Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit
Lent #1, March 13, 2011 Matt. 5:3
Intro:
Welcome to the first Sunday in Lent, the season of preparation for Easter.
While many of us like the idea of spontaneity, with its surprise and playfulness, we also recognize that the things in life that really are significant usually require careful preparation. Like a career choice, a marriage, retirement, a holiday, even a special meal – these things require fore-thought, planning, and an intentional decision to get ready and then follow-through to make it happen.
The season of Lent is about that kind of preparation. Lent is the 40 days (excepting Sundays) leading up to Easter, and in the Christian calendar it has long been a time set aside for deeper spiritual engagement. It is normally patterned after the rhythms of confession and repentance, with strong elements of sacrifice, as a way of walking with Jesus through the cross and then to the empty tomb.
I’ve mapped out a journey through Lent and would like to invite you to come along. It is a deliberate contrast between the way of life described by Jesus in the Beatitudes, and seven sins that Christian history has identified as particularly sinister to our souls (and which are largely now celebrated in our broader culture). It is well described in one of the resources we’ll be using:
“The Beatitudes are eight snapshots of eight different lives that Jesus said experience God’s favor. The Beatitudes introduced all that Jesus wanted to say about a new kind of life. Through them Jesus sought to pull at his audience’s heartstrings. He wanted to draw them in and show them that the life God offers is precisely what they desired. The Beatitudes were, above all else, Jesus’ invitation to see the world as God does – and to love it. As a whole, the Beatitudes are a picture of the voids created by sin being filled in with the life of heaven. They are eight pictures of resurrection.” (from the introduction, emphasis original: Jeff Cook, Seven: The Deadly Sins And The Beatitudes. ePub Format. © 2008. Zondervan.)
The Journey:
Each Sunday we are going to look at one of the Beatitudes, and see how it fills in the void left by one of the sins identified by some of the ancient Christians as particularly hazardous to our souls. We will continue the discussion in Adult Ed time, and I will prepare some questions for you to work through prayerfully during the week and to discuss with a friend or a spouse. My prayer is that as we walk through this season, we’ll “put to death” the sins and experience the Holy Spirit breathing new life, resurrecting us as we take this season to pay closer attention to our spiritual walk as we draw near to the high point of the Christian year, our celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. I invite you, here at the beginning, to choose to fully engage this journey, and I’m confident that the Holy Spirit will work in us.
Lately in my spirit I’ve been feeling that God wants to stir up a new thing among us, awaken us in a deeper way to His Kingdom life, connect us again to His power to bring real change in our lives and our world. And I must say, that excites me, and I pray we will see it come to reality among us. I’ve been a pastor and a student of history long enough to know that there are times where God moves more visibly, where He comes afresh, where our plodding obedience begins to break down the substantial walls that exist between God’s Kingdom and our lives in the middle of the Kingdom of this world. Maybe that feeling is that God wants to do that in me, and I welcome it, but I think it is for the rest of us as well, and I pray this Lenten Journey is a part of that work of God.
So to begin, I wonder if you might be willing to pray a prayer with me. I’m going to put it on the screen, and I want you to look at it before praying it so that you can choose whether to make this your prayer or not. I’ll invite you to pray it out loud with me in a moment, but only if you will own it as well. It is simple:
Holy Spirit, come.
I open my life to You, completely.
I invite You to open the eyes of my heart to the life of God.
I surrender everything to You,
asking You to remove everything that gets in the way of me living life “to the full”,
asking You to create within me a hatred for sin, and how it destroys life in me,
asking You to fill me with a hunger and thirst for righteousness.
I want to know the life of Christ within me,
and so I give you my heart, mind, emotions, and will,
that Your Kingdom might come in and through me,
and that Your will might be done in and through me.
To the glory of God the Father, Amen.
