The Poor in Spirit
1Seeing the multitudes, he went up onto the mountain. When he had sat down, his disciples came to him. 2He opened his mouth and taught them, saying, 3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 4Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 5Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. 6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. 7Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. 8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. 9Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. 10Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 11“Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. 12Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
When Jesus proclaimed the Sermon on the Mount, those who heard him were Jews who kept the Sabbath and held strictly to the law that forbids pork. Yet because this teaching becomes, in the end, the center of the spiritual life for every Christian who has been saved, we are to keep it as spiritual instruction for ourselves. Jesus said that when we become poor in spirit, we can set our hope on the Kingdom of God and cast off our greed and our craving for the world. Sadly, those who live as the poor in spirit will be persecuted by the world, which will try to rob them of their faith just as it persecuted Jesus. Even so, those who are poor in spirit gain the wisdom and understanding to reflect God’s glory into the world, and they can become a holy people who take up their part as lamp and salt. The persecution of the church is itself a sign that an evil spirit is setting itself against God. However painful the persecution we meet in the world, we must grow inwardly so that we may lift high the name of God. When we honor God’s name even under persecution, we show how far we have matured in faith and how truly we believe that God is alive and at work.
How should we live until the day we reach heaven? On a television scholarship quiz, when the student who takes first place is handed plane tickets and hotel vouchers for a trip abroad, their delight brings a smile even to strangers. That student won not by a great effort for the quiz show but by studying all along. Just as the student rejoices with the prize in hand, God wants his people to rejoice and be glad when they are given citizenship in his Kingdom. The poor in spirit do not insist on seeing heaven with their own eyes before they will believe it exists. They are the children who receive heaven as a gift in this world and live with gladness and joy, as though they were already living there. To believe in heaven only after seeing it is the foolish faith of Thomas. When you believe that heaven is real, God can pour out a richer grace on your everyday life. This is what Scripture means when it says that faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen.
Colossians 1:15-17
15who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.
Scripture tells us that all things in the world were created for Christ. If thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, all the authorities and rulers that people fear, were created for Christ, then we too must think hard about how we ought to live for him. When we hold fast to this word and strive to live by faith in Christ, every power in the world becomes an instrument in our hands as we fulfill the task God has given us. If, on the other hand, we keep Christ at a distance to win the favor of powers, thrones, and rulers, we will be cast off by the very Christ who created them all. Only when we have the wisdom to discern what comes first can we receive the help of Jesus Christ, the Almighty, the King of kings.
To live in this world, we certainly need money, health, and children who do well. But we must always be on our guard, because if we put life in this world ahead of God, the world will steal our hearts and we may end up living by our own greed. Jesus said that the poor in spirit receive the Kingdom of Heaven as their blessing. What, then, does it mean to be poor in spirit? The word spirit here carries the sense of heart or soul. To be poor in heart is to have emptied oneself of everything that is useless. The Jews, however, filled as they were with the works of the law, would not have understood what it meant to be poor in spirit.
If we are to enter heaven, we must fill our hearts not with worldly power, wealth, and human righteousness but with steadfast faith. Casting off greed and fleshly desire is no easy thing, but those who fill themselves with steadfast faith can gain deep spiritual insight. Such desires fill us naturally, out of human instinct. How hard must it be to lay them down, if Jesus promised heaven to those who do? For human beings, who in their greed ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, it is plainly not easy to make the spirit poor in obedience to the word of Christ.
The first thing we must do if we are to live as the poor in spirit is to acknowledge that God is the owner of all things. Everything in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, was created for God’s glory; this means that nothing has any reason to exist apart from his glory. Once we forget this, the desire to possess things as our own takes root. Do you believe that God, the owner of the whole universe, has appointed human beings as stewards to manage it all? The people of the world will not admit this, but believers must. Yet in times of trouble they confess that everything they have belongs to God, and then, once their prayers are answered, they bar the way so that Christ cannot come into their lives and exercise his rights as owner. Because their faith is of this kind, they pick out only the sermons they want to hear, and when the word of Christ differs from their own thinking, they refuse to accept it.
