When Michael Jordan announced the first of what would ultimately be his three retirements from the NBA, Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago Bulls, made this proclamation:
“He’s living the American Dream. The American Dream is to reach a point in your life where you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, and can do everything that you want to do.”
The truth, of course, is that our culture’s entertainment icons and sports heroes, who appear to be hogging the inside track to the Good Life, rarely lead lives that morph into Happily-Ever-Afters.
If there really is an American Dream beckoning for your allegiance, you should know that Jesus of Nazareth also has a dream for your life.
It is a radically different dream – the antithesis, in fact, of doing whatever you want and turning your back on whatever you find unacceptable. Jesus’ version of the Good Life has a startling and sharp-edged quality to it that appears in its rawest form in the opening words to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-12), which have come to be known as the Beatitudes.
Jesus’ dream for your life is that both your outside appearance and your inside reality will progressively become just like his.
So who’s most likely to experience such a transformation?
According to Jesus, it isn’t the educated or the powerful or the self-confident or the make-it-happen people in the world – the high achievers who hit the big shot or close the big deal. The people who are most likely to cast all their hope on him are those who are poor – both materially poor and spiritually poor – because their poverty compels them to be desperate.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he says, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3).
In a trivial way we may count ourselves blessed if we find an open parking space in front of Target on a rainy day. Biblically, perhaps the best way to render “blessed” to modern readers might be, “you incredibly lucky, jackpot-winning person.” Being showered with God’s favor is like hitting all the Powerball numbers in the game of life.
“How incredibly lucky are the poor in spirit,” says Jesus. What does this mean?
Scottish Bible commentator William Barclay notes that the concept of “the poor” in ancient Israel had an interesting evolution. At first, poor people were identified as those who had little or nothing. Because they had little, they had no influence, even on the course of their own lives. Because they had no influence, powerful and irresponsible people were left free to crush them. Because they were crushed by others and were desperate for help, poor people were those most likely to place their hope in God.
They hoped in God because they had no other hope.
Jesus opens his Sermon on the Mount by saying, “Blessed are those who are so desperate for help that they totally depend on God, because they know they cannot depend on anything else.”
And that presents a problem for affluent people in the United States. If Jerry Reinsdorf was right about the American Dream, we’re living in a society that is urging its citizens to figure out how not to be desperate for anything.
Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are the comfortable, because that means God must be taking care of them.” He says just the opposite. Only those who are desperate for God as their only security are likely to sell out to him.
And unless we sell out to Jesus, we’ll just play religious games in Jesus’ name and call it “going to church.”
TV commercials assure us that we can count on Oil of Olay to reverse the effects of aging. And we can count on Pennzoil to work like liquid ball bearings. And we can count on Diehard batteries to start our cars, even if they’ve been sitting on frozen lakes all winter in Minnesota. Videographers try to document such claims and display them on the screen.
Right now, could an advertising agency build a credible campaign that features you saying, "You can count on Christ"? If the camera closed in on your checkbook, and your calendar, and the last argument you had, would everybody watching be led to conclude, "You know, Jesus really is a person you can totally count on"?
Jesus has a dream for our lives – that we will feel so desperate for him, in contrast to all spiritual rivals, that our dependence will be something people can actually see.
In the Beatitudes Jesus goes on to say, “Blessed are those who mourn – who grieve their own spiritual brokenness. Blessed are the meek – who know that they cannot leverage God with spiritual Brownie points and therefore must simply trust him.”
Matthew 5:6 says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness [that is, to be totally right with God and to display God’s “rightness” day by day], for they will be filled.”
It's worth noting that in the Greek language the words for eating and drinking are usually followed by what's called the genitive case – specifically, the partitive genitive. In Greek, to say that I hunger for pizza is to say literally, "I'm hungry for a piece of pizza."
This Beatitude is different. Here Jesus follows the verbs for hungering and thirsting with the accusative case. That gives them the special meaning of desiring the whole thing.
In other words, "I don't want just a slice of a walk with God. I don't want a one-course serving of spirituality to make me happy on Sundays. I want all of it – for all of my life.”
Jesus says that anyone who is that desperate for that much of God is blessed, for they shall be satisfied.
May your deepest dream for your own life start looking more and more like Jesus’ deepest dream for your life.
Because if that happens, you won’t even notice that you never did get around to winning the lottery.
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