Matthew 5:1-6
This is one way to think about being a disciple. It’s a privilege life.
Jesus says “blessed” What does he mean by blessed? Is he just naming different physical bad circumstances and saying you’re blessed if you go through them? Yes, but no.
Yes he talks about physical stuff, but not just physical. He is really talking about spiritual. He is talking about spiritual needs with physical concepts.
We know we can’t survive that long without water. But how long do we think we can live without God almighty? Millions are trying to do it. We’re blind to our spiritual needs, so he uses these physical concepts to make it clearer.
He is saying there is a really unique, select group of people who grasp their situation.
In the wider Greek world this word “blessed” was used of the gods, the Christian martyrs, and a few select people who were determined could be happy. It described the kind of satisfaction or privilege only someone who wasn’t really part of this world could achieve or accomplish.
The privileged
Discover/adventure
To achieve this select privilege
Poor in spirit
The first step on the path to this privilege is poverty of spirit. Jesus says “blessed are the poor in spirit”.
The poor are people who have nothing. If this was strictly a description of their financial place in life, they have no savings. They don’t even have clean clothes. Food is scarce. A sense of desperation sits over their life. They are anxious about their next meal.
But these people aren’t poor physically. They are poor in spirit. A person who is entering the kingdom has to realize, “My problems are more than psychological, but they are at least psychological. They’re more than social, though they’re at least social. They’re more than philosophical; they’re spiritual.”
Poverty of spirit doesn’t mean a person lacks smarts. It doesn’t mean a person is missing passion or even that their character has some flaw in it. To be poor in spirit is much deeper, much broader than that.
If you and I were a little short on cash, we might watch a few videos and skim a few websites about picking up gig jobs. If we really wanted to work hard at it, we might take a Dave Ramsay course.
If you and I needed to get our act together, get our life together, we might learn a new productivity system or take a quick life course.
Even if we needed to improve our relationships, we could see a counselor a few times.
We live in this awesome self-help culture. We’ve got free YouTube videos to help out with so many problems and if that isn’t enough, we can spend $12.95 for an expert who says, spend $12 and this is the last book you’ll ever need. You’ll be an expert.
We’ve got this awesome self-help culture. We’ve figured out we have so many shortcomings, failings, and issues. We’ve got tools and tricks to help you with all of them. We can even help you – we think – with your spiritual poverty.
We’re the first people to say thigs like, “Believe in yourself”, “Love yourself”, and “actualize your potential.” 100 plus years ago no one said things like that. They still heard the same restless inner murmur. Thye didn’t silence it.
Jesus is saying, if you really want to reach a place of privilege, you have to start like this. A lot of people approach Christianity likes it’s a self-help thing. People hit bad patch in life and say, “I’ve hit a bad patch now. I better clean up my life a little. I’ll go to church. I’ll stop this or that. If I need to, I’ll talk to pastor or someone else some. And then God’s power will show up in my life!”
You cannot self-help yourself into a relationship with the God of the universe; you have to have poverty of spirit. You can’t say, “I’ll clean my life up”; you have to say, “My problems are beyond me.” You can’t say, “I’m suffering. I’m having a bad patch. I need a little boost”; you have to say, “I’m not coming to you O Lord because I need a boost, I’m coming to you O Lord because I owe you everything and I owe you more than I can pay. I’m poor in spirit. I’m spiritually bankrupt. My problems are beyond me, and they’re spiritual problems.” Are you there? That’s the first step
Mourn
Being poor in spirit is simply becoming aware about the realities of your life. Most people understand how bad things are in the world. Some people don’t. They’re spiritual teenagers. I’m kind of like this when it comes to accomplishing work goals.
I’ll meet with one mentor or another every 6 months or so. And they’ll say, so what projects are working on? What are you trying to accomplish? Since I’m a pastor, my goals are usually something relational.
I’m trying to build 10 new gospel relationships. 5 new discipling relationships. I’m going to reduce the unhealthy conflict behaviors by 25%. And so on.
“Woah”, they say, “that’s a BHAG – a big hairy audacious goal!” They’ll always say, “How is that going for you?”
I always end up saying, well, you know this person left work or we had this event come up or
Until I finally say, I can’t do this. I’m not getting this done. I really don’t want to mourn over the situation. I don’t want to go to the place where I say, “This is beyond me. It’s more than I can handle.”
You can’t just know the symptoms, recognize the symptoms, and understand the symptoms. If you’re really going to reach that privileged place, you have to know what’s wrong. You have to take the situation seriously enough to ask someone what is causing the problems and what the disease is.
For a lot of people, the greatest sadness they experience in life is over circumstances. There certainly is plenty of that. Job loss, relational conflict, and even death. We all experience that stuff because of sin in the world.
Most people never ask, hey, what is going on behind all of this? What’s the cause of all these problems?
Poor in spirit means acknowledging your deepest life problems are beyond yourself. You don’t have the resources to handle them. To mourn means to acknowledge that those deepest life problems are actually your spiritual problems. Your sin problems.
In other words, our first instinct is to say..., If I were to ask most of you, what are your biggest problems, Most people say it’s my financial problems, relationships problems, or its my health problems. The real problem …
The real problem is our struggle with sin. When you mourn, the weight of this guilt pushes on you. Just like a job loss, relational struggles, or a death might push on you and make you feel the hopelessness, the cheerlessness, the fear of it all, when you mourn over sin, the hopelessness, the cheerlessness pushes on you. It doesn’t crush you. I'm not saying that. Jesus has more to say about that in a minute.
