Shaped by the Future

Music resurrection, and claims of Jesus through the unique stories that we find in the book of Luke. My name is Jared Booye. I am one of the pastors here. I am so glad you came today. Welcome to Twin Lakes. I think this is the second time that I spoke in the last two months, and I know we've had some guest speakers, so if you're like me, you're thinking, where's René? Well, good news. He is back from Switzerland. He wanted me to let you know that he's going to be speaking today in the Spanish service, and he will be back with us next week. So I just thought maybe we should all just get up and go over and see him right now. Oh, okay. Already some takers back there. No, I'm just kidding. Yes, we're excited to have René back next week.

But this morning, I want to start off by asking a question. Do you think it's possible to shape your own future? See, we live in a world that tells us that we can create our own future. We can visualize it. We step into it. We shape our own destiny. But in this passage, it seems like Jesus might be challenging that way of thinking. In fact, kind of actually turning it upside down. Instead of the idea of us shaping our own future, it seems that he's calling us to be shaped by the future, which is the subject I want to talk from today.

See, this idea that we can shape our own future, it works. It works great. It's fantastic when things are going well. But as soon as we hit a trial that is out of our control or we can't fix, maybe it's internal or external, that philosophy sort of like stops serving us and kind of falls apart. Just like it did for a man named Louis Zamperini, I want to introduce you to him. And I know this because he was my grandfather. No, I'm just kidding. I'm out of grandfather stories. I'm not related to this man. But you might know his story. He was an Olympic runner in the 1940s. He was at the top of his game. He had reached, I think it was the second fastest runner in the world. He'd reached a level of success in his career that very few people experience.

And then after this, he went and signed up for the U.S. Air Force and became a pilot, a bombardier pilot in World War II. Now, he thought this would be an exciting adventure, but he had no idea that what he was about to step into would utterly change his life forever. On one of his missions, he's flying over the Pacific Ocean, and they started to lose a couple engines on the left side. And the plane started to go down, and eventually it crashed in the middle of nowhere. And he was one of three survivors out of the 11 men on the flight. And then on top of that, he managed to make his way to a life raft with the other two guys, and somehow stayed alive for 45 days on this life raft.

Okay? To make matters even worse, he drifted, and when they drifted, they drifted in the wrong direction towards the enemy territory and ended up on an island called Execution Island. Okay, this is where the Japanese soldiers would torture and execute prisoners of war. And he stayed there for, in Japan total, for two years as a POW being traumatized and tortured. And he internalized all this pain and anger, and he remembered the names of his captors during that time. He knew what it was like to be utterly desperate. He knew what it was like to feel hopeless. He later admitted it felt hopeless, but there was something interesting about him. He never broke. He stayed in the game. He was known for his resilience.

Right when he was about the end of his rope, just literally at the very end, the war ends, and he's rescued and able to come home. And that's where his story really begins, because when he returned home, he was like, I'm just so glad to be free. I'm jumping into life. And he went right into it, but he didn't deal with any of the trauma or any of the pain that he experienced. He got married, he had kids, and then after a while, all of that caught up with him, and bam, it hit him hard. That's when his life began to spiral out of control, and he started lashing out at the people that were close to him, pushing people away. He ran to alcohol and addiction to try to mask the pain.

So he went into a dark tunnel, and honestly, he met his match. Here, Louis is this Olympic runner. Like, he survived against all odds. He survived the plane crash. He survived the drift at sea. He survived the execution island, and he couldn't figure out how to internally be free from all of that pain and that trauma. He couldn't figure out how to make a better future for himself in that moment. So I want to ask you this morning, we'll come back to his story, but have you ever hit a situation or maybe you're in where you feel like you can't change your future? You've tried. Maybe you can't see what's ahead, but you know you need to step into the unknown. You can't see it, but you know you need to take a big step.

Or maybe it's the 11th hour and you've been praying, you've been asking God for something, and you're feeling desperate. You're feeling like, man, I'm almost to the point where I'm losing hope on this. Or maybe somebody hurt you so bad that you can't even imagine how to love and forgive that person. You can't even figure out how it's possible. Well, if you felt these things, you're not alone. In fact, one of the great challenges in life is learning how to move into an unknown future when it feels like your present reality is crumbling. So the question is, how can a promised future shape our lives today? And how can we move into the unknown with confidence? And we get that answer in our passage today in Luke 6.