God freely gave the Garden of Eden, which was his own, to Adam and Eve, and commanded them to obey his word. But because they would not acknowledge what was God’s as God’s, they lost to Satan everything they had been given, even their lives. In other words, the house the Father had given them so that they might live happily was taken from them entirely, because they could not see through Satan’s lie. Adam, that is, humanity, was left wandering without a home, and to bring him back to live in a secure house again, the Father paid the price with his own life. That price was the cross. The Father took upon himself the sin of Adam, who in his folly trusted and followed the word of Satan over the word of the Father. Because of Adam’s sin in failing to tend the beautiful life God had given him, God paid once more: he shed his precious blood to atone for original sin. It was because Adam disobeyed God’s word that Jesus himself came to this earth and died to pay the wages of sin. This world and all things in it never belonged to humanity, nor to Satan, who seized them by deceiving us. They are God’s, and so it was God who restored them as well.
God must have entrusted the things of this world to you as well, freely, and asked you to look after them. But have you forgotten that you are a steward? Have you torn off the owner’s name, fixed your own name to everything, and insisted that you will never give any of it back? Some people even go so far as to take the lives and wealth of others in order to make what is God’s their own. This is just what Satan did to Adam; people like this are therefore the rich in spirit, their hearts full of what is rotten. If those who need the grace of redemption go on living as the rich in spirit, unable to let go of their greed and covetousness, they cannot become God’s people. To be poor in spirit, we must acknowledge that our lives, and life itself, belong to God, and only if we are ready to leave the world behind at any moment can we enter the heaven Jesus Christ has prepared. When I preach like this, people sometimes come to me with a question. If I want my children to do well at school, they ask, and if I work as hard as I can to be promoted, does that mean I cannot be poor in spirit? If anyone thinks they must do nothing at all but pray and live in poverty in order to be poor in spirit, that is not poverty of spirit; it is laziness. There are basic things every person has to do in life. To live poor in spirit is to live humbly, knowing that nothing in this world is mine and that I am only a steward. Without means we cannot raise our children or live a decent life, so we have a responsibility to help our children grow up rightly, and for that we need money. There is nothing wrong at all with earning a great deal and succeeding in life. But if you feel unhappy because you have less than others, or lose heart because your child does not outshine other children, those thoughts show that you are thinking as an owner, not as a steward. To live as the poor in spirit means to set our hope on heaven and not to grasp beyond measure; it does not mean neglecting the basic things a person must do. If someone works diligently, learns to be content with what they have been given, and spends themselves for the Kingdom of God, God will entrust them with still more so that they can work for him.
Matthew 6:20-21
20but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume, and where thieves don’t break through and steal; 21for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
To live according to God’s will is to overcome our evil human nature, to keep far from sin, and to lead an upright life in keeping with the word. Human effort alone cannot keep us from sin, and only with the help of the Holy Spirit can we overcome our evil thoughts and nature. Of everything in the human heart, wealth is the hardest to push out. What is more, the very idea of counting what we have built up by our own labor as God’s may make no sense to us. So some preach that giving large offerings to the church is how we lay up treasure in heaven’s storehouse, but that is not what this verse means. This world belongs to God, and Christ is its owner and its king, because through his work of redemption he paid the price and bought back my life when it had fallen into death. God, who has existed of himself from before all eternity, created the world and all things by his word, and to this day he has governed them without the slightest error. For thousands of years this world has gone on being restored and healed, unchanging, and that in itself shows that God reigns.
Genesis 1:1
1In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
If you cannot believe this verse, you will never be able to believe the rest of Scripture. When we believe that God created the heavens and the earth, we come to believe in the atonement of Christ. The Kingdom, the power, and the glory have belonged to Jesus Christ from the beginning, and the judgment and the second coming that lie ahead belong to him as well. Those who first acknowledge this firmly and believe it are the ones who can lay up their treasure in heaven.
In Palestine, we are told, people buried their valuables in the ground. Jesus knew their custom, and so that they could easily understand, he told them that treasure buried in the earth would be spoiled by moth and rust, and that they should lay it up in heaven instead. The rich would not share with the poor; they hoarded as much as their greed desired and then lived in fear of thieves. So they built their walls higher, barred their windows like a fortress, and lived inside as though they had locked themselves in a prison. To people like these Jesus spoke firmly: however great your wealth, if I take your life today, you can no longer be the owner of all those riches. That is why the very thought that we are owners rather than stewards is itself sin.
