Restorying Virtue – 3/10/24

In 1908 G.K. Chesterton, a British philosopher, wrote Orthodoxy, which is a kind of spiritual autobiography explaining his journey from agnosticism to Christianity. In his chapter entitled “The Suicide of Thought,” he says this:

“The modern world is full of wild and wasted virtues. … The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also, and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.”

What is he talking about? He summarizes: the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. What does he mean? What does he mean by virtues going mad? He explains,

“The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

He gives two examples. One,

“Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless.”

Sample number two, “Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” Do you see those two examples of Christian virtues gone mad? Truth divorced from pity. Pity wandering away from truth. Christian virtues gone mad. Chesterton seems to be seeing something good. Let’s bring it into the physical world.

Let’s say you have a car that is good for transportation, but you decide to divorce it from the road and rumble along the sidewalk, blowing away pedestrians. You have a good vehicle being used in a way it was never intended because you’re isolating it from its purpose— still being used for transportation but causing great damage. When the virtues of Christianity are extracted from the other virtues of Christianity, isolated from the other virtues of Christianity— and I would say Chesterton really doesn’t go there. But I would say, more importantly, from the larger story of Christianity, those virtues are easily abducted for harmful purposes. Let me bring it down.

Example: a college student recently announces he’s no longer calling himself a Christian. He’s calling himself an atheist. He explains this transition as a necessary one and a necessary deconstruction of faith due to the fact that he has a deep concern for justice for his LGBTQ friends. And you ask him about that. Like, why are you concerned about justice? Why do you care for someone you view as marginalized? Why is that a concern for you? As soon as he opens his mouth and explains, he is trying to build an atheist argument on a very Christian foundation. Christian virtues gone mad. Where do you get this idea? Justice. Oh, that came from Christianity. Where do you get this idea of caring about the marginal? Oh, that came from Christianity.

C.S. Lewis ran into this reality as an atheist when he attacked the God he disbelieved in. He writes in Mere Christianity,

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

He’s realizing he’s having to stand on a Christian foundation in order to attack Christianity.

More recently, Tom Holland, in his massive book Dominion, describes his own realization of this. By the way, if that book is a little much, a more helpful book might be The Air We Breathe by Glen Scrivener. Excellent. Back to Holland. Educated at Cambridge and Oxford, rejected Christianity, became a historian and award-winning author. But the more he studied the ancient civilizations, the more alien he felt. Why did he not embrace the predatorial values of Sparta or Rome? Why did he disown the values of Caesar, who was reported to have killed over a million Gauls and enslaved about another million? He explains,

“It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all.”

This was deeply unsettling to Holland, who, as a non-Christian, is realizing that he is far more shaped by Christian ethics and values than he wanted to admit. Why did he care about the weak? That certainly didn’t come from atheism. Why did he care about the poor? There’s only one source. Holland came to realize that the teachings of Jesus have transformed the world far more than he and many others are willing to admit, and that his own ethics and virtues rose from and rest on the life of Jesus. But, as Chesterton observes, in our world today, these virtues of Jesus are often extracted, isolated, abducted from Jesus and from the other virtues.

One of the primary places we can go back to find the source is Jesus’ most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. If you want to know the fountain that a lot of this contamination rose from, the contamination of the Western conscience, that we would actually care for the weak—atheist, agnostic, doesn’t matter—that we would care for the weak, for the vulnerable, it rises from (among other things) Jesus’ life and this sermon known as the sermon on the Mount.

Last week, we did an overview of the whole thing, and we’re not going to repeat all that, so if you weren’t here last week, I strongly encourage you to try to go back and watch that or listen to that, preferably with notes in front of you because it is a lot to take in. Today, we want to jump back in with the first four Beatitudes.

I want us all to resist the temptation to view these virtues as isolated ideals, as if we’re in the Golden Corral and we can pick what we want to put on our tray— or not. And I would recommend in the Golden Corral that you not, but be that as it may, you have that option in that buffet. This is not such a buffet for clues. The virtues described in the Beatitudes are not intended to be isolated.

Number one, the pronouns with unspecified referents. What is that? Verse one,

“Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them …”

Matthew is emphasizing here that the preacher of chapters five to seven cannot fully be understood just by hearing his sermon. To be understood, you must go back to chapters one through four to be introduced to who he is. The King who was born a baby in the line of David. Matthew keeps using the expression “that it might be fulfilled” all throughout those four chapters, “as it is written.” Why? Because he’s linking this to a much larger story. The new and better Moses is giving a new filled-up messianic Torah. Pronouns point us back to this larger story.