So if you have your Bibles and you want to turn there, turn to Luke 6, verse 17. We'll be reading out of the NIV today. And while you're turning there, let me set the stage a little bit. So the book of Luke, as Val set up for us a couple weeks ago, was written to a non-Jewish audience by a non-Jewish author, Luke. And he set out to carefully investigate the life, death, resurrection, and the claims of Jesus. And what he reveals to us is that not only did Jesus show to be the Jewish Messiah, but also the Savior to the entire world and ultimately God himself.

And so we pick up our story in Luke 6 right after Jesus has spent the entire night on a mountain praying. And he comes down from this mountain with his disciples, and he comes into this crowd of broken and oppressed people that have traveled from all over the known world, just desperate to like make contact with him, to encounter Jesus. And it's as if he just, metaphorically speaking, just rolls up his sleeves, walks right into their mess, and he starts healing them. Just starts getting into it. But he also, in that moment, delivers a teaching that is known as the Sermon on the Level Plain. And this is very similar to the Sermon on the Mount with some key differences.

But in both sermons, he delivers a radically counterculture message, both in his time and in ours today. And this message that he brings literally will change everything as we know it. And we have it on record. So we're going to dive into it today and we're going to read it. Luke sets up the scene in verse 17. If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, it says, Jesus went down from the mountain and stood at a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from Judea, Jerusalem and the coastal regions around Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear him and be healed of their diseases.

So the way that Luke sets this up is important. First, we see that Jesus comes down from this mountain to a level place. Okay, so in essence, he's sort of coming down to meet these broken people on their level, right? And not only that, but the message that he gives sort of elevates the lowly, the poor, and the weak and brings down the arrogant and the prideful. And in doing so, he sort of levels the social playing field as well. So for those of you guys who are Bible students, this is exactly, by the way, what John the Baptist declared in Luke 3:5, when he said, When the Messiah comes, every valley will be filled and every mountain and hill be made low. So now the sermon on the level takes on a whole new meaning with that context.

But not only did he come to these people, but these people came to him. So who was in this crowd? Well, Luke mentions four locations. He says Judea, Jerusalem, and Tyre and Sidon. Let's start with Judea. Judea was primarily lower class farmers, shepherds. They were under taxation of the Romans and under oppression of the Romans. So they knew hardship. Now, Jerusalem was a little bit different. They were also under the oppression of the Romans. However, this was like the home of the religious elites, right? The top religious people. And these were oftentimes the ones that Jesus would call out in the book of Luke for their hypocrisy, for their greed, for their self-righteousness.

So you have kind of a mixed crowd already. And then throw this third one in here. If you don't know about this, this is a non-Jewish port city. So they would have been considered way outside of the box, like pagans, right, as they would have called them, right? And they would have said, you know, they're known for their wild living and all this. It's like somebody just like, who invited the Vegas partiers to this group? Like, that's basically what it would have been like, right? So this was a radically diverse group, but what did they all have in common? Well, verse 19 tells us that they all came in crisis. It says, those troubled with impure spirits were cured. And all the people tried to touch Jesus because power was coming from him and healing them all.

See, the word healing here actually means to be made whole. So there's a lot of physical healing happening in this moment. But there's also an indication that there's spiritual healing, deliverance, and emotional healing happening. All because Jesus is here. See, these people came fearing an unknown future, right? They came with a health crisis or some sort of spiritual crisis, and they thought, if I could get to Jesus, maybe he could heal me. And they weren't let down. Which brings us to our first point, and that is to be shaped by the future is to trust in Jesus even when you can't see. And by the way, this is called faith. And Hebrews tells us that faith is the confidence in what we hope for and the assurance about what we do not see. And that's exactly what brought these people to this moment to meet Jesus.

Now, I think it's easy. We can just quickly breeze over verse 19, and we can just not really understand the impact. But I just want you to think about what someone in this crowd might have felt. Right? They travel a long distance, filled with fear about their future, filled with brokenness, filled with suffering. And they get there and they think they're confident that if they could just make contact with Jesus, things might be better. And it's amazing because that's exactly what happened. And this is actually the story that we see all throughout the scripture with God's people. Now, whether it's, you know, someone facing two, essentially two disastrous futures, whether it's Moses and the Israelites right there with Pharaoh's army on one side, ready to take them out in an uncrossable sea, two disastrous futures, right? Or Daniel in a non-escapable den in front of hungry lions. Two disastrous futures.