The heaven Jesus spoke of has a greatness this earth cannot compare with, in its everlasting holiness and its boundless worth. The treasure we can store in heaven’s storehouse is the good we do by faith here on earth. Since good works cannot be done without sacrificing what is our own, we must know that we are stewards, live by faith, and give generously. In the same spirit, the apostle Paul charged the rich in 1 Timothy 6:17-19 not to be haughty, nor to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy; to do good, to be rich in good works, and to be generous. This word is the very way to lay up treasure in heaven. Of course, we may be afraid of seeing what we own grow smaller, but if we live uprightly according to the word, we will be blessed with abundance, both in spirit and in material things.
When a certain nobleman set out for a far country to receive a kingdom, he gave each of ten servants one mina and told them to trade with it as best they could until he returned. When he came back with his kingdom, he gave the servant who had made ten minas from one authority over ten cities, and the servant who had made five, authority over five cities. This passage speaks of the reward given to servants who obey the word. But one servant brought back his mina wrapped in a cloth and said he had done nothing with it because he was afraid of losing it. The master was furious, rebuked him as a wicked servant, and gave even that one mina to the servant who had ten. Those who saw this asked why he would give more to a man who already had ten minas, and he answered that to everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. Had that servant not wrapped his mina in a cloth, but traded with all his might and lost even that, the king would have commended him, because he would have seen a heart that tried to do something for the king. And had he grasped his master’s heart and worked hard, the almighty king would have kept him from ruin. An upright heart that serves God’s glory in poverty of spirit: this is what it means to lay up treasure in heaven. The man who made ten minas understood fully that Jesus had borne the cross for him, and that is how he could spend his very life on the charge he had been given. A person like this has a faith that looks to God alone. Because he knew how precious salvation is and worked hard to spread the gospel, he was blessed with yet another mina. This is the heavenly reward the faithful receive. It is the mark of the poor in spirit to serve God with all their soul, heart, and mind and to cherish their neighbor as themselves. To children so dear, God does not withhold heaven and its rewards.
The blessing people want and the blessing God gives are not the same. People want to pile up the possessions of this world, but the blessing God gives reaches beyond visible, bodily plenty: it is the peace and rest that are ours in the eternal world. Though they are still in the world, those who hope for heaven trust that God will supply all they need, and they have no need for greed or craving. Why? Because they already hold citizenship in the Kingdom of God, and they believe they will live forever in the dwelling place God has prepared. Those who rely on God fight the good fight by scattering their gifts to the poor, and since they have laid up their treasure in heaven, their life in this world will be at peace, like the poor who have nothing to guard. How could God not love such upright children? How could he fail to protect them? He will surely keep them from the evil one and from evil spirits, and he will send angels and people to make their circumstances favorable. The New Jerusalem described in Revelation 21 is said to be so beautiful that human language cannot express it. Scripture records that twelve angels guard the gates of heaven, which are filled with God’s glory, and that its wall was built of jasper and the city of pure gold, so that it was like clear glass. The twelve gates are pearls, the street of the city is pure gold like transparent glass, and Almighty God and the Lamb are its temple. Because they light it so brightly that it needs neither sun nor moon, it is a place where nothing is lacking.
You are children who will live in this New Jerusalem, so full of glory. It cannot be seen now, but the poor in spirit live on this earth with joy, as though they were already living in heaven, and they do not grasp for more. We must learn to tell the difference between doing our best and being greedy.
Colossians 3:1-3
1If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God. 2Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth. 3For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Jesus bore the cross, rose again, and sat down at the right hand of God in order to bring us to live in that beautiful heaven. Now we must all stop setting our minds on the things of the earth, which perish, and live with our minds on the things above. The only way to live in so great a glory even here on earth is to strive to become poor in spirit. Let me say it once more: you died on the cross with Jesus Christ, so you no longer have a body that can harbor greed and the desires of the flesh. Only if we keep a poor spirit, trust Jesus Christ wholly, and fulfill our role as stewards can we enter heaven. If we serve God as our master and carry out our calling with a good conscience, we will be assured of eternal life under his protection. May you reveal the glory of God and share in the blessings of both earth and heaven.