Luke #16: Changing the Rules (6:20-49)

Good morning again, and thank you for being here this morning with the church family of Eastern Hills as we remember and reflect on what Christ has done for us: how He died in our place to pay for our sins on the cross, and how He overcame death and rose again on that first Easter, so that those who believe in Him can be saved and have eternal life. As we’ve already declared through music today, this is the point of Easter. And I pray that that message has come through clearly in all that’s happened this weekend. Thanks praise band, Trevor, Joe, Children’s Ministry team, and students, AV, Security, and Family Services teams for all of your work this weekend to bless and encourage this congregation through all of the events that took place. You’ve exemplified our mission as a church: to be people helping people live out the unexpected love of Jesus every day.

If you’re a guest or visiting with us this morning, welcome! We’d love to send you a note thanking you for your visit today, but to be able to do that, we have to get a little information from you. Could you please just fill out one of the Welcome cards that you’ll find in the back of the pew in front of you? When you’ve done that, you can return it to us in one of two ways: you can drop it in the offering boxes by the doors as you leave when service is over, or I’d appreciate the opportunity to introduce myself, so after service, I’ll stay down here, and I invite you to come and say hello and give me your card personally. I have a small gift to give you to say thanks for being here today.

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Opening

I’m trying something new this year. The first Sunday of 2025, we started looking at the Gospel of Luke, going verse-by-verse in order. We’ve only planned to stray from this for special focus Sundays, such as Grad Sunday (which will be May 18), VBS Sunday this June, and International Mission Sunday in November. Otherwise, we’re going to stay on the Luke train. So this morning, I’m not specifically preaching on the resurrection. Certainly the love of God as proven through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is the message behind every message, because without that, I would just be up here giving a TED talk, a self-help message, or a maybe even a personal rant.

But we are people who value Real Truth. We dig into Scripture for clarity in a confusing world, because it’s the truth of the Scriptures that gives us a foundation to stand on, and that foundation is built on the rock of Jesus. So this morning, we are going to be looking at a passage that is decidedly practical. Our focal passage is Luke chapter 6, verses 20-49. This passage is commonly called the Sermon on the Plain.

So would you please stand in honor of the reading of God’s holy Word, and turn in your Bibles or Bible apps to that passage? I’ll warn you now: this will take about six minutes to read out loud. So if you can’t stand for that long, please feel free to remain seated, or to sit down when you need to. No pressure, and no judgment.

Luke 6:20–49 CSB

20 Then looking up at his disciples, he said: Blessed are you who are poor, because the kingdom of God is yours. 21 Blessed are you who are hungry now, because you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, because you will laugh. 22 Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you, insult you, and slander your name as evil because of the Son of Man. 23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy. Take note—your reward is great in heaven, for this is the way their ancestors used to treat the prophets. 24 But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your comfort. 25 Woe to you who are now full, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are now laughing, for you will mourn and weep. 26 Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for this is the way their ancestors used to treat the false prophets. 27 “But I say to you who listen: Love your enemies, do what is good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If anyone hits you on the cheek, offer the other also. And if anyone takes away your coat, don’t hold back your shirt either. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and from someone who takes your things, don’t ask for them back. 31 Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them. 32 If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do what is good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do what is good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High. For he is gracious to the ungrateful and evil. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful. 37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you; a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over—will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” 39 He also told them a parable: “Can the blind guide the blind? Won’t they both fall into a pit? 40 A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. 41 “Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye, but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? 42 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the splinter that is in your eye,’ when you yourself don’t see the beam of wood in your eye? Hypocrite! First take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the splinter in your brother’s eye. 43 “A good tree doesn’t produce bad fruit; on the other hand, a bad tree doesn’t produce good fruit. 44 For each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs aren’t gathered from thornbushes, or grapes picked from a bramble bush. 45 A good person produces good out of the good stored up in his heart. An evil person produces evil out of the evil stored up in his heart, for his mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart. 46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do the things I say? 47 I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them: 48 He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. When the flood came, the river crashed against that house and couldn’t shake it, because it was well built. 49 But the one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The river crashed against it, and immediately it collapsed. And the destruction of that house was great.”

PRAYER

Let’s all imagine for a moment that instead of all of us being gathered here for a worship service, we were gathered for a sports competition. You’re probably already imagining being here for your favorite sport, such as basketball (NBA playoffs), baseball, football, or soccer. But instead of this, imagine that we are all here to watch a game with NO RULES. None whatsoever. What would that be like? Incredibly boring.

