Today we enter a famous section of the Bible commonly known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. This particular beginning section is known as the “beatitudes” from the Latin word for “blessed”. I think it also means beautiful attitudes. And I am quite certain this may be the most important sermon I have ever preached.
Imagine with me Jesus walking around the Sea of Galilee with his new disciples becoming more famous by the day with all the miracles he was performing. He was preaching with such authority as had never been seen before. Massive crowds followed him. We know he fed 5000 and 3000 so the crowd here was probably at least that big, it may have even been one of those crowds that he fed.
He sees these crowds and makes his way partially up a mountainside so everyone could see and hear him. People settle in around him with great hope and anticipation, their ears standing up, and then he opens his mouth and the first word that comes out is “blessed”.
Now many have translated the word blessed into happy, and though it is somewhat accurate, it’s much more than that. To these readers it was a state of divine joy and perfect happiness that only the gods could experience. It implied an inner satisfaction and sufficiency that didn’t depend on outward circumstances, but was a godlike state that could never be moved by life’s happenings. Being completely in God’s favour.
So I imagine him saying it like this with a big pause…..
In hypnosis this is a very common technique for getting people’s undivided attention and bypassing their rational mind. Jesus was a master communicator and he must have had people wondering, what on earth is this guy saying? And that’s when you can really get past their defences.
And we’ll get there later, but notice after these beatitudes he gives them hypnotic suggestions, “you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world”. Isn’t that cool? He get’s their minds all confused, anticipating and focussed, then in essence tells them to cluck like chickens. Well that’s what the stage hypnotist would do, but Jesus suggestions here are much more useful.
It would be like me coming up to the pulpit one day and starting, “This is the guaranteed secret to being filthy rich, sell everything you have, quit your job, leave your family and go live on top of a mountain. You are like a pizza with no pepperoni.”
You see he also uses metaphors which are another great way of getting past the conscious mind. You are like salt, you are a city on a hill, you are a lamp under a bowl. Instantly we are using more than our ears, we are accessing our sense of smell, sight, and even taste to visualize and fully experience what he is saying.
I could say something really hurt, or I could say it hurt like getting your armpits waxed. Which gives you a better picture, which makes you experience what I’m saying?
Alright, enough about his masterful communication techniques, lets get to these blessings.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. Let’s stop right there for a second. Notice he says blessed are for all these beatitudes. Not blessed will be, or if you do these things you will be blessed, but blessed “are”. This is important because Greek verbs have very specific meanings.
This is not a declaration of how they feel, but of their state in the present and continuing on. John Stott says it well when he clarifies, “The beatitudes are not an indication of their feelings, but a declaration of God’s assessment of them”. Favoured by God. In God’s good books, being bestowed with this state of blessedness.
This also means all Christians are to be like this. These are not just descriptions of exceptional Christians. Christians are Christians and God shows no favouritism. This is how he expects to see all those who say they are Christians.
These are also not spiritual gifts, some having some of them, some having others. No, all Christians are to manifest all of these characteristics. You can’t pick and choose, and you can’t say, “Well that’s not my gifting.” God is saying this is what all Christians are meant to be. Are we?
These are not natural tendencies, because Christians are to be transformed people, different from the world’s norm. And it is only because we are fallen humans that we don’t all manifest these qualities now.
They are also a whole. You cannot manifest one without the other. Each one of them individually demands the others. Do you think it’s a surprise that according to the Bible, these are the first official words Jesus utters after beginning his ministry? He just comes right out and sets the standard for a true blessed, set apart Christian, no sugar coating, no big speech just easy points that have massive power.
These show the essential difference between the true Christian and the non-Christian, and it implies that we all can be like this, obviously if we are sold out to God and let him work in us.
The world says this kind of Christian is a poor excuse for a man, a weakling, holier than thou. The world tells us that we should be more like it is, we need to make the church more attractive to the average person, become as much like them as we can.
But as Martin Lloyd Jones says, “the chaplains drinking and smoking and swearing with the soldiers in the world wars didn’t get the service men into church after the wars were over, and real evangelism never has happened that way.
The glory of the Gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It’s then that they listen to her message, though they may hate it at first. That is how revival comes”. We can’t be just another message in a message saturated culture, ours has to stand out because people see its power.
