Matthew 5:3: “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit…”

INTRODUCTION:

Back in my school teaching days, I used to ask my students to write an essay for me each week. One of topics I asked them to write about was what their ambition was for their lives.

The most common ambition of these 5th, 6th and 7th graders was simply to be happy. They weren’t dreaming of fame or riches. They just wanted to be happy.

Well, those children are in their 60s or 70s now, and I hope that they have learned by now that there are more important things than “being happy”—and that happiness is not achieved by aiming at it.

Jesus gave us some instructions for what makes a “happy” life.

We call them “The Beatitudes.” “Beatitude” just means “blessing.” The Beatitudes are the first nine sentences of the Sermon on the Mount.

The first one goes like this: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Then follows: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Next: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” You would recognize the others.

These words are familiar, so familiar that when we hear them, we are not especially impressed.

That is because we have heard them so much that we don’t realize that they are like 9 little bombshells, demolishing the ideas we take for granted about what it takes to have a happy life.

If you asked most people, “What makes a happy life?” they might tell you that the good life is to be young and healthy, to have good friends, to have fun, to be respected, and to have enough money to buy nice things.

Many dream of winning the lottery. They think that if they had a million dollars, their troubles would be over. This, in spite of the fact that winning the lottery has ruined—not helped—many lives.

What Jesus says constitutes a happy life is just the opposite of what most people would choose.

Today I intend to talk about the first Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I. First, I want to talk to you about this first word: “Blessed.”

The word in Greek is makarios. According to my Greek lexicon, makarios has three meanings: “happy,” “blessed,” and “fortunate.”

We think of “happiness” as a feeling, but here Jesus isn’t really talking about feelings.

He’s talking about a reality that is more than just a feeling. So our translation uses the word, “blessed.” Or equally good would be the word, “fortunate.” The meaning is, “How fortunate are those who are poor in spirit!”

Even if they don’t always feel happy, the poor in spirit are blessed—because they are fortunate. They have the best in this life—and in the life to come.

II. People can be poor in different ways.

A. Some people are poor because they’ve not got the things necessary for life.

When Jesus was on earth poor people were much more likely to be attracted to him than rich people.

Rich people are actually at a disadvantage when it comes to responding to the gospel.

That is why Jesus warned so often about the danger of riches. Three of the four gospels record Jesus’s saying: “It is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

It is hard for a rich person not to think that he or she is somehow better than other people. Rich people get their way in the world. People respect them because they are rich.

To have plenty of money makes a person feel comfortable in his world and it dims his hope for something better to come.

Another time Jesus said, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20).

B. But Matthew has it a little different. As we have read it, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…”

Now, I think that Jesus, like every other preacher, said similar things at different times. And one time he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and another time he said, “Blessed are you poor.”

When Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” he isn’t limiting his blessing to those who are poor in money. This is good for us. We aren’t literally poor, but we can have the blessing of the “poor in spirit.”

One may have money and be poor in spirit, and one can have no money and be proud and forgetful of God.

Jesus told a story about two men who went to the temple to pray. One looked up to God and said, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers. …I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”

But the other man—a despised tax collector—could not look up to God but bowed his head and beat his breast and simply said, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14).

Now the tax collector was probably had more money than the Pharisee, because Pharisees weren’t generally rich. But Pharisees tended to be proud. They knew they were more righteous than most people.

Many tax collectors became wealthy. But this tax collector knew that before God he was poor and needy, and he begged God for forgiveness.

And Jesus said that the sinful, but repentant, tax collector went back to his house with the gift of salvation, while the self-righteous Pharisee went home unchanged.

We are not poor. We have enough to eat and a comfortable place to stay and money to pay our bills—but we are also needy. We need God.

We know how far short we have come from being all that God intended us to be, and, like the tax collector, we bow our heads and cry out, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

III. Now it’s time to talk about what it means to be “poor in spirit.”

A. One translation has it this way: ““Blessed are those who know they are poor.”

When the great Martin Luther came to die it is said that his last words were: “We are beggars; this is true.”

Luther was a great man. He was successful. He was admired.

But Luther realized that before God he was a beggar.

Everything he had that was worth having was what God, in his mercy, had given him.

To be poor in spirit is the opposite of being “rich in spirit.”

To be rich in spirit is to be self-sufficient, pleased with myself, to have a feeling of superiority—not perfect, but better than most people.

To be rich in spirit is to be constantly aware of the faults of other people and mostly blind to my own.