Or maybe it's David standing in front of a giant, between a giant and an entire army with nothing but a sling and a few stones. See, in every case God had, and we can read it, God had a future for them that they could have never imagined in that moment. But we can see that he had a third way for them, and it's the same for you today. I can relate to this because I, as I mentioned before, I worked in Silicon Valley for a really long time, a lot of years. And like I had my own business and I was employed, I had some people relying on me and traveled around the world, made products. It was really a fun time. However, the last five years, something changed. I worked so hard. I've worked harder than I've ever worked in my entire life. And if I'm honest, at some point I shifted and started relying on adrenaline and I was running on adrenaline. And I was working really hard. And after a while, that adrenaline caught up with me.

And I remember being in Israel on a trip with my wife, Alicia, and we're standing there on the steps of the temple of all places. And I remember being sort of at the top of what I felt like. I'm like, here, I've made it in my own estimation. And I was standing there, and I remember in a moment of inspiration, I just raised my hands and I just said, God, I give you my life. Like I would give everything up just to follow you. I give you my life. Now, what I expected to come home to was like some new, miraculous, exciting, inspirational season. But when I got home, all of that adrenaline, just bam, it hit me hard and I crashed. I crashed so hard. Call it an adrenaline crisis. Call it anxiety. Call it depression. All I knew was that I didn't know how to fix it. It was beyond me.

I grew a big beard. I moved to Kauai. I went from this happy guy to Grizzly Adams walking the hills of Kauai. This is me, by the way. Renée's like, you got to tell him it's you. I didn't even know it was you. I actually gained the nickname Wilson for obvious reasons in the months to come. But you see, I had always seen myself as a self-made person, right? Like, I felt the pressure culturally and internally to lift myself up by my own bootstraps, to fix my situation on my own. But as time went on, it became clear I was powerless to create the future I wanted. And that drove me deeper into fear. I've heard it said that anxiety is the fear of a fabricated future. And this is what we often do in our trials. We sort of like imagine a very frightening scenario. And oftentimes it's binary, right? It's a rock and a hard place. It's two disastrous possibilities. And that's definitely what happened with me.

I felt like I had reached that point where all I could see is like either figure out a way to numb and press down this pain. Or face it head on and feel that despairing, almost despairing of life at one point. And I was paralyzed. But you know what? I didn't see that there was a third way that God had in mind for me. He wanted to deliver me. He wanted to heal me. And I remember one night I was praying, and I felt like, you know, I'd heard a lot of messages during this time, read a lot of Scripture, and I was praying, and I felt like the Lord just said, hey, trust me for your future. And for some reason, in that moment, I believed him. I believed he's got a way. And right then, even though I couldn't see it, the fear started to drop off. Now, it wasn't like an overnight fix. It was a couple months of like mind, body, soul healing that took place. But it was at that moment that I believed God and trusted him that the healing began.

And not only did that season give me a tremendous amount of compassion and understanding for people experiencing these types of like mental health challenges and facing things that they can't fix, but also gave me the confidence to stand here and tell you today that there is light at the end of the tunnel. This too shall end. Why? Because God has a third way for you, a future that you can't even imagine at this moment, like so many of the people that have followed him in the past. And you know what this is called? This is called hope, which brings us to our next point. And that is to be shaped by the future is to hope in Jesus even when you feel desperate. And that's exactly how these people felt, right? And Jesus brings a message of hope.

In the midst of this mess, he's standing there and he looks up and begins to speak to his disciples. And in that moment, he gave what would be a new sort of manifesto, a new way of viewing the world that would change everything. And in this sermon, he addresses two people. He addresses the desperate believer who's in desperate need for him. But he also addresses the unbeliever who's under the illusion that they don't need him at all. So to the desperate believer, he says this in verse 20. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you, and when they insult you and reject your name as evil because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day. Leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven.

Now, these verses throughout church history have been called the Beatitudes, and Beatitudes is just Latin for blessing. It's like the blessings, right? Now, when I was growing up, I heard that the Beatitudes were attitudes to be. You guys ever heard that? I'm here to tell you that is a terrible misinterpretation of this passage. In fact, the ancient monastics used to twist these scriptures and teach that we should be seeking these things out in order to be more spiritual. But if we're honest, I don't think we really even need to seek them out. At some level, we've all experienced this. I think Jesus is speaking to a common experience of human suffering in our world. And he's not saying to seek these things. He's saying that in the midst of them, because of me, you can be blessed. You can find happiness.