But there is a certain weight that falls on you. The weight of your own sin might really bring you to tears.
And if you don’t mourn, realize you’ll never be comforted. Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. It’s only those who mourn who are ever comforted.
Meek
When they weight begins to press on you, a lot of people are going to say, woah, this is too hard. This is too difficult. I can’t carry all this weight. It’s going to crush me.
People might say, I see my problems are beyond me. I can’t please God, and that just frustrates me to know. I’m going to feel bad. I’m going to be angry at the world. I’m just going to sit here and give up. A lot of people do that.
The other approach is what Jesus says. He says, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”
You can see what he is saying. He is saying, if you truly humble yourself, you can’t be discouraged. You can’t be filled with despair. You can’t just sit down and give up. Why? Because you inherit the earth.
The humble hold the entire universe in their hands. This is another way to say, whoever loses their life will save it. But first comes the difference between meekness and self-pity.
A lot of people think they have given up their life. A lot of people will say something to me like, “I believe God has forgiven me, but I don’t know if I can forgive myself”. That sounds helpful. That sounds really humble. It’s actually a great test for the difference between real humility and fake humility.
What you might actually be saying is, what many people are saying is, I know God is a God of love. And because of that, he doesn’t hold this thing against me. But me, I need to be a good person. I need to be really good. I have higher standards than God. I intend to hold up these higher standards. I’m too proud, I’m too capable to accept forgiveness from God.
This is a great place to remember what CS Lewis says true humility is. CS Lewis, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” True humility is not self-pity. It’s saying, God, I’m going to listen to you. What you say matters. You are Lord of my life, I’m not. Whatever you say about me, sinner and saint, it’s true, no matter what.
Can you see what a difference this could make? A truly humble person realizes Jesus is all about them. This changes them. They can be all about you. That’s how you recognize a truly humble person. They are really, genuinely all about you. They are never insanely high one day and off the charts low the next day. Why? Because a meek person is always saying, On my own I’m nothing. I’ve done nothing to deserve this. Everything I have is a gift from God. God will never take those gifts away.
Hunger and thirst for righteousness -
By now, what we’ve got is a person who recognizes their deepest problems in life are beyond themselves. They don’t have the resources to handle them. Along with that, they see these problems as genuine spiritual problems. Sin problems. The weight of that bears on them. It diminishes them. They’re losing their own life and in the process the life of Jesus has grown for them.
And we’re getting hungry more.
There is this story told by a woman named Rebecca Pippert. She was a speaker and after one of her talks, a woman came up to her and said, “I need to talk to you.” The woman said, I was married recently. She was a member of a very, very conservative evangelical Lutheran church – probably a WELS church. She and her husband to be were considered leaders and shining lights in the church.
You can see they were passionate for Jesus. They were zealous for his glory. It very much looked like they hungered for righteousness.
What is righteousness? It’s to be right with someone. Men, if you remember what it felt like when your wife to be actually accepted you, despite the fact that you drank weird beer and wore clothes from grade school and stayed up all night playing video games, you experienced righteousness. You lived rightness.
This woman and her husband to me, it seemed like they wanted that. They worked hard at church. They were desperate for approval.
Six months before the wedding, they realized they were pregnant. They realized the scandal. They decided she would have an abortion. As she walked down the aisle on her wedding day, everybody was looking at the beaming bride, and all she was thinking to herself was, “You murderer.”
She kept saying to herself, “You were so worried about showing these people you really were. You were so zealous to look right that you would murder this life. I know what you are, she said, and God knows.
She said to Rebecca, I’ve confessed this a thousand times over, again and again. I’m obsessed with it. It’s running me into the ground. How could God possibly forgive me?
Rebecca said, ““My dear friend, Jesus Christ had to die for all our sins, sins of the religious and the non-religious, sins of the Nazis and the victims, sins of the moral types and the immoral types. We are all responsible for the death of the only innocent man who ever lived. The sin that caused you to destroy this life was pride, and it was pride that destroyed Jesus Christ’s life 2,000 years ago. As Luther said, ‘We all carry about in our pockets his very nails.’ You were already a murderer before this happened, and it was all totally paid for long ago.”
What happened to that woman? Did she suddenly say, “You’re making me feel worse?” No, because she got the point. She turned to Becky, and she said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You’re right. I always in my head believed I was a sinner and my sins were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, and now I see it. I came to tell you I did the worst thing imaginable, and you told me I’ve done something worse than that. If I’m worse than I’ve imagined, if I killed God’s Son, and that can be forgiven, then anything else can.”
You and I are so hungry for approval, we’ll often swallow the bitter taste of anything else. There isn’t a pill too bitter that we won’t swallow it down.
Jesus wasn’t hungry for approval. You know what Jesus was hungry for? There is passage in John. Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of my Father.” (John 4)
You know what that means? It means Jesus was hungry for you. Jesus said, I’ve hungered and thirsted for you. There is only one feast that could possibly satisfy me. And once I’ve got that food, I finally won’t be hungry for anything else. I’ll be done.
And the more you enjoy the privileges he is giving you, the more privileged a follower of Jesus you’ll become.
Enjoy the privilege of following Jesus.