There would be no rules about teams, so who would you root for? Even if there were teams, they could all each wear whatever they like because there would be no rules about uniforms or equipment, so it would be difficult to know who is on which team. For that matter, how would you even root for a team at all? Without rules, how would someone even begin to score, and how would they win? Without rules, this game would actually have no beginning, and no ending. We might be playing it right now… students: you just lost the game.

Many people try to approach life as if it is a game with no rules. It’s kind of up to us to decide what we should be doing and how we go about doing it. Or we have rules, but we actually want to kind of stack the deck in our favor: we will live by our rules, and expect that everyone else will live by and respect our rules, but they aren’t allowed to have any rules of their own, at least not any that go against our rules. We even do this as Christians—looking at some of the Bible’s clear rules and saying, “we don’t want to be legalistic.” And that’s not entirely wrong. It’s possible to worship the rules instead of the Rule-giver. Jesus changed the rules of death. 1 Cor 15

We saw this last week with the Pharisees. They loved their rules, and they even tried to trick Jesus into violating their rules so they could sentence Him to death. But in our focal passage today, we see that Jesus changed their human rules, because the way we approach rules is broken, just like every other part of us. The truth is that God’s rules are helpful. His rules give us purpose, define direction, and create boundaries that help keep us from harm. From a spiritual perspective, we need there to be rules. Bruce Larson quipped:

“If there are no rules, then I can’t repent. I am lost in my sin.”

—Bruce Larson, The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 26: Luke

The problem comes when we either ignore God’s rules, or make our rules more important than His rules. We should want to follow God’s rules out of love for Him.

Jesus changed the rules of four things in the Sermon on the Plain: He changed what blessing means, who we should love, how we should judge, and where we should locate the foundation of our lives.

1: Jesus reverses the idea of blessing (20-26)

How does the world define blessing? We as people tend to think of it really simply: that things go the way we want them to go (I’m of course being really general). In the first part of Jesus’s Sermon in Luke 6, He speaks about the difference between the world’s ideas and God’s ideas. He gives four “beatitudes” or statements of blessing, followed by four corresponding statements of “woe.” Keep in mind that these are not prescriptive: They aren’t a goal to shoot for. They’re descriptive of what God’s kind of blessedness looks like. In this way, we should see “blessed” as meaning “fortunate.”

None of the blessings sound much like blessing to us: Blessed are you who are poor, hungry now, weeping now, and hated because of Jesus. These four things are all related to the idea of being “poor.” He’s not necessarily simply talking about being economically poor, because this is the same kind of terminology that David used about himself when he was king of Israel, and he wouldn’t have thought himself economically poor by any means:

Psalm 86:1 CSB

1 Listen, Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.

Instead, the poor are defined by the “because” that follows in verse 20: “because the kingdom of God is yours.” The poor are those without an inheritance in the kingdom of the world (which MAY include material wealth). In a sense, the believer is an orphan in a foreign kingdom, where we must live for a time—we are “strangers and exiles” in this world, according to 1 Peter 2:11. We hunger and weep for the moment, longing for the abundance and joy of the kingdom that we have been promised, and those we come into contact with the in the world may hate us, revile us, or exclude us because we bear the name of Christ. We are called to live with the future in view and to take joy, because we have a reward waiting for us. This reward isn’t because we deserve it, though. It’s completely by God’s grace because He loves us, as Jesus would later explain in Luke 17:

Luke 17:10 CSB

10 In the same way, when you have done all that you were commanded, you should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we’ve only done our duty.’ ”

In contrast with the “blessed” “poor,” Jesus says “woe” to those who are “rich” in the kingdom of the world, and can include those whose wealth has been their means of comfort, power, and arrogance. The rich are those who are so satisfied with what they have that they become haughty, prideful, dishonest, and litigious. They don’t want the things of God because they don’t believe they need what God is offering. Jesus says that they have received their comfort through their wealth, and because of that comfort, they have rejected Christ.

Please keep in mind that Luke isn’t excluding people with worldly wealth from being in the kingdom of God, and he’s not saying that those who have very little are automatically saved. He’s saying that the value of your soul is what is most important, and the only way to be God’s kind of rich is to become the world’s kind of poor through following Jesus.

Mark 8:34–36 CSB

34 Calling the crowd along with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me and the gospel will save it. 36 For what does it benefit someone to gain the whole world and yet lose his life?

Jesus reverses the definition of blessing. Along with this switch in what blessing means, Jesus also redefines what it looks like to love, and who we should be willing to show love to:

2: Jesus redefines the people we should love (27-36)

How many “influencers” are there now? The world tells us that popularity is important (according to verse 26, the last woe: the false prophets were treated well and spoken well of by all), but it turns out that one can become extremely popular by just telling people what they want to hear. But Jesus says something that wasn’t just radical for then, it’s still radical today: love your enemies.

