Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are the poor in spirit... Matthew
5:3
Poor in spirit” commends those who realize their destitute condition before God.Those who are “poor in spirit” gladly cast themselves on God’s grace.
Poor in spirit is the personal acknowledgment of our spiritual bankruptcy before God.
It is the tax collector standing in the temple before God and beating on his breast saying, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner” (Luke 18:9-14).
It is an honest confession that we are sinful and utterly without the moral virtues that we need to commend us to God.
It’s the deepest form of repentance. It acknowledges our desperate need for God.
At the very beginning of the Sermon we discover that we do not have the spiritual resources in ourselves to put Jesus’ teachings into practice. You and I cannot fulfill God’s standards by ourselves.
Blessed are those who realize that they are spiritually bankrupt. Much of the rest of the sermon is designed to rip away from us the self-delusion that we are something when we have nothing; it aims to produce in us a genuine poverty of spirit.http://discovertheword.org/2011/01/20/what-does-the-concept-%E2%80%9Cpoor-in-spirit%E2%80%9D-really-mean/
Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.... Had a wonderful door open this morning in my
devotions. Actually, this door was the opening of a safe of hidden treasures,
and once the Holy Spirit opened the eyes of my heart, My spirit man leap like
calves coming out of the stalls in Springtime.( Malachi 4:2 ).The reason why
the poor in spirit are blessed and inherit the kingdom of heaven is because a
poor man knows he's poor and needs help. A rich man needs nothing but demands
everything. A poor man needs everything and demands nothing. We can not
approach God if we know we don't need him for anything. But if we know we need
him so desperately as a poor man needs a loaf of bread, he will meet us and
therefore take us in.The organized church "The Pharisees (of cultural
Christiandom)"(taken from a quote from Tim Shey (High Plains Drifter;
http://tim-shey.blogspot.com/2011/04/they-have-stretched-my-shredded-body-on.html)
can try to identify or talk about being poor in spirit like a very rich man
saying he can identify with the poor man with tongue in cheek while foreclosing
on the poor man's mortgage. The Pharisees of cultural christiandom don't need
anything but demand everything from religious compliance to the LAW to futile
compliance with "church bilaws, rules, and MORES. Oswald Chambers sums it
up best here:"The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount produces a sense of
despair in the natural man - exactly what Jesus means for it to do. As long as
we have some self-righteous idea that we can carry out our Lord's teaching, God
will allow us to continue until we expose our own ignorance by stumbling over
some obstacle in our way. ONLY THEN are we willing to come to him as paupers
and receive from Him. Blessed are the poor in spirit.' This is the first
principle in the Kingdom of God. The underlying foundation of Jesus Christ's
kingdom is poverty, not possessions; not making decisions for Jesus, but having
a sense of such absolute futility that we finally admit, "Lord I cannot
even begin to do this." Then Jesus say, "Blessed are you.... (5:11).
This is the doorway to the kingdom, yet it takes us so long to believe we are
actually poor. The knowledge of our own poverty is what brings us to the proper
place where Jesus Christ accomplishes his work. " (Oswald Chambers, My
Utmost For His Highest. July 21)
Amen! May we always be spiritually bankrupt, so HE can fill us again and again! When I am weak HE is strong!
ReplyDeleteThank you for the encouragement!
Blessings!