We should not have to wear a tag that says we are Christian because there’s no other way to distinguish us from everybody else, it should show in our life. The more we become like him, which is the goal, the less we will look like everyone else. Jesus was radically different.
OK, “Poor in Spirit”, what does it mean? Well I entitled this message “Happy are Spiritual Beggars” and the emphasis here should be on beggars. But we need to get one thing straight right off the bat. This has nothing to with finances, it is completely a spiritual state. And I would say it is the most obvious missing ingredient in the church of today.
Many Christians through history have taken this passage to mean that we should take a vow of poverty, and that God favours the poor and blesses them over the rich. This is absolutely not the case, the poor have no wider path to heaven than anyone else, and clearly poverty does not necessarily lead to blessings, neither does being rich.
By beggar I mean a person who desperately depends on God for everything. It is the state we should always come to the Lord in, absolute desperation because we are completely helpless spiritually without him. Even Jesus himself said in John chapter 5, “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of Him who sent me”.
Again I ask, is that our first impulse when we have even seemingly unimportant decisions to make. Do we desperately seek God’s will?
This beatitude has also been mistaken as a command to sacrifice oneself with a false sense of humility. One who secludes oneself, starves oneself, displays their humility to the world, is actually doing it to show how humble and poor in spirit they are. This is actually Pharisaic pride. A person truly poor in spirit will not be that noticeable.
A person poor in Spirit doesn’t tell everybody how worthless they are, it is not a lack of confidence or assertion, again it’s modelled by Jesus. All of these beatitudes are Jesus leading us back to him, look at me, he says, and be like me.
Being poor in spirit in its simplest terms is having an honest, God centered view of oneself. It reflects our attitude toward ourselves. Again Jesus didn’t say he was worthless, but he would acknowledge that he could do nothing without the Father. He definitely had a backbone, he was outrageously bold and assertive, but it was all God powered, not pride powered.
He knew as we should know that while he was in a human body he was completely dependent on God for everything including his physical survival. He never uttered a word that wasn’t from God the Father.
It seems like there’s a reason this beatitude is first, there seems to be a definite order to these. This one is key to all the others and I think we get this from the blessing.
Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven
Remember Matthew is speaking to the Jews who were not allowed to utter the word God, so he always uses Kingdom of Heaven instead of Kingdom of God but they’re the same thing.
It says here that the poor in spirit are blessed because theirs and theirs only is the Kingdom of Heaven. This is an exclusive term that means there will be no one in the Kingdom of Heaven that is not poor in spirit, that isn’t desperately dependent on God.
Do you see why this is so? Because unless you have become aware of your true state as a sinner and have not desperately admitted that state to God and asked for his forgiveness and salvation, you are not saved. The poor in spirit has to come first, or a person doesn’t even understand what they are doing in terms of asking for salvation. They just don’t want to go to hell if it’s real. Confession and repentance come before being born again according to Jesus.
Not only that, in several other places Jesus makes it clear that the Kingdom has already come in Him. This means that it’s not just about going to heaven when you die, it means that the poor in spirit already have the kingdom of heaven, otherwise it would say theirs will be the kingdom of heaven. It is a present reality, though not fully manifested on earth yet, for those who are poor in spirit. And if you are not poor in spirit, you do not have the kingdom of heaven.
If you don’t have the kingdom of Heaven, which is eternal life, which is Jesus, then you don’t have the foundation for being a Christian and displaying all these other characteristics. So this one is primary, it is the foundation of true salvation. Dallas Willard says it well, “It’s not just about going to heaven when you die, its about living in heaven while you are alive.”
No human can bring in the Kingdom, and so this beatitude causes us to face ourselves in a very searching way. If the kingdom is something you have through complete surrender and dependency on God, then it is not something you can get on your own. At once it condemns the idea that we can achieve this on our own power.
Being poor in spirit is completely opposite of striving in your own power to achieve something. Desiring these things is good, but if you are trying to achieve salvation, if you are trying to achieve meekness, and mercy, and love, you are destined for failure and actually going against the beatitudes.
Whatever love or mercy or spiritual gift that you display will be false, because it will not be from God. It will be a human doing and therefore imperfect.
