Take a walk on the poverty side

“I’m convinced that most Americans live with almost a panic-driven fear of poverty and of not having things,” says Jordan. “This has been a curse of Western civilization for centuries, and so you’re driven to have and to have.

“To me, one of the most touching things in the Book of Luke is to watch the Lord in just His human sympathies—He understood what poverty was. He understood the poor, and Luke constantly points to that.

“When He was born, there was no room for Him in the inn. If He had had an Am Ex Gold Card He probably could have gotten in, but He didn’t. He had a manger for a crib.

“In chapter 2, when He was just eight days old and His parents went to the temple, it says they offered a pair of turtle doves and two young pigeons. You know what that was? That was the poor man’s offering. That wasn’t the first offering; they didn’t have the money to offer the lamb.

“Jesus was raised in a humble home; not a home of wealth and splendor. He was raised in a home that knew what poverty was. Look at His parables—the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son.

“In Luke 5 you find the publican named Levi, who made Christ a great feast. The passage reads, [29] And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them.
[30] But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?
[31] And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.
[32] I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

“A preacher once preached a message called ‘The Table Talks of Jesus.’ He went over to chapter 10 where you’re at Mary and Martha’s house and then over to chapter 7 and that woman; He said she was a sinner but she was the woman who anointed His feet with oil and washed His feet with her own hair—the one who had nothing to pay yet He forgave all.

“Then you see Him sit at the table with them. You go through Luke and there are five or six places where you come into the meal and you see the Lord sitting in somebody else’s house. Somebody else has set the meal and yet He comes and sits with them as the Great Teacher.”

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Pleasure is the foundation of our society today and it is pursued secretly and publicly from cradle to grave. Obviously, though, as they say, ‘pleasure brings pain.’

Finding freedom from the pain (frustration, sorrow, fear, etc.) requires understanding the whole structure of pleasure.

In what is pure counter-intuitiveness to the world’s way of seeing things, the Apostle Paul testifies, “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”

Paul says any suffering we go through now isn’t even worthy of spending time on when we look at the glory that’s one day going to be revealed in us.

“Christ’s faithfulness is our resting place,” encourages Jordan. “He’s who God trusts and we can trust Him, too. There’s a lot of comfort and peace in that. A lot of, ‘I’m through with the toiling process in that.’

“Paul writes in Philippians 3, ‘Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.’

“The guy’s been saved 35 years and he’s still saying, ‘All I want in life is to know Him.’ You see how He’s to be the object of everything?”