Blessed Are…
It is very early on. After the miraculous things that happened at His birth, there have been 30 years or so with little that is radically different, but that changed just a short while ago when He went to the desert to receive the baptism of John, and John said “behold the lamb of God…”. Now it has started…
There is something really different about this man. He speaks with authority and backs it up with miraculous healings. He has invited people to follow Him, and some of them left their livelihoods and everything behind to follow. He “traveled throughout the region of Galilee, teaching in the synagogues and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom. And he healed every kind of disease and illness. 24 News about him spread as far as Syria, and people soon began bringing to him all who were sick. And whatever their sickness or disease, or if they were demon possessed or epileptic or paralyzed—he healed them all. 25 Large crowds followed him wherever he went—people from Galilee, the Ten Towns, Jerusalem, from all over Judea, and from east of the Jordan River.
“1 One day as he saw the crowds gathering, Jesus went up on the mountainside and sat down. His disciples gathered around him, 2 and he began to teach them.
3 “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
4 God blesses those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 God blesses those who are humble,
for they will inherit the whole earth.
6 God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice,
for they will be satisfied.
7 God blesses those who are merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 God blesses those whose hearts are pure,
for they will see God.
9 God blesses those who work for peace,
for they will be called the children of God.
10 God blesses those who are persecuted for doing right,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
11 “God blesses you when people mock you and persecute you and lie about you and say all sorts of evil things against you because you are my followers. 12 Be happy about it! Be very glad! For a great reward awaits you in heaven. And remember, the ancient prophets were persecuted in the same way. (Matt 4:23 – 5:12)
Blessed are the poor in spirit
“3 “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
Well let’s just dive right in there and get to the heart of it. Do you need God? I mean, aside from the eternity thing, do you need God today? For your daily life??
This, I think, cuts to the heart of one of the big issues we face as Canadians in 2011. We are pretty comfortable. We are pretty safe. We don’t have a lot of concerns, threats, or even discomforts. Of course there are things we can gripe about, but we would agree, overall, we have it really good.
So why, then, do we need God?
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. I don’t know why the NLT leaves the “in spirit” out, it is there in the Greek, they must assume that their addition of “and realize their need for him” communicates that adequately, but I prefer the rest of the major translations who are specific: “blessed are the poor in spirit”.
Who is that? Is that the “down-and-out”? The addicts, the “sinners”, the people whose lives are really a mess, who really need God because they can’t function day to day on their own? Yes, it is them.
But not just them.
Let me ask you this: what do you have that is really all yours? When it comes right down to it, and we strip away all the surface stuff, what do we have that came from us? What do we have that has any eternal value? On Wednesday night, a number of us participated in an Ash Wednesday service where the celebrant met us at the altar, traced the sign of the cross on our head in black ash, and spoke these words: “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. A sobering, but true, reminder that we have no intrinsic value outside of the touch of God. Without God, we are simply organic matter.
But, here is the joy – we are not “without God”. We know the story – God took the dust of the earth and formed a person, and then breathed the life of His Spirit into us. That is why we matter, that is why we have value, because we have within us the Spirit of God. Every human being on the earth has this initial breath of God, and thus has value, though many in our world are what the Bible describes as “lost” or “dead” in sin.
Now, let us recognize this: we have as much of the Spirit of God within us as we clear out room of ourselves. D. L. Moody said, “I believe firmly that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and everything that is contrary to God’s law, the Holy Spirit will fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God. We must be emptied before we can be filled.” There is limited capacity for control in our lives, and whatever portion we determine to attempt to control, we keep the Spirit from owning and transforming. Those who are “lost” and “dead” in sin are trying to be in control of their own lives, running the show themselves, and so keeping God out. As Christians, we have made a decision to make Jesus our Lord, and have submitted ourselves to the reign of God as we accept citizenship in the Kingdom of God. But the question we must ask ourselves, in this season of confession and repentance, is this: how much are we really allowing Jesus to be Lord, and how much are we running our own lives. There is limited capacity for control in our lives, and whatever portion we determine to attempt to control we keep the Spirit from owning and transforming.