Second, the repetition of “blessed” nine times, which means favored by God, happy, fortunate. These are the ones who have “made it.” They’re truly living “the good life.” But by using the adjective “blessed” for each one, we are to see these not as isolated qualities but as a larger, “happily-ever-after” story. A new Kingdom identity.

Number three, the timing of this life of blessing. It’s hard to tell whether there are 8 or 9 beatitudes, either two sets of four or three sets of three. If there are two sets of four, then the last one mentioned in verses 11 and 12, the last “blessed,” is most likely an expansion on the eighth one. In that case, there would be two sets of four with a little expansion beatitude at the end. One of the indications that that might be the case, which I believe it is, is the timing described in the first and eighth, as I mentioned last week. You see them in the present tense. Verse three and ten are like bookends, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” All the ones in between are in the future. They shall be comforted, shall inherit, shall be satisfied. And by the way, a little sidebar here: the first four in the Greek (we won’t notice it in the English) are alliterative. They all start with pi (the Greek word for poor, for mourning, for meek, for hungering), which is another indication that we have a set of four and a set of four. But the key point here is to remember that by using present tense and future tense, we are seeing a “now but not yet,” an unfolding story going somewhere. Not just a list of qualities that you can randomly pick from.

And then finally, the overflow of the Beatitudes into salt (verse 13) and light (verse 14). The kingdom identity is not a series of segregated scruples but is more like layers or waves of luminous goodness that radiate beyond us. The kingdom identity is intended to go somewhere for, as you see in verse 16, our neighbors’ good and our Father’s glory. So, we can’t isolate these virtues.

With all that introduction, I want us to do two things. One, to summarize four of Beatitudes. And then two, to drill down into one of them, the meek one, in order to see how it’s situated in this larger story. We don’t have time to do all four that way, so we’ll summarize all four and land on meekness. Let’s go.

Number one, the spiritually destitute are participants of the kingdom. Verse three,

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The favored ones—we began last week seeing—see their need, recognize our desperate condition. Praying things like, “Father, if you don’t forgive me, fill me, clothe me, rescue me, save me— I am nothing and I have nothing.” There’s a desperate recognition of our desperate condition.

I hope you can see that this condition is not isolated. It’s not wandering alone. Jesus is saying with different words what Isaiah promised in Isaiah 61:1,

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me [this servant of the Lord Jesus] to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.”

In contrast to viewing the destitute as—in almost all ancient cultures—as despised, write them off, Christ says no. Actually, they are participants in my kingdom. As Doctor Charles Quarles writes, “The poor in spirit are not merely subjects of this kingdom but participate in the Messiah’s rule as his representatives.” He’s choosing the least of these.

Number two, the emotionally shattered will receive comfort. Verse four,

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

We had a funeral on Wednesday for our brother Richard Orr. Matt began welcoming everyone who was over in the community room. And then he said, “We grieve with hope because we know that Richard is doing far better off than any of us in this room.” When he said that, I was kind of caught off guard. You heard these waves of affirmation. Yes, he is doing better than any of us in this room. When you stop and think about, what just happened? We’re at a funeral. We’re mourning. Christians mourn. But their mourning is not wandering alone. It’s not isolated. It’s not grieving for grieving sake. It’s not an end in itself. It’s not, the more I grieve, the more spiritual I am. No, it’s actually going somewhere. Blessed are those who mourn for they should be comforted. Grieving doesn’t have the last word. The grief is not a solitary sadness. It’s not a virtue gone mad.

The Bible talks about grieving from a lot of different angles, like grieving over a loss like I just described. But also, the Bible will call us to grieve over our sin. But even as it does that, notice it doesn’t call us to grieve over our sin in an isolated manner. Listen to 2 Corinthians 7:9-10,

“As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”

Worldly grief travels alone and ends with hopelessness. Godly grief has companions and fruitfulness, produces repentance and salvation. Our grief is going somewhere.

In the early years of our church, I met almost every week with an older gentleman in our church. Some of you may remember Bill Swartz. As we would meet almost every week to pray, he pretty consistently would pray Psalm 126:5,

“Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy!”

That was his life, and the next one as well was his life passage. Often, as we were praying for children that he was ministering to it, a children’s ministry and other people that he longed to come to know the Lord, he would be weeping. Verse six goes on,

“He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”

So his grieving is not wandering alone, it’s actually leading to a gathering, a harvest of joy. Blessed are those who mourn. They shall be comforted.

Number three, the humbly gentle will inherit the earth. Verse five,

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Meek means gentle or humble. We’ll come back to this one.

Number four, the morally inadequate or deficient will be satisfied. Verse six,

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”

Righteousness here has both a horizontal longing to see things made right with people, as well as a vertical longing to see things made right with God. Let me show you an example of what we mean by horizontal.

