Beatitudes Part 1: Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

The best place to start is always at the beginning. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is giving his perspective on what Kingdom life looks like. Yet to be in the Kingdom of Light, one has to be a citizen of the Kingdom and that is what I believe the Beatitudes are all about. They are not platitudes that are just good for quoting on Twitter, and they are not random statements disjointed from the rest of the sermon. They are connected and I believe they reveal a spiritual process of how one goes from darkness to light and is then equipped to live in the Kingdom of Heaven in extraordinary ways. In short, the Beatitudes illustrate the process of being born again and then growing in your relationship with God as a citizen of the Kingdom.

Let me give a little disclaimer, now, that I am not trying to over spiritualize here. We Westerners do that from time to time… especially with concepts we can’t understand. Poverty for instance, is one of those ideas that we would rather cast in spiritual terms because we have never really been poor (like Africa is poor) and so we tend to think in spiritual terms instead of physical terms. We often emphasize the spiritual over the physical because of our Western tendency to compartmentalize. But Jesus’ statement is clear, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” MT 5:3

Why does Jesus start with spiritual poverty? The answer is because that is where you have to start if you are going to be citizen of God’s Kingdom. Mary Poppins said, “Well begun is halfway done!” and she was right. If you start in the wrong place you often end up in the wrong place. I wonder if that is what is happening in our efforts to evangelize and plant churches? Are we starting in the right place? Jesus is saying that you are blessed if you realize just how spiritually bankrupt you are… spiritual poverty means you are not just totally depraved but you don’t have anything that you can bring to the table to bargain with, instead you are absolutely, utterly dependent on the grace of God to save you. By contrast the Pharisees (who were also lost) did not see themselves as spiritually poor, but instead, as spiritually rich. They thought that they could be religious enough to merit a place in God’s Kingdom, but to quote one of my good friends, “religion doesn’t work.”

What is my point in all of this? Basically, we need to start with the negative and that is actually a positive thing. If you understand just how lost and just how spiritually bankrupt you are; just how much you need grace, then Jesus says “You are blessed!” Yet, many times we want to start with the soft sell… “let me tell you how you can have a wonderful life, let me tell you how you can get to heaven, here is how you avoid Hell, let me show you all the benefits of following Christ.” All those things are true and wonderful, but I don’t know that they are the place to start. To make disciples who are worthy of the Kingdom, we have to help them to see themselves the way God sees them, and to be brutally honest about their spiritual poverty and need for grace. I don’t know what that looks like where you live and work, and it even sounds counterintuitive to start with the negative… but that is really a positive thing and the right place to start. Think about it… we aren’t trying to sell our religion over their religion. We are trying to remove the scales from their eyes so they realize that “religion doesn’t work.” We are all spiritual beggars who have nothing to give and no hope but Jesus.