Again here we see why the Christian then is so distinct from the non-Christian. The world despises the idea of being dependent on someone else. Yet most people are dependent on something they like, like alcohol or work or TV.
Self-reliance and self-control are what the world values. If you’re looking for a job, you are probably not going to get far by starting your interview like this, “Well, I am a vile sinner, poor in spirit and completely dependent on God”.
But this is not a man to man characteristic, it is one’s attitude of oneself before our holy God. No one needs to know your poverty of spirit other than God, though spiritually discerning people will probably notice it.
The world looks for attractive personalities, outgoing, confident, independent, glamorous, even aggressive, all fleshly and carnal, based on outward appearance. And I hate to say that this is what has become popular in the church too. We want leaders who display these characteristics. Look at the mega churches and you don’t see many soft-spoken, humble, relational people leading these churches, and you also don’t often see much spiritual growth in those 5000 people either.
Even churches prefer attractive, charismatic, powerful leaders. There is nothing innately wrong with these traits, but they are often not coming from a person who is also poor in spirit. This was the very reason the Jews rejected their Messiah when he came to them.
Remember Paul went to Corinth and he said “We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord”. He preached in weakness, fear and with much trembling, not confidence and ease, and people said of him, “His appearance is weak and his speech contemptible”. But I’d say he was pretty darn effective. We have to look beyond personality to discern a person’s true spiritual state, not that people with these attractive personalities are necessarily spiritually weak, but we must look beyond the surface.
We have piled all these other character traits on to what it means to be poor in spirit. But you don’t have to repress your personality, you don’t have to be materially poor, you don’t have to act like you are worthless and humble. You don’t have to do anything, in fact the opposite is true, stop doing, and start letting.
Just empty yourself and come to realize your utter dependence on God. This is not something you’re born with, it is not natural, it’s supernatural, something you are born again with. See yourself as you really are to God and let Him have you.
Perhaps Isaiah said it best in his chapter 57:15, “For this is what the high and lofty one says – he who lives forever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite’”.
You know what that word contrite means? Crushed or crumbled. God is very clear that we are to be crushed in our old nature so that he can rebuild us. Remember last week we were talking about renovation, transformation? The old has to be demolished for the new to be built. Dallas Willard has a book called renovation of the heart, and it is a classic in spiritual formation.
Peter is a great example of this. When he first sees Jesus perform a miracle he says, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord” We see in his impulsive way that Peter immediately acknowledges who Jesus is, but remember so do demons. Again later when Jesus asks who Peter thinks he is, Peter is right there with the answer.
But it’s not until he denies Jesus at the end that he fully sees who he himself is - a faithless hypocrite, and is crushed in his spirit. Before he was broken he was assertive, pushy, outspoken, confident, bragged about his devotion to Jesus, in many ways Peter was all talk and personality.
He said he would never disown Jesus, he even cut off the soldiers ear when Jesus was arrested. He had the guts to rebuke Jesus and Jesus calls him Satan when he does! Jesus has to tell him three times at the end of John how to follow him, and still talks to him with disapproval just before he ascends to heaven. Yet after Peter was broken and the spirit came to dwell in him at Pentecost, it’s not like he became an unconfident sissy, far from it, before Paul he was the most courageous, bold spokesperson for Jesus.
You see even Peter wasn’t converted, born again, even after all that time with Jesus because he hadn’t been crushed, he wasn’t poor in spirit, and he hadn’t received the Holy Spirit. For something to be born again, it must first be destroyed or at least transformed.
He thought much too highly of himself and his ability. He is then crushed to deep tears of repentance after he denies Jesus. He sees for the first time his true spiritual state.
Acknowledging and accepting Christ for who he is and what he has done, is not the whole enchilada, if you have not been broken in his presence. Again as Dallas Willard says, “Doing the minimal requirements for getting into heaven when you die is like passing the written requirement for a drivers license.”
It happened to Moses to Peter, most of the prophets, to Paul and many others in the Bible. Realizing what you are in the presence of the almighty God should overwhelm us, and bring us to our knees in desperation and tears. I remember this crumbling well, months after I “officially” became a Christian by accepting Christ. We don’t just invite our buddy Jesus into our hearts, we don’t just accept Jesus as our Saviour, we beg him to break us and change us because we see who we really are.