To be rich in spirit is to think that I deserve to have my share of good things and to suppose that my wealth, health and success are evidence of my goodness.

To be poor in spirit is to be empty and open before God.

To be poor in spirit is to have a deep sense of my sin and need. It is to know my helplessness and God’s goodness.

To be poor in spirit is to have plenty of room for God in my life. It is to have Jesus so fill my heart that I become small in my own eyes—and Jesus becomes great.

If I am poor in spirit, I live in the presence of God. I will be open-handed and open-hearted. I will know in the depths of my heart that what I have is not mine but God’s.

To be poor in spirit is to be like Jesus.

In Philippians 2, St. Paul writes this:

In lowliness of mind, count others better than yourselves.

Let each of you look not only to your own interests,

but also to the interests of others.

Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not count equality with God a thing to cling to,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,

being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself and became obedient unto death,

even death on a cross

(Philippians 2:3-8).

Someone said, “God wants to give us something, but our hands are too full.”

Or maybe we should say, “Our hearts are too full”—too full of feelings of self-satisfaction…goodness…superiority.

We are too often, like the Pharisee in the temple, thankful that we are not like other people.

We forget that we are sinners and need God’s mercy as much as the worst sinner in the world.

It’s only when we realize our spiritual poverty that we are willing to accept the gift of life that God is holding out to us.

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now I’m found,

Was blind but now I see.”

The man who wrote that understood his spiritual poverty.

And because he understood his spiritual poverty, he could experience God’s amazing grace.

CONCLUSON

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

The “Kingdom of Heaven” simply means God’s Kingdom.

God’s kingdom is where God rules.

If God is ruling your life, you are living in God’s kingdom—even while you are still in this world.

And someday you will experience the Kingdom of God in its glorious fullness.

In this world we have trials and tribulations. Sometimes we are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

But we are blessed, because we have the riches that can never be taken away.

We are rich because we have God, and God is enough.

Once I was riding in an elevator in a retirement center where a lot of rich people live.

It is a luxurious place and no one can go there unless they have plenty of money.

But riding in the elevator I heard one woman say, “This is a very sad place. Everyone here has a sad story.”

We all have sad stories, whether we are rich or poor, but if we have Jesus we are blessed anyway because we can look forward to everything that is good and pleasant.

A hospital chaplain left the hospital shortly before noon on Ash Wednesday to attend a service at a nearby church. As part of the worship, the minister inscribed on the chaplain’s forehead a cross made of ashes mingled with oil. He returned to the hospital, ashes still in place, and began to visit the patients. One of the patients, a woman, noticed the ashes on his forehead and, thinking it was a smudge of dirt, grabbed a tissue, moistened it, and said, “Come here, Hon, you’ve gotten into something.”

The chaplain artfully avoided the tissue and explained: “No, they are ashes. They’re supposed to be there.” She looked at him, puzzled.

He told her the meaning of Ash Wednesday, that the minister places ashes on our foreheads as he says, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” They remind us that God was with us when we were weak and sinful. They represent our acknowledgment of our mortality and our sin and our need of God.

The woman thought for a moment and then she said, “I think I want some of that.” The chaplain slowly reached to his forehead, borrowed some of the ashes, and with his finger traced on her forehead the sign of the cross.

Let me end with these lines Isaiah’s prophecy, written hundreds of years before Jesus came. But I believe that these words were in Jesus’s mind when he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”:

Thus says the high and lofty One

who inhabits eternity,

whose name is Holy:

“I dwell in the high and holy place,

and also with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit,

to revive the spirit of the humble,

and to revive the heart of the contrite.”

(Isaiah 57:15)

If we are poor in spirit—if we are humble and lowly in heart, God dwells with us and we are already part of his realm. To us the Kingdom of Heaven is a reality even while we are in this world, and the more empty our heart is of love for the fleeting pleasures of this world and the more full it is of the love of Christ, the more sure we are of our glorious destiny.

The world may call it a “pie in the sky, by and by,” but we can see it from afar.

Soon it will be Christmas, when we commemorate a time when, in an obvious way, God’s reality entered ours. And Jesus calls us to himself to partake of the life of that other world which is eternal—a world that is normally hidden from sense and sight but is more real and permanent than all that we see and feel.

Dear Jesus, teach us our spiritual poverty so that we may embrace your Kingdom—so that we may find our rest in you. Fill our lives with your love and peace. Prepare us for Glory.