This, I think, is why it is so hard for us to truly be Christians in Canada in 2011. We are, generally speaking, in control of our lives. And when we are in control, we push the Holy Spirit out. We think, perhaps subconsciously, “what do I need God for now? When I die, perhaps, but at the moment I am doing just fine…” And that is why I began with the prayer above – we need to admit, we need to own, and we need to speak out loud our need for God.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” That is all of us whose eyes are open. We are the poor in spirit, we were all lost, hopelessly, in sin. We were dead, spiritually, until Jesus gave us new life. We all, every one of us, are desperately poor without Jesus. We have nothing of eternal value, nothing redeeming, nothing that will not last except for that created within us by Jesus. This is the good news – Jesus met us in our helplessness and rescued us. And once we embrace our poverty of spirit, once we admit our need for God, we see and live the life He promises, “God blesses those who are poor (in spirit) and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
Pride
The problem, the sin, that many of us face in regards to admitting and embracing our poverty of spirit is this nasty thing called pride. When the ancient Christians talk about sin, especially the sin that destroys life within us, they do not talk about external things like murder or adultery or theft. They speak of the inner things, the attitudes of heart that bleed the life out of our souls. And chief among those is pride. Andrew Murray said, “The truth is this - pride must die in you or nothing of heaven can live in you.”
It is exactly the opposite of Jesus’ description as He begins this first recorded sermon, where Jesus is laying out His agenda, His vision, and His description of the Kingdom of God. Pride is devastating to the life of God within us, primarily because it focuses us on ourselves and tricks us into believing that the good things of life are somehow produced by us or are given to us because we are so great or so worthy or so important. And pride seeps in, and starts to lie. “You deserve that… You did a great job now everyone will respect you... You really are a great Christian, you went to church today even though it was daylight savings time and you had to get up an extra hour early…” Way down deep, pride destroys us because it takes God out of His rightful place at the center of the universe (or, at least, out of the center of our universe…), and puts ourselves there on the throne.
And then we start to believe we deserve it, we earned it, and somehow it is ours. And from there, we start to think we must be important, we must really matter to God, we might even have something to offer Him if He asks really nicely and promises a good return.
People full of pride like that are not blessed; blessed are the poor in spirit. For the poor in spirit know they need God, they know that life lived without God is meaningless and futile, and that pursuing some illusion of control in our lives is a recipe for neurosis in the now, disappointment and shock in the future (when we start to really see how little we actually are in control of), and a mundane half-asleep life where we go through the motions without ever really living. At the root of that kind of life is the sin of pride that puts us at the center of our lives where God belongs.
The sin of pride is not healthy self-esteem, nor is it feeling positively about our ability to do something worthwhile. Hear me clearly. The sin of pride is when we go deeper and believe that the good things about us come from ourselves and not from God. Where we cross the line from “I have so much because God is so good”, to “I have so much because I worked hard and earned it and deserve it, and more…”. It comes back to the center – who is there, us or God?
Conclusion:
Jesus says, “God blesses those who are poor (in spirit) and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.” The sin of pride tells us we are not poor in spirit, we are self-sufficient and we do not need God. Pride does not lead us into the Kingdom of God, it is a way to a life that says “I am in control”, and that illusion can sometimes last a long time but for all of us, eventually, we will get to a point of realizing that is a lie and we are not in control.
But the way of Jesus is opposite. It recognizes our need for God, puts to death our pride by cultivating within us a gratitude for the many gifts that come from God and gladly and freely celebrates that I am not in control of the forces of life, but God is. And God is good.
So, which way do you want to live? There is, of course, much more to say about this first beatitude and the sin of pride, and the Lenten journey I described earlier means we’ll take this week to explore this more, but for this morning let me close with some ancient words of Moses (Deut 30):
6 “The Lord your God will change your heart and the hearts of all your descendants, so that you will love him with all your heart and soul and so you may live!... 11 “This command I am giving you today is not too difficult for you to understand, and it is not beyond your reach. 12 It is not kept in heaven, so distant that you must ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down so we can hear it and obey?’ 13 It is not kept beyond the sea, so far away that you must ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to bring it to us so we can hear it and obey?’ 14 No, the message is very close at hand; it is on your lips and in your heart so that you can obey it.
15 “Now listen! Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. 16 For I command you this day to love the Lord your God and to keep his commands, decrees, and regulations by walking in his ways. If you do this, you will live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you and the land you are about to enter and occupy.
17 “But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and if you are drawn away to serve and worship other gods, 18 then I warn you now that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live a long, good life in the land you are crossing the Jordan to occupy.
19 “Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!”