Leviticus 19:36,

“You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin —”

Pause for a second. That word “just” four times, “sedaq” is the Hebrew word. It means a righteous. We might translate it fair, equitable, honest. Just like what? He’s getting very practical here. When you’re in the market and someone comes to your booth to buy spices and you weigh out those spices, don’t tip the scale. Don’t cheat your neighbor. God cares about how righteous you are in relation to your neighbors. Why? Why does he care? Look what he says next.

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

We’re talking about weighing spices or other purchases and God is saying, you don’t just see this righteousness in its solitary life. You see it in the context of who I am and what I’m doing. I have brought you out of Egypt, not so that you can shaft your neighbor or cheat your coworker.

Look at the vertical example. Oh, there’s so many here, but Psalm 33:4 is one,

“For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”

I’m tempted to go off on a big discussion of what theologians call the simplicity of God, but we won’t. Simplicity of God does not mean God is simple, a simpleton. It simply means that you can’t properly understand God as an accumulation of his attributes, and even more so, as if you could pull out certain attributes and comprehend who he is. I’m not really into the holiness of God. That’s kind of scary. I’m kind of into the love of God or some other characteristic. What the doctrine of the simplicity of God is getting at is God is not the accumulation of his attributes as if you could understand him. If I could just get this or this characteristic of God — his essence is love, his essence is holiness, righteousness. And you see an example of this in Psalm 33. He loves righteousness and justice. The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. These characteristics or attributes of God are not in isolation. They don’t wander alone. You’ll never know God if you just think, oh, I’m just going to compartmentalize him to try to grasp his greatness. I need to stop there. Let’s do this case study on meekness.

I hope you can see what we mean when we talk about “restorying,” like bringing some of these individual values, virtues, qualities into the larger narrative, and they begin to make sense and not wander alone. A good definition of meekness is “faith and patience that produces gentleness.” A larger one might be faith + patience = gentleness. A larger one might be confidence in God’s timing and provision (that’s the faith part) enables us to refuse to take shortcuts (that’s the patience part). They will not put on the ring of power and respond with gentleness.

Jesus modeled this meekness for 30 years as he lived in obscurity. He modeled this meekness in his temptation, as we saw last month when Satan tried to get him to take shortcuts. After 40 days of fasting, he rejected Satan’s shortcuts to provision. Hey, turn stones to bread. Nothing wrong with that. Or protection. Jump off the temple. Angels will catch you. Prominence. Worship Satan. You get all the kingdoms in the glory right now without a cross, without waiting. Right now. Do you see how tempting that is for us as Americans? We don’t do waiting well, do we? Like, it takes a whole day for Amazon to deliver my books. Like, what is wrong? What is wrong with that?

I hope we can get this. It’s not like Jesus gritted his teeth and responded with gentleness and confidence in God. No, he saw himself as part of a much larger story. If you can’t see the story, you’re not going to be able to respond in the moment and say no to the temptation. Meekness makes no sense apart from the larger story. Jesus actually defined himself as meek. Matthew 11:29,

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am meek [that’s the word, I am gentle] and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls.”

Jesus, as Dane Ortlund brilliantly describes in his great book, Gentle and Lowly,

“Jesus is not trigger-happy. Not harsh, reactionary, easily exasperated. He is the most understanding person in the universe. The posture most natural to him is not a pointed finger but open arms.”

I think a lot of us have a fragmented view of meekness, as if it’s just kind of a personality. You know, she’s a meek soul. She’s a/he’s a gentle soul. As if it’s a personality thing. Meekness makes no sense if it is severed from the story, if it’s wandering alone. Let me show you an example of this.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book Between the World and Me, writes this,

“I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas.”

Now pause here for a second. This is tragic. First of all, that he views the church and its mysteries as a place to hide from reality. In some ways, you can understand this because the church has, at times in history, run from God’s call to us to be conduits of justice and tried to run and hide. And so tragically, in some ways, you can understand. But he goes on to say his parents rejected all dogmas. Hello. If you read the book, you realize it’s teeming with dogma from cover to cover. Christian virtues gone mad. He goes on,

“We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ meant nothing to me. … My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.”

Ta-Nehisi’s story is hopeless because its moral arc is bent toward chaos, concluding in a coffin. Do you see how meekness makes no sense in a story like that? Like, why would you wait? Why would you not lash out, seek blood, pursue revenge? It’s now or never. Someone’s got to win. There is no future justice. There’s no future story. It’s now or the coffin. The way we respond in the moment is going to be defined by the story we believe that has everything to do with the moment. It’s not just a personality thing. Ta-Nehisi rejected Doctor King’s view of the story that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. He rejected that. And yet what’s so tragic is throughout the whole book, there is this craving for justice. But, but, but his story does not. Permit it. Very hopeless. Christian virtues gone mad.