Luke 6:27–28 CSB

27 “But I say to you who listen: Love your enemies, do what is good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.

Jesus launches into this redefinition of love with the phrase, “But I say to you who listen:” Those who believe are those who listen, and those who listen are those who obey, as we will see later. So these four commands again are not a set of conditions that we are supposed to try to meet in order to gain God’s favor, but a set of directions for those who already believe in Jesus.

These four commands from Jesus: “Love...Do...Bless...Pray,” are the first general commands of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel (there have been other commands, but they were specific to individuals). And not only that, but they are also of the kind that means, “do this, and keep on doing it.” Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you… and keep on loving, keep on doing good, keep on blessing, keep on praying.

These things that King Jesus commands are choices, not feelings. We are called to decide to seek the best for those who are our enemies, those who hate us, curse us, and mistreat us: To be willing to not return insult for insult, or theft for theft, or deception for deception (29-30), but rather to choose to respond in blessing and grace. Paul said it rather graphically in his letter to the church at Corinth:

1 Corinthians 4:12–13 CSB

12b When we are reviled, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; 13 when we are slandered, we respond graciously. Even now, we are like the scum of the earth, like everyone’s garbage.

I don’t know about you, but this is a difficult example to follow! I don’t want to be mistreated. I want to be treated well. I want to be loved and have good done to me and be blessed by others and prayed for. Don’t you? That’s exactly Jesus’s point!

In summary, Jesus here states the Golden Rule:

Luke 6:31 CSB

31 Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them.

Jesus essentially tells us: You go first. But we don’t like that. We want to be able to respond to how someone else treats us first. We want to only love people who love us. Jesus says that that’s not good enough. We have to go first, even with people that we see as our enemies.

You might be thinking, “Come on, Bill… really? I have to love first, even if it’s someone I see as my enemy?” Yes, if you’re a Christian. Yes. It’s only natural to love someone who loves us, or someone who is like us, or agrees with us. That’s easy. We already want to love those people.

But remember that we’re called to see ourselves as citizens of another kingdom, a heavenly kingdom, a supernatural kingdom—the kingdom of God. We’re called to be more than natural. Even people who don’t follow Jesus do what is natural.

Luke 6:32–33 CSB

32 If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do what is good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.

The Golden Rule said to do for others what we want them to do for us, not do to others what they have done to us. And it’s this decision to love others well—even our enemies, even people who aren’t like us, even people who disagree with us—that shows people that not only do we follow the King of kings, but we are members of His family: that we are children of the Most High (v35). And it shows that because that’s what HE has done for us.

Luke 6:35–36 CSB

35b For he is gracious to the ungrateful and evil. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.

God is not like us, and we are not like Him. Yes, the Bible tells us that we bear God’s image, but we bear a broken, flawed version of it because of sin. The Bible says that we don’t think like God, don’t live like God, and don’t love like God… and yet He loved (and loves) us. And He’s proven it by being gracious to those who are ungrateful, by offering forgiveness to those who are evil, by showing mercy to those who are His enemies:

Romans 5:6–8 CSB

6 For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For rarely will someone die for a just person—though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. 8 But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Jesus went to the cross because He loves us, and because we needed Him to. His death was the only way to pay the penalty that we owe for our sins, because it’s what our sins deserve. He died when He didn’t deserve to, so that we who don’t deserve to live can have eternal life in Him! This is what makes Easter so incredible! Death has been defeated by Christ! And we can join in that victory over death through faith: believing that Jesus died to save us from our sins and rose again, and turning from going our own way and surrendering to Him as Lord. Believe in Jesus. It’s only in Him that we will be able to obey this command to love the way He loves, because He went first:

1 John 4:9–10 CSB

9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Jesus redefines who we should love by loving us when we were unlovable. And He calls us not only to love like Him, but then He goes on to explain how we are to judge others.

