What does it mean to be poor in spirit?
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:3
May we see that we are spiritually bankrupt if we don't have Jesus. It is clear that being poor in spirit is not about appearing poor in spirit, or acting poor in spirit but by truly being...poor in spirit. When we see that we have nothing spiritually good and our account is empty, we acknowledge that we are poor...this is a confession that goes against our pride. Jesus' account is full and he gives it to those those who believe in him. Before this belief in Christ, or with our belief in Christ, we see that our accounts are emptied out due to our self-worship and God rejecting lives and attitudes. We acknowledge that we need Jesus for forgiveness and satisfaction. In Christ our spirits worship and soar with joy. These are the kind of souls that will abide with Jesus forever in Heaven. Souls that depend on God. Souls that find their purpose in the glory of God. Knowing that you are poor in spirit and can be rich in Jesus is the foundation of the beatitudes, the way of being blessed and blessing others for their good and God's glory. May we never pretend that we are rich and act as if all is well, but may we confess our need for Jesus daily and depend on him always. Although he holds his sheep eternally, we still tend to run to other satisfiers and lean on our own ways. The believer lives a life of constant faith and repentance, not to gain salvation, but because of salvation. A life-long leaning on God is a blessed life. God is gracious!
Here are some gleanings:
This does not refer to natural disposition.... The poor in spirit are those who acknowledge their own helplessness and rely on God’s omnipotence. They sense their spiritual need and find it supplied in the Lord.
The kingdom of heaven, where self-sufficiency is no virtue and self-exaltation is a vice, belongs to such people.
William MacDonald
The Beatitudes demonstrate that the way to heavenly blessedness is opposite the worldly path people normally follow to find happiness. The worldly idea is that happiness is found in riches, merriment, abundance, leisure, and such things.
In the Beatitudes, Jesus describes the character of true faith. Poor in spirit. The opposite of self-sufficiency, spiritual poverty includes the deep humility of recognizing one’s utter spiritual bankruptcy apart from God. It describes those who are acutely conscious that they are lost and hopeless apart from divine grace.
Jesus teaches that the kingdom is a gracious gift to those who sense their own poverty of spirit.
John MacArthur
God never made a soul so small that the whole world will satisfy it.
Not poor in spirituality but “with respect to” their spirit; that is, they are the ones who have become convinced of their spiritual poverty. They have been made conscious of their misery and want. Their old pride has been broken. They have begun to cry out, “O God, be thou merciful to me, the sinner” (Luke 18:13). They are of a contrite spirit and tremble at God’s word (Isa. 66:2; cf. 57:15). They realize their own utter helplessness (Rom. 7:24), expect nothing from self, everything from God.
The book of Revelation contains two vivid passages that respectively show:
a. how one can be poor though deeming himself to be rich, and
b. how a person can be rich indeed in the midst of his poverty.
The risen and exalted Church Visitor, Jesus Christ, addresses lukewarm Laodicea as follows:
- So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. 17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Revelation 3:16-17
But he gladdens the church of Smyrna by saying:
- I know your tribulation [or:affliction] and your poverty, but you are rich” (2:9).
William Hendriksen
Humility is the very first letter in the alphabet of Christianity. We must begin low, if we would build high.
J.C. Ryle
You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
Matthew 5:3 (Message)
RICH: the reality of encountering Jesus
In this short 117 page book, Peter Dickson and David Gibson offer sharp and dangerous commentary on nine+ passages from the book of Luke. Sharp because the short chapters cut precisely into the meat of the meaning of what Luke shares/writes. Have you ever been playing with a little pocket knife and underestimated its ability to penetrate or slice you? Well, Luke's many glimpses into who Jesus is should never be underestimated. Also, this little book by a couple of guys I have never heard of could be overlooked in the midst of awesome popular books and commentary series. RICH offers wonderful insight that could help any seeker of truth as supplement to personal Scripture reading of Luke.
It's dangerous because they remind us that we are saved by grace alone by a lover of sinners, not saved by works by a lover of the self-righteous....although he does love repentant self-righteous folks...that's all of us. Jesus came to help us see that we are needy, that we are dead in our sins, that we are bankrupt with a debt that we can not pay. As he shows us this we see that he offers himself to be our riches, our salvation, our substitute, our hope, and our Lord that can bear our worship...who can be our God unlike any other, including ourselves. We crumble under the weight of self-worship along with all idols.
Many of us want to instinctively want to point to the good things we have done, the kind of things we hope might just haul us out of the spiritual red into the black and tip the scales in our favour...But the problem with even the best that we can bring is that it is like offering the bank a handful of copper coins to repay a £1m mortgage. It is Jesus who came to help us see our bankruptcy.
Chapters
1. A Rags to Riches Story, Luke 4:14-22
...encountering Jesus is a hazardous business. There is no neutral position to occupy once he has addressed us. Either we hear what he says and believe him, or even our indifference and our apathy counts as a rejection of him.
2. God in the Dock, Luke 1:26-35, 2:1-15
There is no Christian view of God that does not recognize that we can only talk about God meaningfully if we talk about Jesus.
3. The Real Jesus, Luke 4:31-44
Luke presents us with a sobering fact: it is dangerous to be dazzled and amazed by Jesus' deeds and to be totally oblivious to the priority and meaning of Jesus' words.