Look what Peter says after Pentecost, the first actual spirit powered instructions he gives, “Repent and be baptized every one of you”. You see now he knows the truth. He doesn’t say accept Jesus, admit that he died for you, ask him into your heart.
No, the first thing he says is repent, realize that you are a sinner and unworthy of the Lord, and be broken inside because of it, and then be baptized. What does baptism represent, dying, and being raised a new person.
I can’t be dogmatic and say that if you haven’t had this kind of experience you’re not saved. But Jesus says if you are not poor in spirit, you do not have the Kingdom of Heaven. I’m going to take that very seriously.
But forget about even going to heaven and being saved for a minute, what about being a Christian, a follower of Christ in this life. The Kingdom of Heaven is here. John the Baptist says just a couple chapters earlier in Matthew, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Jesus himself says at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in Heaven”. Lip service won’t cut it. This is a real wake up statement from Jesus.
Jesus in Luke 10 tells his disciples to say that the kingdom of God has come near to you, when he tells them to go heal people. He tells the religious leaders in Luke 17, behold the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you, referring to himself. If he is in us, we have the Kingdom of Heaven.
I don’t know who’s saved and who isn’t but I do hear what Jesus is saying in His word. If you are satisfied with a get out of hell free card maybe you have one, but if you want to be a Christian, if you want real assurance of salvation, Jesus demands that you die to yourself, allow him to break your spirit of self-reliance, and become fully dependent on him. That is what it means to be poor in spirit and I pray that you are, so that you can have the Kingdom of Heaven, not just when you die, but now.
Let’s ask ourselves then these questions as we begin our adventure through the Sermon on the Mount. Am I like that, am I poor in spirit? How do I really feel about myself in relation to God, and in the presence of God? And as I live my life, what am I saying, what am I praying about, what is my attitude with regard to myself?
Yet how does a person become poor in spirit? By not looking at yourself, or trying to do things to yourself. The more you try to be poor in spirit the more you are focused on yourself and doing something that you can’t do. You can’t hide your nakedness from God. The way to become poor in spirit is to look at God and let him break you.
Look at the fall. Suddenly after Adam and Eve sinned, they realized they were naked, they became self-aware of their sinfulness, their separation from God. Prior to this, all they knew was their oneness with God, they didn’t even see themselves. What did they then do, tried to cover themselves up instead of running to God and confessing. What does God then do, he clothes them, he covers their nakedness properly after their ineffective attempt with fig leaves, which wouldn’t last long.
Beam ahead 66 books into Revelation and the church of Laodicea, the modern church. While Adam and Eve saw their nakedness, Jesus says that we are naked, but we don’t realize it. God wants us to see our nakedness again, not physically, but he wants us to completely expose ourselves, our true nature before him. Then let him clothe us in his righteousness. The only way to have complete intimacy is for us to be completely honest and exposed, and it’s my experience that this is one of our greatest fears before God and each other.
The word that God keeps giving me for the church is simplicity. He says, “I don’t need your talents, I don’t need you to put programs together, I don’t need anything you have to offer, I created you. But I want you, I want a relationship with you, I want you to love me as much as I love you. The only reason there is a church is so I can have you. Why won’t you just let me be with you, why don’t you want to spend time with me?”
Immerse yourself in his word, read his law, see what he expects of us, how he wants to make us. Contemplate standing before him. Look at the Jesus of the Gospels, look at his example, it is exactly what we are to be in this human shell, and he can make us like that.
The more we look at Him, the more naked, hopeless and helpless we will feel about ourselves in a good way, a truthful way, and the more we will depend on the one who created us. We cannot stand before God long before we realize what we are in comparison to Him. His strength is found in our weakness.
We must let him clothe us, first with a new nature, then with a new glorified body when he comes back. I wonder sometimes, will he give us the physical body if he hasn’t been allowed to change the person that will inhabit that body?
Keep looking at Him in weakness and the transformation will take place. You cannot look at him without feeling your absolute poverty, and emptiness. Has the church stopped looking at him and replaced it with looking at ourselves, to ourselves to make the church be something we want it to be? The church will never be anything without Christ at the helm of a bunch of beloved, blessed, slaves.
