The Good Life: Part 3
The Question Nobody Is Asking
Here’s a question many men have never been asked: What did Jesus come to teach you about how to live?
Not how to avoid hell. Not which rules to follow. Not which box to check on the way to a Sunday morning service. What did Jesus come to teach you about how to actually live your life, on Tuesday, in traffic, at the office, in your marriage, when the bottom falls out, when everything is going right and something still feels off?
If you’re like many men who grew up in the church, or have been in and around it for any length of time, the Jesus you heard about was primarily a rescue figure. He came to save you from your sins. He died in your place. He rose from the dead. Believe in him and you will go to heaven when you die.
And I believe all of that. I believe every word of that is true. It’s true and glorious and worth staking your life on. But if that’s the whole picture you’ve been given, then something has been left out. Something significant.
Because the Jesus of the Gospels didn’t spend all his time talking about the afterlife. He spent much of his time teaching people how to live in this one.
A Word We Are Afraid to Use
So what do we call a person who does that, who takes the deepest questions about human existence seriously and actually answers them? Who asks what a human being is for, how a person ought to live, what genuine flourishing looks like?
We call him a philosopher.
We aren’t used to pairing that word with Jesus. Philosophers are Greek figures in marble. They’re college courses most men were glad to be finished with. Philosophy feels like the opposite of practical. And Jesus, we have been told, is nothing if not practical.
But consider what a philosopher actually is. Not the caricature, but the real thing. A philosopher is someone who loves wisdom, who pursues it seriously, who asks the deepest questions about human existence and doesn’t settle for shallow answers. What is the good life? What is a human being for? How should a person live? What does it mean to flourish?
These aren’t abstract questions. They are the questions every man is wrestling with whether he has words for them or not. The man staring at the ceiling at two in the morning is doing philosophy. He just doesn’t know it.
New Testament scholar Jonathan Pennington has argued, carefully and compellingly, that Jesus operated in this tradition. In fact, artifacts from the early church include images of Jesus wearing the philosopher’s robe. They understood he was Lord, Savior, and Philosopher. He engaged the questions the ancient philosophers were asking and answered them in a way that none of them could. Ben Witherington has written on Jesus as a sage in the deepest sense, a teacher of wisdom about the whole of life, not just one compartment of it.
I do not believe this reduces Jesus but expands him. It’s a way of introducing a Jesus you may not have met yet.
What Paul Said About It
There’s a verse in Colossians that is key here. It sits in the second chapter, almost tucked away, but it may be one of the most far-reaching claims in the entire New Testament.
In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:3)
Read that again. Paul isn’t saying Jesus has some wisdom to offer alongside other sources. He is not saying that if you check with Jesus and then consult a few other voices, you will eventually piece together the answer. He is saying that all of it, every treasure of wisdom, every depth of knowledge about what it means to be human and how life actually works, is hidden in Christ.
This isn’t a modest claim. It’s the most comprehensive answer to the meaning question that has ever been offered. Jesus is not one philosopher among many. He is wisdom incarnate. He’s not a man who found the truth. He is the truth, which is a different thing altogether.
The Greek philosophical tradition spent centuries chasing the good life. Aristotle called it eudaimonia, human flourishing, living in accordance with your deepest nature and purpose. The Stoics pursued it through discipline and virtue. The Epicureans pursued it through the careful management of pleasure and pain. Seneca, brilliant as he was, could see the problem clearly: “I am not yet the kind of person I want to be.” He just couldn’t tell you where to find the power to become that person. The philosophers were asking the right questions. However, they were working without the full answer.
Jesus walked into that conversation and said: I am the answer you have been looking for.
The Curriculum You Missed
Somewhere along the way, the church did men a disservice regarding the Sermon on the Mount, which is one of my favorite texts to study and teach in all of Scripture.