3: Jesus revises the concept of judgment (37-45)

It’s almost assumed in today’s society that judging someone is against the rules—that culturally speaking, we can’t disagree with someone else’s opinion, choices, priorities, or convictions. If we do, we are judging and are wrong. This doesn’t seem too far off base at first blush in the next part of our focal passage, where Jesus again gives us four direct general commands:

Luke 6:37–38 CSB

37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38a Give, and it will be given to you;”

But Jesus isn’t saying not to use discernment and wisdom. And as we’ll see in a moment, He’s not saying never to bring correction to a brother or sister in Christ. Our King is telling us that we are not have a heart of judgment and condemnation, but instead a heart of forgiveness and generosity, because this is how His heart is. Let me see if I can illustrate what a judging or condemning heart looks like:

Have you ever known someone (or been someone) who is either a one-upper or a put-downer? These are two sides of the same thing. One-upping is when you tell me something about your life (whether good or bad), and then I come up with something from my life that is more good or more bad, so that I can appear to be better than you. Putting down is where I make myself feel better by making you feel worse through criticizing you. If I can make you lower than me, then I must be higher than you, right? This is something of what Jesus is calling to task here. Both of these things are me negatively using others to elevate myself. But neither of these things have a place in the heart of the Christian.

Instead, we elevate others through giving and forgiving—our heart posture is one of humility because we see ourselves correctly as one of God’s children. The measure that we use will be measured back to us, according to Jesus. Hypocritical judgment doesn’t get us anywhere.

Along with this tendency to one-up or put-down, have you ever noticed that we tend to justify or minimize our own sins, while at the same time, condemning the sins of others? Jesus tells us here that we are to deal with our own stuff first: the “beams of wood” in our own eyes; before we try to help our brother with the “splinter” in his. Because we love them, we are called to bring correction if our brother or sister has a “splinter,” but we need to be certain that we are seeing clearly in order to help them with it.

Take a moment and think about how you speak to other people. Are you a one-upper or a put-downer? Are you hyper-critical or hypocritical? Jesus ends this section by saying that what’s going on in our hearts is what comes out of our mouths and in our actions, because our mouths and our actions bear the fruit of where our hearts are rooted.

Our fruits reveal our roots. If you planted two cherry trees, one from a well-known successful cherry tree stock, which you put in good soil and watered and cared for, and the other from the pit of a cherry that came out of a bag of cherries from the grocery store which you just stuck in the ground somewhere and never noticed again, which one do you suppose will do better? Jesus tells us here that the quality of the fruit that our lives bear reveals where the roots of our hearts are. Proverbs tells us to watch our heart roots:

Proverbs 4:23 CSB

23 Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.

Also, you can tell a tree by the kind of fruit it bears. If you were to go to a nursery and buy a seedling that was labeled “apple” on the bottom of its little pot, and then take it home and plant it, but when it grew up it bore peaches, would you think you had purchased a malfunctioning apple tree, or mistakenly purchased a peach tree? Likewise, Jesus says that if the fruit of your life doesn’t match what you say it should match, your judgment should start with your own heart, because what comes out in our lives shows what’s stored in our hearts. You might need to do some housecleaning in there.

And very quickly for our last point, we see that this heart foundation should be placed on Jesus’s words:

4: Jesus relocates the foundation of our lives (46-49)

As I said earlier, the person who believes is the one who listens, and the person who listens is the one who obeys. Jesus closes the Sermon on the Plain by asking a very plain question:

Luke 6:46 CSB

46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do the things I say?

This question makes sense. If we call Jesus, “Lord,” then He has the absolute right to direct our lives however He sees fit for His purposes and His glory. If we have the right to refuse Him, then He is not Lord… we are. So Jesus calls us to place the foundation of our lives on Him and His words, because doing so is what is best for us.

To illustrate this, Jesus used two men who built the same structure: a house. One digs down to the bedrock to place the foundation, and the other builds his house just right on top of the dirt. If a nearby river flooded, which house would stand? The one with an immovable foundation.

When we hear the words of Jesus, we have a choice: believe them, which demands that we act on them; or don’t believe them. There is no room here for saying that we believe them, but we just don’t act on them. To believe is to act, according to Jesus. His words are the truth: we can believe them, trust them, and act on them. He’s proven who He is through the resurrection. Before He was crucified, He said He would rise again, and that’s exactly what He did. We can trust that His words are true.

Closing

The contrast here is Jesus’s way and the world’s way. Which set of rules are we going to follow? Are we going to continue on the path that the world has set out before us, or are we going to trust Jesus when He reverses the idea of blessing, redefines the people we love, revises the concept of judgment and relocates the foundation of our lives? James tells us that we can’t have it both ways: we can’t love the world and love God at the same time:

James 4:4 CSB

4 You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God.

Surrender to Christ.

Repent to Christ.

Church membership

Prayer

Giving

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Bible reading (Amos 3-4, Psalm 103)

No Pastor’s Study tonight

Prayer Meeting this Weds: third week considering Nehemiah’s prayer in chapter 1

Instructions for guests

Benediction

John 13:16–17 CSB

16 “Truly I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, and a messenger is not greater than the one who sent him. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

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