Matthew Beatitudes: Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

All right, maybe seated.

So that is the first Beatitude.

There are nine Beatitudes.

The Beatitudes is this a series of statements that Jesus makes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.

So there's nine Sundays going through June and July, and we are going to take one Beatitude per Sunday going through the summer.

So we're going to begin in verse one, work our way through this, and then focus in on that first beatitude.

And so seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.

So this word, disciple, this speaks, it's a rich word.

It's a follower.

It's somebody who has wholeheartedly given themselves over to a teacher.

And so in this case, you have Jesus as the teacher, Jesus is the rabbi, and here he is beginning in in his renowned sermon with these nine statements.

I read this version of the Beatitudes this week.

Might hit you a little bit differently than what we tend to read in Matthew 5.

Blessed are those who don't have it all together.

Anyone just want to amen?

Any amens?

Heather, amen.

Scott nodded.

Blessed are those who have run out of strength, ideas, willpower, resolve, or energy.

Blessed are those who ache because of how severely out of whack the world is.

Blessed are those who stumble or trip and fall in the same place again and again.

Blessed are those who on a regular basis have a dark day in which despair seems to be a step behind them wherever they go.

Blessed are you, for God is with you, and God is on your side, and God meets you in that place.

So these are actually not commands.

These are not commands of what you should go do.

These are descriptions of a person who has seen that they're more flawed than they originally thought, more broken, more imperfect, more sinful than they originally thought, but they're more loved by God than they could dare to dream.

And they actually need this teacher who's teaching this.

They need him, they need his way of life, and they need his death and resurrection to be for them their righteousness.

And then these become descriptions of that person, not commands for us to go and put ourselves out in tougher and tougher striving to do.

So this past week I was listening to a podcast, This American Life on NPR.

Don't know if you listen to that.

I listened to it and it was an old podcast.

It was from 2003.

It was about this island called Nehru.

Has anybody heard of this island called Nehru?

I'd never heard of it either.

It's this tiny island.

It's about one-third of the size of Manhattan.

And this island tends to pop up with like thoughts of conspiracy theories and stuff like this throughout history.

Supposedly, when the uh the Soviet Empire dismantled and about$70 billion was liquidated out of the USSR, it went into Nehru.

Nehru took the money.

If you want to fund a terrorist group, you can use Nehru.

Like Nehru over and over and over again is just synonymous with this sort of activity.

And so this whole podcast was about how does this tiny island, which is in the middle of the Pacific, is desolate, there's nothing on it, it is ugly, it is stripped down, it is barren, it is 1,200 miles from the nearest other land.

How did it become like this?

Because it was it was not like this.

It had not always been like this.

At one point, this was an incredibly beautiful island.

And this is what hit me when I was listening to it, and then I was thinking about this passage, blessed are the poor in spirit.

Because at one point these people were poor, but they had a beautiful island.

And then these businessmen came in and they discovered that this island had phosphate.

And they say to all these poor people, we can make you rich.

And they strip the land, but these people get cars, they get roads, but the land is stripped, the island is stripped, and then the businessmen leave, right?

We know this story.

And the people had been rich for a little bit.

They had their shiny cars and they had their roads, but their island was totally, completely just demolished.

The phosphate eventually ran out, the money was all spent, and now their paradise is all destroyed, and now this island is just worked down to the point of like they have a building with computers in it, and we'll take any evil person's money and we'll hold it for you.

And that's what we'll do to survive.

So they were poor before, but it was beautiful.

And then they were rich, and the wealth actually stripped them of everything good about living in that place.

And we all know this story, like not necessarily in physical wealth, right?

I mean, physical wealth can do that, or it might not do that.

I mean, it's but this is an interesting metaphor, right?

Because we've seen this, we've seen it with a person, or maybe you've seen it with yourself.

When your spirit grows proud, all of a sudden any of the beauty that it had is stripped away.

Because now you're judgmental toward people.

There's no kindness left, you're you're self-oriented, you're selfish.

Right?

Because all of that, like the idea of compassion or kindness, uh authenticity, all of that came out of poverty of spirit.

It came out of humility.

And so we come up against this thought, right?

I mean, it's the same thought that these people on this island think today.

It's the same thought.

We were better off when we were poor.

And so we come up against this thought with our own selves, thinking about Jesus' teaching about blessed are the poor in spirit.

We come up, oh, like, oh, we're actually better off poor in spirit.

So you have a handout in your uh bulletin there, and this first quote.

I have a couple quotes here, ran into this week as I was studying.

This first one is by David Brooks.

He's a prolific, very insightful writer for the New York Times in this article called the moral bucket list that he wrote.

Listen to this.

We live in the culture of the big me.

The meritocracy wants you to promote yourself.

Social media wants you to broadcast a highlight reel of your life.

Your parents and teachers were always telling you how wonderful you were.

But all the people I've ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about their own weaknesses.

They have identified their core sin, whether it is selfishness, the desperate need for approval, cowardice, hard-heartedness, or whatever.

