Matthew 5:3 - May 26, 2024

So we're about to enter into our time of reading God's word, but before we do, I wanted to say congratulations

to the graduates as well.

I know that you guys don't know me that well beyond what you've seen up here, but I do want you to know that

we're proud of you as a church, we're proud of what you've accomplished and we're proud of what you're about to do.

And I hope that you show gratitude to your parents for

bringing you up in the church, because that's important.

But what you're gonna find as you go off to some quasi kind of independence

is that your relationship with God is yours alone.

It has nothing to do with your parents and they can't make you have it and they can't make you keep it.

And it's not for nothing that we give you Bibles or we give you devotionals, because we want you to stay

grounded in the word of God, because I have been where you're going and Ava, literally, I have been

where you're going because I spent four years at Virginia Tech.

And you'll see, you'll have opportunities both good and bad, and you'll see things

both good and bad and my prayer is that you stay grounded in the word of God as you do that, because that

is the foundation for all that we live for and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that today.

But please know that the church is praying for you, we're proud of you, you're always welcome to

come back here when you're home and when you're finished, please come back here as well.

When you have families, bring those kids here.

So again, congratulations to you all.

Let's give them a round of applause real quick.

Thanks for today, thank you.

And today, all right, today is the day.

We're gonna begin in earnest to look at the Sermon on the Mount and to truly consider

what the Sermon on the Mount means for us as Christians.

So I spent last week, our entire service, talking at length about some general concepts and some

general ideas, but now I wanna start getting more into the specifics of what Jesus was

teaching.

But before I do that, I wanna kind of bring our focus back onto the purpose of the whole that we're looking

at, because we're gonna chop this thing up into little pieces and look at it in small bites, because we really

wanna dig into the meaning and understand it, but we can never lose sight of the whole picture here as well.

So I wanted to share this quote from the Puritan pastor J .C. Ryle on the Sermon on the Mount.

He said this, would we know what kind of people Christians ought to be?

Would we know the character at which Christians ought to aim?

Would we know the outward walk and inward habit of mind which become a follower of Christ?

Then let us often study the Sermon on the Mount.

Let us often ponder each sentence and prove ourselves by it.

Not least, let us often consider who they are that are called blessed at the

beginning of the sermon.

Those whom the great high priest blesses are blessed indeed.

So now, we're about to get into what I told you was the introductory part of the sermon last week, and this is known as

the Beatitudes.

So the term Beatitude is a transliteration of a Latin word.

Transliteration is when we take a word that's in another language and we pronounce it the way it kind of looks.

So it's not a translation, it's a transliteration.

But the meaning of that Latin word is blessed.

So obviously that makes a lot of sense because the majority of our Bible translations are gonna use the term

blessed.

We can also say blessed.

Sometimes I feel like that gets a little awkward, so I might say blessed.

I might say blessed.

We'll just go with whatever feels right at the time.

But on that note, some other people in some translations of the Bible have

preferred that to be translated as the word happy.

As in happy are the poor in spirit.

And while that is true, we don't

necessarily consider this to be the best translation of the word.

And that's simply because happy doesn't do justice to the profound depth of what it

means to be blessed by God.

And certainly being blessed can make us happy and it can make us feel happy.

But again, there's just such a deeper meaning to it than simply the emotions that we feel

as a result of something.

D .A. Carson explains it like this.

He says to be blessed means to be approved or to find approval.

But the blessings that we're talking about here in the Beatitudes are the blessings that are coming from God.

So he goes on to say this.

And since this is God's universe, there can be no higher blessing than to be approved by God.

So basically, what the opening part of the Sermon on the Mount is cluing us into is the

kind of thoughts or the kind of attitudes, lifestyles, or behaviors

that God blesses.

But this is where it gets interesting.

And this is why I spent all last week talking about why we have to prepare our hearts for the Sermon on

the Mount.

Because as we're gonna see very soon, the things that God blesses are often

very different to the point of being in direct conflict

with the things that the world blesses.

This is where the Sermon on the Mount becomes a really radical, revolutionary,

confrontational idea.

But as I mentioned last week, it's only confrontational to the extent

that we value the things that God does not bless.

It only becomes confrontational or really radical for us to the extent

that we would rather have something that the world blesses than something that God blesses.

So as we talk through the beatitudes over the next several weeks, here's a little question that you can sort of

put in the back of your mind as we look at what the beatitudes mean and what the beatitudes imply

for our lives.

And that question is this.

Whose blessing am I seeking?

Whose blessing am I seeking?

Because if we acknowledge that the things that God blesses are going to be things that actively

hinder or even prevent our being blessed by our culture or our society,

then the choices we make and the lives that we live are gonna be what shows what we truly

value.

Our words are only worth so much.

Our actions in combination with our words will tell people a lot more about what it is that we truly

believe.

And that's true for each and every one of us.

I said a few weeks ago that we have to live lives where our audio matches our video or our video matches

our audio.

And that's exactly what we're talking about here.

So again, the beatitudes, they're going to be things that the world laughs at.

They're gonna be things that the world scoffs at, that the world insults you over.

And so the two ideas, God's blessings and the world blessings, as cute as the bumper sticker is,

those two things can't coexist.

But back to the real significance of being blessed.

And obviously what we're doing right now is sort of a small introduction to the beatitudes, but I promise we're gonna get into a beatitude.