4. The Scandal, Luke 7:36-50
It is dangerous to have fixed ideas about people-and especially about Jesus. With compassion and grace, with perfect insight and understanding, he (Jesus) spots the attitudes that are skewed and says 'let me tell you why your thinking has to change'.
We separate people into artificial categories of good and bad even though everyone is in need of God's forgiveness. This was Simon the Pharisee's mistake. Luke is showing us that God's forgiveness offends those who think it is only relevant for others.
5. The Greatest Mistakes You Cold Ever Make, Luke 12:13-48
at this point in Luke..."Jesus' popularity is sky-high. He's the latest, greatest thing and everyone wants in on the action. But Jesus isn't interested in admirers, however sincere in their admiration; he wants devoted followers.
What a terrible error to be afraid of the terrorist who can kill but to not give a second thought to standing before Almighty God on judgment day (12:4).
The person who embraces Jesus loosens their grip on everything else. They give their money to others. They share their home with strangers. They are not obsessed with their own nearest and dearest. They spend time with the unlovely. They shift their priorities from themselves to others. Their worries about the present shrink while their hopes for the future grow... All because Jesus Christ is the greatest treasure they possess.
6. The Back to Front Kingdom, Luke 14:1-24, 18:9-14
...the person who has nothing to offer God but their sin is the person who finds that God offers them everything.
7. Finders Keepers, Luke 15:1-32
In regards to the older brother in the story of the prodigal son.....Self-righteousness is the breeding ground for deadly muttering, and deadly muttering when full grown is the spiritual equivalent of a terminal disease that leads to the kind of anger that refuses to go into the party, and sits outside in a huff.
8. The Price of Freedom, Luke 22:14-23, Luke 22:54-23:49
Subtitiles...His blood, my forgiveness. His trial, my freedom. His death, my life. His life, my future.
9. The Big Picture, Luke 4:14-30
It is easy to spend some free-time reading a book about Jesus giving sight to the blind without ever realizing that I am the one who is blind.
“I’ll take it from here.” Not a good idea.
How do you seek change?
How can and will we be changed?
Do we even see clearly that we need changing or are we falsely satisfied with our dependence on church attendance, bible studies, and spiritual disciplines as we neglect the power of the gospel of Jesus?
It's like a newborn baby turning to mom and dad after delivery and saying, "Wow, thanks! Love you guys...I'll take it from here."
In For the Fame of God's Name, David Livingston writes an encouraging chapter titled, What is the Gospel?-revisited.
After covering the meanings of the word gospel in Greek as it appears in the New Testament, he gives a couple of strong exhortations to not only believe in the gospel for our salvation but for all of live transformation.
"...the gospel is regularly presented not only as truth to be received and believed, but the very power of God to transform (see 1 Corinthians 2; 1 Thess. 2:4).
Failure to see this point has huge and deleterious consequences. I shall mention only two. First, if the gospel becomes that by which we slip into the kingdom, but all the business of transformation turns on postgospel disciplines and strategies, then we shall constantly be directing the attention of people away from the gospel, away from the cross and resurrection. Soon the gospel will be something that we quietly assume is necessary for salvation, but not what we are excited about, not what we are preaching, not the power of God. What is really important are the spiritual disciplines. Of course, when we point this out to someone for whom techniques and disciplines are of paramount importance, there is likely to be instant indignation. Of course I believe in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, they say. And doubtless they do. Yet the question remains: What are they excited about? Where do they rest their confidence? On what does their hope of transformation depend?"
"....a rich grasp of what it means to "preach the gospel" ought to be definitive for establishing our strategy. We are constantly urged to develop mission strategies, vision documents, strategic plans, and the like. At a certain level, I am all for such encouragement, so long as the primary strategy of God, disclosed in Scripture, is preserved, such that what we are really doing is nothing more than carefully working out tactics in submissions to the grand strategy that God himself has laid down. That gospel strategy, laid out again and again, is the heraldic announcement of the gospel. It is gospeling..."
The surpassing power belongs to God
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.
(2 Corinthians 4:7 ESV)
As Sherry and I sat around today with some new missionary friends I was reminded of the fact that God has entrusted his gospel in weak vessels. It's not that my friends were appearing weak, by no means...although they are....it's that I was reminded that as a jar of clay my view of the gospel and missions can be so weak. I can forget that Jesus is the great shepherd who will bring in his sheep.
"And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd."John 10:16
But he does this using his people who are very weak in order to show us that the power belongs to God and not us. Jesus is our good shepherd who leads us in how we are to love on and share his good news with the world. We are to learn the culture and ask questions about how to best communicate the good news in that culture. We are to be learners of the Word and of the World. We are to learn the Word so we can best love the World with the gospel. We are to pray. We are to trust. We are to acknowledge our weakness and his strength.
As we seek to share Jesus with others we will clearly see that we are weak and need a shepherd who we can trust to lead. It's not always a tidy set of methods that best produce fruit, but it is the power of God through his gospel, his timing, his process, his power.
I was encouraged to not only believe in the power of the gospel to see souls saved, but to trust in the Lord of salvation to do it. Being results oriented can easily cause us to shuck evangelism down into tidy categories of what works and what does not. In doing this we can unfortunately depend on our clay-bilities instead of depending on the surpassing power that belongs to God.
