it goes against the stream of our natural impulses to defend ourselves, be greedy, stay comfortable, and to make sure everyone knows how devout we are. All of these are natural tendencies that we have from birth, and they are curbed by the hand of the Potter when we yield to His glorious words in this simple sermon. At first read it may not seem that powerful, but try to live it 100 percent, and you will feel the heat of transformation as you realize that so much of it is the opposite of your natural bend and the opposite of the lust and pride of life. This is because Jesus is so much different than we are. He is love, and therefore, He is humility.

When I was in my early twenties, I became hooked on the Sermon on the Mount. I would corner anyone who gave me the chance and preach it as the lifestyle of love. As I tried to live it out, something in me started to change. The change was not due to living by a set of rules, like some kind of checklist. But I was being transformed, because so much of this sermon is what is done in secret. Over and over Jesus is saying, “My eyes are on you, and everything you do matters. I call it love every time you choose Me, every time you reach for righteousness, every time you turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, refuse to worry about your life. All of this I see as love, and it moves My heart.”

The war on the inside of us is the arena in which we can choose to demonstrate love. That same choice Adam was given in the garden is the same choice we are given time after time. When we choose righteousness, humility, love, and meekness, we are demonstrating not only our allegiance to Jesus but also our affection for Him.

The more I allowed the Sermon on the Mount to be my guide, the more determined I became to walk it out to the utmost. Servanthood, fasting, prayer, a secret life, love for enemies, all of these things He calls love. My life calling is to live before His eyes by walking out His commandments as the instruction manual for my heart and life, confidently knowing that He is watching and that He calls it love. He sees in secret, and it doesn’t matter how many people notice or don’t notice; only His evaluation matters at the end of the day. We know how we will be measured. He has made it clear that the standard we will be measured with on the day we meet Him face-to-face is the standard of Scripture. The Sermon on the Mount is one of the primary places that He has made that standard clear.

I will give you a couple of examples of the transforming power of this sermon. Jesus said, “Whoever slaps you on your right check, turn the other to him also” (Matt. 5:39). This is not talking about being physically assaulted. It is talking about being insulted. For a man to slap another man on the face was an insult. Jesus is saying, “Do not to defend yourself when you are insulted.” There are many times I want to defend myself or prove myself when I feel misunderstood. I can hear the whisper of Jesus, telling me that my reputation is in His hands, not mine. This is a hard one for most people because we naturally want to defend and define ourselves, but He is our defender, and He is the one who defines us. Keeping silent before misunderstanding has always been a challenge and one that I have not always done well, but He sees this struggle and calls it love. Making this choice time after time changes me.

Here’s another example of the transforming power of His words: Jesus exposed how the spirit of immorality operates by telling us that it is rooted first in the mind. Again, He wants the whole person. He said, “Whoever looks at a woman to lust . . . has already committed adultery . . . in his heart” (v. 28). The progression of adultery is lust of the eye leads to adultery in the heart, which leads to circumstances, and then on to physical adultery. The principle is immorality is established first in the area of the eyes. Jesus wants us to understand the role of the “eye gate” as the primary battlefront for stopping the operation of the sin. This applies to all manner of sin, not only sexual sin. It is easier to close the “eye gate” than to put out the fires of immoral passions.

When I read this, I realize Jesus isn’t only asking me to restrain my actions but also to start at the root. He deals with the very root of lust and teaches us how to be transformed at the heart level. This causes me to recognize sin before it has blossomed, and this transforms me from the inside out.