The Good Life

On the abundant life and the Temptation of Jesus

We all have different ideas of what constitutes the good life. Often those ideas are subconscious, under the surface. We may be able to give a socially acceptable, or even Sunday-School-acceptable, answer to the question, “What is the good life?” But even if we know and can recite the “right” answer, we all have inner desires that, if not always, end up guiding our lives toward what we truly believe regardless of what the “right” answer is.

What makes for a good life? When someone dies we often say, “They lived a good life.” Perhaps we say this when they had a big family that seemingly loved them; they had a successful career; they were well-travelled; they used their resources to help others; anything they set their hand to prospered; they were able to do all the things they set out to do. There are a lot of different ways we may define the good life in moments like that. There are less noble ways we may secretly define the good life as well. When we watch someone do whatever they want and face no consequences we may be envious of that good life, or perhaps its those who can swim in their piles of money or those who have many lovers that draw our envy.

For those of us who are married with children, we may look at those who are not tethered to these responsibilities and glamorize their experience of freedom as the good life. Our single friends may look at those in marriages and families and believe that this sense of belonging would truly lead to the good life.

We all have definitions, both stated and left unsaid, of what qualifies as the good life. Jesus has something to say about this. In John 10:10 he said, “A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance.” Jesus came so that we may have life in abundance; a full life; the good life. For many Christians, myself included, we often take this to mean that Jesus will give us our personal version of the good life. Jesus came to fulfill my wishes. Many of us enter into a contractual relationship with Jesus. We will “be Christian” - whatever this means to us - so long as Jesus helps get me my good life. When Jesus fails to come through on this, we abandon him.

But Jesus didn’t come as a genie to respond to our demands and wishes in return for our acts of piety. As creator of the universe, Jesus’ version of the good life is the only one that matches up with ultimate reality. As you may have guessed, Jesus did not leave us to guess at what version of the good life matches up with his. He told us what the good life looks like:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will find it. For what will it benefit someone if he gains the whole world yet loses his life? Or what will anyone give in exchange for his life?”

Ah, yes. We should have known. Take up your cross! That’s obviously what makes things great. It’s pretty intuitive, isn’t it? The tool used for humiliation, physical torture, and ultimately death, just voluntarily carry that thing around and you’ll live happily ever after.

Deny yourself! That’ll do the trick. The best way to get all the things you want is to…deny that you want them? Jesus’ words here fly in the face of what his 1st century audience would have blindly accepted as the truth, just as it does to his 21st century audience.

Trip Lee, pastor, author, and rapper, puts it this way:

“I was taught that the good life meant getting everything I could, but I’ve been shown a brand new picture of the good life…the good life is the life that’s been laid down.”

The good life is the life that’s been laid down. Big, if true.

If we take this to be true, it is surprising. It’s hard to believe. It’s counterintuitive. It’s hard to convince someone of this reality. When our internal desires tell us to accumulate and gather and our external influences tell us to accumulate and gather, how do we make the pitch to ourselves and others that “the good life is the life that’s been laid down.” I don’t think we can convince people of this reality through well-crafted arguments. I don’t think we can convince ourselves of this reality through well-crafted arguments. This is something that must be experienced. And the more you experience it, the more true you realize it is.

As a culture, we often honor and celebrate the renegades, the leavers, the ones who shirk the expectations put on them to “find themselves” or to find what makes them happy. Certainly, there may be times when that is necessary and worthy of celebration. After all, Jesus shirked the expectations put on him in so many ways, but it wasn’t for sake of self-realization. It was for sake of self-sacrifice.

I recently read Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything by Drew Dyck. In one chapter he shares the story of William Cimillo. Cimillo was a New York City bus driver who, in 1947, had had enough. He had worked the job for over 20 years and was just over it. One day he hopped in his bus and instead of taking the normal righthand turn out of the depot, he turned left. And he just kept on going. He stopped for lunch in New Jersey, a peak at the White House in D.C., picked up a hitchhiker, and found himself just outside of Miami, Florida for a nice midnight swim. Eventually, he wired his boss asking for $50 claiming the bus had broken down. Instead of the money, his boss sent police officers. Cimillo was able to drive the bus back to New York but was then taken into custody. He became such a local hero, however, that his job dropped all charges. His bus route became the most popular in city. He couldn’t go out to dinner with his family without being recognized. Many in the city resonated with the desire to escape the doldrums and weight of life. Many knew the desire to find the good life by leaving behind all responsibilities and having total freedom. But not everyone.

“Let me explain something to you,” said Cimillo’s son, Richard. “I was 12 years old at the time. And after I come home from school, my mother was crying. And I was, well, Ma, why are you crying? And she said, well, he didn’t come home. I wonder where he is. Why wouldn’t he come home for supper, and all that. And next day, the same thing. He didn’t come home. Not a phone call.”

Cimillo believed the good life was found in total freedom. His son, for one, disagreed. As Jesus points out, we actually find the good life in denying ourselves. Or as Trip Lee says, the good life is the life that’s been laid down. The good life is one lived sacrificially for others.

Over the next few weeks, I want to look at this idea of “the abundant life” through the lens of Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness in Luke 4. But I’ll leave us with one more biblical invitation to live the good life. This one comes from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi.

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others. Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus,

who, existing in the form of God,
did not consider equality with God something to be exploited.
Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant,
taking on the likeness of humanity.
And when he had come as a man,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death -
even to death on a cross.

For this reason God highly exalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow -
in heaven and on earth and under the earth -
and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father