Let’s go back to the definition. Meekness could be defined as “confidence in God’s timing and provision.” It enables us to refuse to take shortcuts and respond with gentleness. What do I mean by shortcuts? You yell at your kids to try to get them to obey. Is it good for kids to obey? Absolutely. Didn’t even wait for you to answer, sorry. So I think I need to manipulate that, coerce that through my sinful anger. It’s the opposite. That’s a shortcut. Or you intimidate your team at work in order to hit a deadline. You cut off a friend who doesn’t agree with you, or you manipulate him or her in order to get a desired end, or you humiliate a political opponent just to prove your point. These are all shortcuts. Meekness is faith. I’m trusting the timing and provision of God, plus patience. Not going to stick the ring of power on just to get a quick victory here. Not going to take a shortcut just to say I won or so I can show you. The result of that, what that produces is a gentleness. As you’ve heard many times, it’s not a weakness as we would think of weakness, but a gentle strength.

Next month will be three years since my wife Karen first found a tumor. It was six months after that that she was diagnosed with LMS, leiomyosarcoma, and given about 18 months to live and told there’s no cure. She currently— I haven’t given an update in a while, so I’ll give an update. She’s currently, every three weeks, receiving a triple treatment of three things: chemo, immunotherapy, and injections and she feels pretty good right now. She just had chemo on Wednesday, so she’s resting this weekend, pretty exhausted, but we thank God for sustaining her life, for hundreds and hundreds of people who have prayed and continue to pray for her, and her heart is at peace and full of joy, and we are both still crying out to God to completely eliminate the tumors. She has a scan on Monday, first one this year, to find out if the main tumor that has been surgically removed several times but keeps coming back with a fury, if that is shrinking, and we believe it is. So we’re looking forward to getting that scan result tomorrow.

One of our favorite songs — I don’t know if any of you are like this: I get a song and I drive it into the ground until I hate it. I do not hate this song yet. It has been a huge encouragement to both of us over the past six months, maybe a year. It’s called You’ve Already Won, and I hope we can learn it today. It starts,

“There’s peace that outlasts darkness
Hope that’s in the blood
There’s future grace that’s mine today
That Jesus Christ has won
So I can face tomorrow
For tomorrow’s in your hands
All I need you will provide
Just like you always have
I’m fighting a battle
You’ve already won
No matter what comes my way
I will overcome.”

I know this is weird, but this is my favorite part:

“I don’t know what you’re doing
But I know what you’ve done
I’m fighting a battle that
You’ve already won.”

Let me talk about that for a second.

That theme I mentioned several years ago when we first started this journey, that theme of certainty in the midst of uncertainty, has been a dominant theme for us. I know a lot of Christians have the assumption that if you’re walking in the Spirit, you know everything. Not all knowledge, but you know exactly what God is doing. My experience through this, I think Karen would agree, has been kind of the opposite. God has made clear you’re not going to really know, but your certainty is not in your diagnosis or the medical prognosis or the treatment plan or what he or she, they, you feel, think. Trust me. And that theme of I don’t know what you’re doing, as you’ve heard me say before, God is calling us to follow him and he rarely uses his turn signals. He will just veer left or right, and we’re following, and it’s like, Lord, could you give us some heads up? But that theme of “I don’t know what you’re doing / But I know what you’ve done” and I know that you’ve won.

When I look back, I see your indescribable love through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. You’ve washed us clean. You’ve rescued our lives, and I look forward with all that you have planned. And so, because I know what you’ve done and I know that you’ve won—that massive story, which is rock solid—I can have confidence in this moment. You’ve got us. Do you see the connection there? When we get fearful, anxious, doubting, that’s usually when we get a little snappy. Get a little attitude. This idea of gentleness seems insane, but please understand it’s connected to the larger story. Have I lost sight of what you’ve done and what you’ve won?

He goes on,

“There’s mercy in the waiting
Manna for today
And when it’s gone I know you’re not
You are my hope and stay

When the sea is raging
Your spirit is my help
He’ll fix my eyes on Jesus Christ
And I’ll say that it is well
Oh I know that it is well.”

Here’s the chorus.

“I know how the story ends
We will be with you again
You’re my savior my defense
No more fear in life or death
I know how this story ends.”

So we’re going to have the worship team come and sing that over to us, but at any moment feel free to join in if you know this song, and then I’ll come back after this song and invite us to pray.