Living Upside Down
I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them: 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. 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.” -Luke 6:47-49, CSB
“Jesus’…message is not simply one of prescriptive morality, as though he were telling people how they should or should not act. Rather, he is asking people to accept an inversion of the world, to agree with Him that the world order has been inverted, and to act accordingly.”- Joel B. Green
When taken in full (Luke 6:20-49), it becomes clear that Jesus’ sermon on the plain (as it is sometimes referred to) is not about calling people to a new moralism with higher standards than the Old Testament law. No, Jesus is asking for those who would follow Him to join Him in upending the world. Not by a rebellion of force mind you, but by refusing to join the rebel way of the world around them. They are to, each day, live subversively in a world dead set against God and His Kingdom. Doing so will be full of reward from God. Doing so will put a person at odds with the world and in the world’s system, they will often get the raw end of the deal. Hunger, weeping, persecution are all on this path that Jesus urges us to take. But it isn’t because, God is torture testing His children. This is no cosmic game of survival of the fittest. It is rather because, to do less than reject the world’s system and whole heartedly embrace Jesus’ system will result in the worst sort of catastrophe. Our very souls hang in the balance here. Choose the world’s system and its rebellion to God and find yourself swept away when the torrent of God’s judgement comes. Choose Jesus’ way, in all of its upside down values and behaviors anchored in faith in Jesus and your life will be built on the only foundation that can withstand the coming flood. There are then two acute dangers of which we must be aware if we are heed Jesus’ message. The first is that we would set to work modifying our behavior to match what Jesus teaches without ever submitting our whole selves to Him. This will leave us as hollowed out legalists who do one thing all the while remaining the same on the inside. The trouble here will come sooner or later as a bad tree always bears bad fruit. The second danger is claiming relationship with Jesus as Lord all the while still being in rebellion to Him. So we adopt a stance that allows us to save face even as we refuse to submit ourselves to Jesus in any life-giving way. The trouble here is that such a life becomes self-deception and we fool ourselves into thinking we are a genuine Jesus follower when in fact, we are building without a foundation. To avoid both of these dangers, a person must surrender their life entirely to Jesus. They must let God change them from the inside out. They must be a genuine child of God whose life matches their supernatural paternity. All else leads to destruction. All else is in some way an embrace of the world’s rebellion, a wink and a nod to the rebel system in which we find ourselves. Ours is to be a path of subversion. Ours is to be a path of inverting the whole thing by choosing to follow Jesus with all that we are. Ours is to be the life lived out of hearing Jesus and acting on what He says. Ours is the path of whole-hearted devotion. Ours is to live upside down until God rights all the wrongs and reorients all that is to match His original intent. The tipping of the system has begun in Jesus, the question that remains is if we will join Him, gladly submitting to Him, and live subversively in a world turned wrong side up. Do you hear Him? Are you fully surrendered to Him?
Questions for further discussion/life application:
When you hear Jesus’ radical teaching, do you hear its harshness or its tender mercy?
What part of this sermon is most difficult to you? How can that help you enter into deeper surrender and submission to Jesus?
What part of this sermon do you find least difficult for you? How will you sort if you are simply ‘playing the part’ of a disciple or living a fully surrendered life?
Reflect on your story. Have there been seasons of surrender to Jesus, as demonstrated by an inside out obedience to the upside down way of life? Are there key elements to that season that can help you now? Conversely, have there been seasons of rebellion to Jesus? In retrospect, what led to and/or fed that rebellion?
How will you help others to understand the reality that eternity hangs in the balance when it comes to following or refusing to follow Jesus?