Okay? Why? Well, because he offers the believer a future hope. To the poor, he offers the kingdom. To the hungry, he tells them satisfaction is ahead, to the mournful laughter, to the hated reward in heaven. But to the unbeliever, it's the opposite. Verse 21 says, but woe to you who are rich and already have received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

Now, first we look at these words and they don't sound that bad. I mean, rich, well-fed, laughing, like well-known, like, hey, isn't that good? Well, it's not that these things in and of themselves are evil. It's that if you put your hope in these things, it will ultimately lead to, woe is me, right? But if you want, we can take a deeper look at these Greek words. In fact, as you see these used throughout the scripture, you start to see them take on a bit of a different meaning. Rich always refers to this pursuit of power, right? So you have the power pursuit. Well-fed is, this word is always used in sort of like context of indulgence, just indulging in food and other things, the pleasures.

And then the laughing is really more used in the context of gloating. It's the idea of like somebody standing at the top of a penthouse, you know, and looking down amid the misfortune of others and just going, I made it. I win. And he's laughing, right? It's this idea of gloating. And then well-known refers to these false prophets who are garnishing the favor of men at the expense of living for truth or speaking truth, right? So Jesus is warning the unbeliever not to trust in these things to save them in eternity. And I think this is why he uses the word woe. Woe is not like, cursed are you? Jesus isn't saying, cursed are you? The meaning of woe is like, hey, there's a deep sense of regret, a deep sense of despair, sorrow, and grief over like unchangeable past. And he's saying this is a warning, right?

But the irony is, if we're honest, this is exactly what our culture tells us will bring happiness. I mean, am I wrong? So many people have sought these things out and found that they actually delivered the opposite. Many people have found that at the end of a road of trying to pursue these things really hard, they find emptiness and depression. In fact, there was a study done in 2020 by a psychologist named Katie Cook right here in our backyard in the Bay Area. And she said that 77% of Bay Area workers reported some of the highest levels of anxiety and depression in the entire nation. I mean, Silicon Valley, right? It's the epicenter of like money and wealth and power and success. And yet there's this kind of looming sense that even with all that, it's not enough to save my soul.

I think people feel that, right? If anxiety is rooted in the fear of a fabricated future, and I've heard it said that depression is rooted in the regret of an unchangeable past. I think this is why Jesus uses the word woe or mourn. He actually uses the word mourn and woe, both meaning similar things. But the word for mourn is pantheo, which communicates deep regret over like the past. Like, oh, I wish I took a different path. Right? Which can drive that. And going back to my story, that's exactly how I felt in my time in the agency world. I was under the illusion that if I could hit my plateau, my personal version of success, you know, we all have ours, right? Each person has something they're driving towards, that once I hit that, I'll find peace and happiness.

And I remember feeling at one point, like I kind of was like by myself. I'm like, I think I hit it. I think I made it. You know, I made some money and I got like some recognition. I'm like, yes. And then immediately I realized there's no peace. There's no happiness here. In fact, I felt disoriented. I felt like somebody, I was on a treadmill at 100 miles an hour and somebody just stopped it. And I was just like, right? And I felt scared because I'm like, I would be an absolute fool to think that if I jumped on the next ladder or the next treadmill and I got to that next plateau, that I would feel any different. Because the people up there, they're telling me they didn't. And that's kind of scary.

You may have felt like this before. You know, I'm talking to a group of people who have a lot of different experiences. And if you felt like this, it's actually quite common. In fact, psychologists came up with a name for it. They call it the arrival fallacy. This is the idea that once you hit, once you make it, you will find peace and happiness. But when you get there, you find the opposite. You know, when I get that spouse, I'll be happy. When I get that child that I've been trying, when I get that job, when I get my money right, when I get a house in Santa Cruz, good luck on that one, no. When I get retired, when I break through, whatever it is, if you're putting, attributing a value to that that's not reality, you might find the opposite, right?

Golfer Scotty Scheffler, one of the, arguably the best golfer right now, currently, he said something interesting in an interview that I thought was worth reading to you guys. He says, there's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life. He said, but when you finally get to number one in the world, which he was, you find yourself asking, what's the point? That's really, really profound coming from him. And I think this is why Jesus calls us to live a life shaped by eternity. See, Jesus was always hinting that he's going to come back. He's going to make things right. Things are going to be restored. Things are going to be made new. And he promises a future to those who come to him in faith. And this is called the hope of new creation, which we read in Revelation. He's going to come back and make all things right.