They have traced how that core sin leads to the behavior that makes them feel ashamed.

They have achieved a profound humility, which has best been defined as an intense self-awareness from a position of other centeredness.

That was in the New York Times.

Isn't that great?

Fantastic.

Just pure truth coming out of that.

That's Matthew 5, 3 right there, which is Jesus, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Now here's another one.

Paul Zall, one more quote, hang with me.

Paul Zall is a priest and author, he expounds on this idea of poverty of the spirit or poverty of the soul.

Here's what he says deep down, we're so incredibly consumed with anxieties and fears.

And so the point of the Sermon on the Mount is simply to express the truth of human life, that the truth of the human life is an inward conflict between I ought to be and what I am.

And this causes enormous anxiety, fear, trouble, guilt, and anger, just to name a few.

When I talk about this, people think I'm saying that he's attacking you.

But all he's doing is exposing the fact that before the law or the standard of God, the only possible response is humility.

Before what God is really speaking to human beings, instead of trying harder, the only possible way of dealing with it is humility.

The moment that I recognize that I, by my own efforts to atone or to expiate, or to do better, or to fly right, or to do more, to work harder, to be nicer, or are doomed to perition.

At that moment, there is a release.

And the release spells joy, power, significance, exuberance, happiness, creativity, love, and come to find out holiness.

So let's dig into Jesus' beatitude.

I think that gets our minds and hearts a little warmed up for this.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

So we're going to look at four different words of four different phrases and pull out three different points by doing that.

So the first word is blessed.

Blessed, blessed are the poor in spirit.

So this is a little hard to translate for us.

Something like supremely fortunate, maybe deep happiness.

Author Philip Yancey, he says the closest thing in our culture is just for us to think of it as lucky.

Because for us, it's the kind of happiness you cannot deserve.

So point number one is to be blessed is to receive goodness beyond your ability to deserve or merit.

So right away you can see how these statements are not about us meriting the thing Jesus is talking about.

This is about a description of a person who has been broken and receiving the goodness of God given to them.

So point number one, to be blessed is to receive goodness beyond your ability to deserve or merit.

Second word, this phrase, pour in spirit.

So this word spirit, this is the core of who you are.

This drives how you feel, how you think, the way you make decisions.

This is the Greek word pneuma.

You say that.

This is the vital principle inside of you.

What is the vital principle buried in the core of yourself that drives you?

Jesus is saying that place should be poor.

Not ugly, not a self-hatred, but that place should be a place where merit does not reign.

So that's that next word, poor in spirit.

Poor, it means bankrupt.

You just you have nothing.

You have nothing to offer.

You have nothing to offer this situation.

It's a continuous state of utter poverty.

It's not self-hatred.

It's just that you cannot work it up on your own effort.

So you are bankrupt in your pneuma.

Your most vital principle that drives how you feel and think and who you are and the way you make decisions, all of that is bankrupt.

Right?

And I know it sounds depressing, right?

You go, this is incredibly depressing.

No, it's the most freeing thing you can know.

So our church gives money to uh support a mission in Guatemala called Impacto, and I received an email this week from some things going on down there.

And in this email, uh it's talking about a mother in this town called San Juan.

And in San Juan, they had set up, they've set up this program called Happy Tummies, and Happy Tummies is a program for little kids, and every day, every day, these little kids they can come to this building and they can get a meal, and there will be people, adults there who will love them, feed them, help them with their homework, and give them a Bible lesson.

And they can come every day.

And so Happy Tummies is there every day for these kids.

So there's this mom.

She has three little girls.

And the mom to support herself, she's prostituting herself out.

The dad's ran off.

They're missing rent, so they're bouncing around town.

The kids are in tow, you know, maybe displaced for a while and then finding another room somewhere.

The mom won't show up for her shift at Happy Tummies, so the way that Happy Tummies works is that the parents have to come and serve like once a week, so that the parents can begin to get ministered to also.

And so the way that it works is you got to show up for your shift, and eventually part of it is that your kids can't keep coming, but of course, they're gracious within that rule, and they ask all the other mothers, please let's be patient with her and her situation.

They're praying for her.

And the kids just keep coming throughout this whole process.

Every day they show up, every single day they show up.

They're always showing up for that meal.

They're always showing up for those sweet missionaries and those locals to feed them and to help them with their homework and to talk to them and love them.

They just keep showing up to receive.

Because these little girls don't have anything else.

And this is our second point.

Poor people receive.

That's what poor people do.

See, for poor people, even seeking is receiving.

For me, for a long time, I would hear something like this this beatitude, and I, and it's not a command, but I'd go, okay, well, maybe I'm not gonna seek poverty of spirit, but I'll I'll seek Jesus.

And what I brought to that was, and I'm pretty sure I had a t-shirt that said seek Jesus on it, but I always brought to it my performance ego.

And so I brought to it a lot of merit and a lot of performance, and I was gonna do this and I was gonna do it hard, and I was gonna do it better than anybody else, and I was gonna be really passionate and zealot and radical and every other, you know, really great word we can throw at it.