Many men who’ve been in church long enough have heard the Sermon described as an impossible standard. A bar so high it’s designed to make you despair and throw yourself on the grace of God. And there’s something to that, the Sermon does expose how far short we fall. I’ve taught that myself and stand by it. John Stott wrote that the most charitable thing you could say about a man who claims to live by the Sermon on the Mount is that he’s never actually read it.
But here’s what that framing misses. The Sermon on the Mount is not primarily a courtroom document designed to prosecute you. It’s a curriculum. It’s Jesus, the master teacher of life, laying out what the genuinely good life looks like, the shape of the life that actually works, that actually produces the peace and purpose and depth that every man is looking for.
Look at what the Sermon covers. Character. Anger. Integrity. Money. Anxiety. Prayer. How you treat your enemies. How you treat the people who are watching you. What you are building your life on. Every one of these is a key question for every man. Jesus didn’t give vague spiritual advice. He gave wisdom, (concrete, tested, correspondent-to-reality wisdom) about how human life actually functions.
He began with the Beatitudes, and even those have been misread. We tend to hear them as a list of impossible spiritual achievements. In fact, they’re a portrait of the person who knows God and is truly living well. The man who is poor in spirit, meaning the man who has stopped pretending to be self-sufficient, is the man who finally has access to the Kingdom. The man who mourns over what is wrong in himself and the world is the man who will be comforted. The meek man, not the aggressive man, inherits the earth.
These are not sweet platitudes. They’re a counter-narrative to every message the culture is sending men right now. And they come from the One who designed human beings and knows what we are for.
Not One Teacher Among Many
Post 1 in this series named the problem: something is wrong, and you already know it. Post 2 looked at what the world is offering men and showed where even the best secular voices run out of road. Peterson can tell you to carry your weight and face your dragon. Frankl can tell you that meaning is the deepest human hunger. Both are right as far as they go. But neither can tell you where meaning ultimately comes from, or why it should survive everything, or how a man can be fundamentally changed at the level where the problem actually lives.
The purpose of this post is to remind us that the answer is not a better philosophy of life. It is not a smarter therapist or a more organized life. It’s a person.
The philosophers were asking: What is the good life? Jesus answered: Follow me.
Not follow my principles. Not apply my teachings. Follow me. Because Jesus understood that the good life is not a destination you navigate to with the right map. It’s a relationship with the One who is himself the way, the truth, and the life. You don’t learn the way and then go find life somewhere else. Jesus is both. (Caveat: Of course, when you follow Jesus as he intends, you will also follow his principles, teachings, will, etc.)
The man who gets this hasn’t just found a new perspective. He has found the One who made him, knows him, and is actively inviting him into the life he was designed for. That changes everything.
Head, Heart, Hands
Head: What is your honest picture of Jesus? Is he primarily a rescue figure, a moral teacher, a personal Savior, or something more comprehensive? How does thinking of Jesus as wisdom incarnate, the philosopher of the good life, expand or challenge the picture you’ve carried?
Heart: Meditate upon Colossians 2:3. “In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” What does it mean to you, personally, that the answer to your deepest questions about how to live is not information to be found but a person to be known? What in you resists that, and what in you longs for it?
Hands: Read the Sermon on the Mount this week, not as a doctrinal exercise, but as a man reading the curriculum of the good life. Bring one question to it: Where does this speak directly to the life I’m actually living right now?
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus, we confess that we have often made you smaller than you are. We have received you as our Savior and sometimes stopped there, never quite grasping that you are also the Lord of heaven and earth, the very wisdom of God, the philosopher of the good life, the one in whom all of our deepest questions find their answer. Open our eyes to the full breadth of who you are. Teach us, as you taught those who sat on that hillside, what the truly good life looks like. And give us the courage and grace to build our lives on your Word. We are men who want to live well. Show us the way. In your name we pray, Amen.
- Christianity is practical because Christianity is true.
- Christianity is practical because Christianity works.
- Christianity is practical because Christianity was meant to be put into practice.
Soli Deo Gloria
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