And in the same way that a future destination on a map changes and sort of like informs the path that we're on currently, so too the promises of Jesus have the ability to shape our present life. Does that make sense? And by the way, this is all made possible through the gospel. And if you're doing the fill in the blank, this is one of them. People asked me about this last night. What line is this? It's the gospel. The gospel is the good news that Jesus willingly came down into our broken world, came down to our level, just like he did with these people. That he himself became poor, hungry, he mourned, and he was hated. And then he promised to those who follow him that he's going to come back and make all things new. And he proved it by raising from the dead. And in doing so, he shows us what love truly is.

That brings us to our final point, and that's that to be shaped by the future is to love like Jesus even when it hurts. Check out verse 28. It says, but to you who are listening, I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. And this is exactly, by the way, what Jesus experienced. In light of this, there's a new way to love. He himself was considered an enemy to the religious establishment in the day. He was hated. He was cursed. He was mistreated. And yet through all of it, he blessed them by caring for them, by praying for them, even when he was laying his life down for them.

And that's the kind of counterculture love that he's calling his disciples to in this moment, in this diverse crowd. And it's the same love that he calls us into today. But if we're honest, that's really hard. To love our enemies? Like, how is this even possible? And I can give you the Bible answer, and this is true, is that when we experience the love of God, something happens. We get an eternal perspective that changes the way we relate to people in our lives. It's very hard to explain something that the Spirit does when you trust in Jesus. And I can't even tell you how it happens, but I can illustrate it. And it's really well illustrated in the life of Louis Zamperini.

Picking up his story, it did not end in hopelessness. Right before his family nearly gave up on him and everybody close in his life nearly gave up on him, he found himself at a Billy Graham crusade, and he heard the gospel, and he finally just surrendered his life to Jesus. And in the years to come, he experienced a radical transformation that would change his life from that point forward. He started to experience deep inner healing from all that trauma and the pain that he carried. He received an eternal hope that sort of changed his perspective towards even the very people that tortured him. All that pain, all that anger, all that hurt and hatred sort of turned into compassion.

And he ended up doing something amazing. He went back to Japan and faced the very men that tortured him. And these guys messed with him hard, right? He got to everyone except for the main guy who really messed with him. But he wrote him a letter. But he was able to face these men, forgive them, love them. And also he shared the transforming work of Jesus in his life. And because of that act of love, many of those people came to know Jesus over there. This is the kind of radical love that is possible when we come to Jesus. This is a love that he gives. The Bible says that we love because he first loved us. Because of God's great love for us, it changes the way we live. And it enables us to extend love to others, even when it hurts. It gives us an eternal hope.

And that has the power to change our relationships in the present. If you want to hear more about his story, you can check out a couple movies. They're both called Unbroken. One sort of ends at the end of the war. The other one sort of picks up after the war, but they're great. And I get this. When I was preparing this message, I was talking to René. He said, hey, did you know that Louis was connected to Laura Spurlock and he actually came and spoke right here in Twin Lakes, which is so cool. I wish I would have been there. Maybe you were. Powerful, powerful story. I guess it was before he was famous, which is kind of cool.

So I want to end with this. Paul tells us that in 1 Corinthians 13:13, there are three great truths that we live by as believers. That is faith, hope, and love. And each of these truths is found here in today's passage in Luke. Paul says the greatest of these, though, is love. Why is that? Because love is the only one of the three that is eternal. See, when we're with Jesus, we don't need faith. He's right there. When we're with Jesus, we don't need hope. He is our hope. The only thing that remains is love for him and love for others.

So are you standing at the edge of the unknown, having to trust God with a next step that feels really big? Are you facing a situation that may feel desperate or even slightly hopeless? Or are you struggling to love somebody that really hurts you and you can't even imagine how to love them back? If that's you, you're not alone. Jesus knows exactly what you're experiencing and he's calling you and asking you to trust him. And this is what it means to be shaped by the future. Not shaped by fear, not shaped by regret, not shaped by the false promises of the world that ultimately lead to woe, but shaped by the future that Jesus promises for those who trust him. And that transforms how we live, how we love and how we hope today in the present. Let's pray.

Father God, thank you so much for your word. And I pray for each and every person here that's joined us today. I pray, Lord, that you would meet them on their level. I pray that you would be with them, that you would show them that you have a better future, a plan for them, and that they would trust you for that. And that would shape their lives currently. We love you. Amen.