But I wasn't willing to bring any poverty.

I didn't want to go there.

I didn't want to admit that, right?

Like I didn't understand that I had always been that, and I was being that in that present moment, and I'm that right now more than I realize.

And that that's that's actually what this is talking about.

That even seeking Jesus is a posture of poverty, of receiving what He has done for us.

That for poor people, seeking is receiving.

Poor people receive.

That's what poor people do.

And what that does is so wonderful for us because it brings us always to a position of confession and repentance and to a position of seeing more and more how wonderful and sufficient Jesus is for us and how full God's love is for us, and then it frees us from constantly feeling like we have to pretend like we are perfect or passionate, even when we're not.

And humility is just the understanding that we are continuously, utterly poor when it comes to our ability to overcome guilt, to secure a right relationship with God, to even maintain that right relationship with God, to have some sense of self-worth.

We're coming in that saying, I'm I'm bankrupt to those things.

I'm bankrupt to that.

That my pneuma, the core vital principle, is bankrupt.

And Jesus is teaching something revolutionary to us and to the human spirit because he's saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Lucky are you, lucky are you if you see you are bankrupt in your pneuma?

So that last phrase is, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

So the kingdom of heaven, it brings in this idea of who or what reigns in your heart.

What is the energy that fuels you?

Is it your desire to please or perform or pretend your desire to manipulate or to mask, or is it a humble posture of open hands, of imperfection, of receiving the grace and sufficiency of God that is so incredible?

See, God Himself showed us in history that the person and the work of Jesus is enough for us, right?

He took on our sin, all of our pride, all of our inability to do this very thing.

That none of us are good at this, none of us are great at being poor in spirit.

And he took that on the cross and he said, I'll take, I will take all of those shortcomings, I'll take it all.

That's what the cross is about.

Him taking all of that and then putting upon us his righteousness so that we are secure by his work and not by our work.

And so you don't have to live in the energy of the kingdom of your own self anymore, which is exhausting, right?

You're free from that slavery.

So maybe maybe you're here and you have felt this because in your self-justifying pursuits, you constantly look down on other people.

Right?

Trying not to feel poor.

You don't want to feel poor.

And so when you start to feel poor, it's easier to just judge someone else, and then you won't feel as poor because you don't want to face that, even though that's where you that's where confession and freedom is at.

Or maybe you're just a shadow of yourself in front of anybody else because you're still not sure.

You're still not sure if anybody would love you.

If you really let them see that you're actually a lot poorer than you pretend to be.

Or maybe you're trying to save yourself by ignoring your grief or depression because you think you have to be perfect.

Right?

And in all of those things, and there's a lot of other scenarios, your pneuma, your core vital principle, is self-sufficiency.

Rather than saying I'm really poor in my pneuma.

And this is point, this brings us what we need to hear, which is this last point, number three.

You are incredibly, ridiculously lucky if you come to see that you're bankrupt.

That's what Jesus is saying here.

Because then the true Redeemer can reign and love and be with you.

Finally, you're you're open to that reign.

And now the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, God's Spirit, starts to do some work inside of you.

We're free to be poor.

We're free to be humble.

This week I took my little girls uh for some ice cream.

And so as I was paying for their ice cream, I actually thought about this.

Um, I pay for everything.

I pay for everything for these little people.

They because I think it was because the ice cream was so overpriced, like, it was like, wow, that was a lot of money for that ice cream.

You know, and so as I was paying the overpriced ice cream, I was thinking, like, they're not even aware how overpriced this is, they don't care.

Uh, and they have no ability to pay for this, nor do they have ability to pay for like their new swimsuits or skirts or go to the doctor, right?

They are ridiculously poor.

They really are.

They're absolutely poor.

Yet, in my care, they're free.

What Jesus is saying is in his care, though you are poor, you're free.

He provides for you.

And in that we can begin to see other people, we can actually care for other people, right?

Like, oh wow, holiness actually comes out of this.

We can love people.

I mean, even the fact that we're not good at being poor in spirit shows you how poor we are and how good and loving God is to us.

So, my brothers and sisters, may you bask in the great grace of God.

You and I are wonderfully poor.

But in Him we're wonderfully rich.

May your pneuma rest in the sufficient, perfect love of God for you.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that we can be honest.

That we are not perfect.

God, we confess this morning that we love to pretend before you and before each other, that we have our acts together when we don't, and we hate to face our poverty.

Makes us feel very needy and weak.

God, would you help us see that this is the place where you minister and you set us free, and your spirit works, and a new life is born.

God, would you help us to see that we are already poor in spirit?

And would you help us to see it that we might live in this luck, this blessed, deep happiness of having you reign and not us having to control our lives, feeling like we have to redeem ourselves or save ourselves with our cleverness or control or our beauty or a religious activity.

But we can rest in your work for us.

That your work was perfect, that your love is perfect, and that the cross of Jesus is sufficient.

We pray this only in the name of Jesus.

Amen.