Only one, but we're gonna get into a beatitude today.

The idea of being blessed.

So if someone were to give you something useful or valuable, you would not

only feel happy, but you might also even use the word blessed to

describe how you feel, right?

Especially since that sounds kind of Christian to say, that you would say, oh yeah, I was blessed by this, because then somebody knows that you go to

church, they know you're a Christian, because you use the lingo.

But we have to be really careful when we mix up these kind of material blessings in

such a way that we start to think of them as somehow equal or even remotely approaching the

blessings that God gives us.

Because think to yourself, how quickly your material blessings lose their

novelty, they lose their luster.

And I know this is something that we've talked about before.

You get something that you've always wanted, and before you know it, it's no big deal anymore, and there's something

better.

And it happens a lot faster than we even plan for, that we even expect.

But this isn't something that should surprise us.

This is a biblical concept.

We see this throughout scripture.

One of the biggest examples of this is that of Solomon.

So if you're familiar with Solomon, you can read about him in several different places in scripture, and you

also can read things that he wrote.

He wrote the Proverbs, he wrote Ecclesiastes, but he was one of the great kings of Israel.

He was a descendant of King David, which makes him part of Jesus' royal ancestry.

And Solomon had all the worldly things that any person could ever want.

And we can read about his wealth in the Old Testament.

2 Chronicles 9 .13 is one of the places where you can see this.

It says, the weight of gold which came to Solomon in one year was 666

talents of gold.

Now, that's a lot of gold.

And the value of that gold would be over a billion dollars today.

So Solomon is taking in over a billion dollars of gold every single year.

The Bible also says his drinking vessels were made of gold.

Every cup that he drank out of was made of gold.

He had 4 ,000 stalls for horses and chariots, 12 ,000 horsemen.

He was also said to have 700 wives and 300 concubines.

And he received visits from people like the Queen of Sheba because he was also wise.

So people were so interested in him because he had so much stuff.

He was so famous, he was wise.

So he had it all.

He had wealth, he had power, he had possessions, and he had fame.

So obviously those things fulfilled him, right?

No, they didn't.

And he writes about that in Ecclesiastes, which is such a profound book when you think about these things.

I wanna read to you from Ecclesiastes chapter two, verses one through 11, just to get the full picture of this.

This says, I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with gladness so that you shall see good

things.

And behold, it too was vanity.

I said of laughter, it is madness, and of gladness, what does it do?

I explored with my heart how to stimulate my body with wine while my heart was guiding me wisely

and how to see simple -minded folly until I could see where is this good for the sons of men

in what they do under heaven the few days of their lives.

I made my works great.

I built houses for myself.

I planted vineyards for myself.

I made for myself gardens and parks.

I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees.

I made for myself pools of water from which to water a forest of growing trees.

I bought male and female slaves, and I had home -born slaves.

Also, I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem.

Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces.

I provided for myself male and female singers and the pleasures of the sons of men, many

concubines.

Then I became great and increased more than all who preceded me in Jerusalem.

My wisdom also stood by me.

All that my eyes asked for, I did not refuse them.

I did not withhold my heart from any gladness, for my heart was glad because of all my labor,

and this was my reward for all my labor.

So this is him talking about all the things that he had and all the things that he did.

And verse 11 says, thus I turned to all my works which my hands had done and the labor which I had

labored to do, and behold, all was vanity and striving

after the wind, and there was no advantage under the sun.

And I should have read this first, but chapter one, verse one of Ecclesiastes sets the tone for

the whole thing.

It says, the words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

Vanity of vanity, says the preacher.

All is vanity.

And that's the response of somebody that we all probably envy at least a little bit.

We all think that money would fix all our problems or we think that a person would fix all our problems or a thing

would fix all our problems.

But we see biblically that that's not the case.

Solomon says all these blessings ultimately are fleeting.

All these blessings are vanity.

In our own time and in our own culture, we don't have to look far to look at celebrities.

We look at people, whether they're athletes, whether they're movie or TV stars, politicians

or business people that have everything that we think that we want.

And yet they still aren't happy either.

They suffer from the exact same problems that we do just in a different way.

Because the thing about this is we make a tremendous mistake, a huge mistake

when we try to satisfy what are spiritual needs with physical things.

When we try to solve spiritual problems with physical solutions.

Now I wanna talk more about this in just a second, but I also wanna acknowledge that we also can't

satisfy true physical needs with spiritual solutions.

Physical needs like hunger.

So for example, let's say one of my children that I won't name came up to me and he said,

I'm hungry, like he does every day.

And I say to him, child, John 4 .34 says

this, Jesus said to them, my food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

Or maybe I can say, my son, I have food you know not of.

Well guess what?

All those things are inspired, all those are out of God's word and they're true and they're inerrant, but they

don't help his hunger.

So let's just acknowledge that it's not enough to say spiritual and godly things to people

that truly suffer from actual physical ailments.

And hunger is one of those things obviously that is very prevalent in our world.

But that said, let's be honest.

Typically, it's not in our nature to try to satisfy a physical need with a spiritual solution.

We jump straight to the physical solution and that makes sense.

However, it's also in our nature to go straight to the physical solutions when we are

trying to deal with a spiritual problem.

And that's ultimately why we never wind up satisfied with these things.

We have another good example of this in Daniel.

So King Belshazzar, he was the king of Babylon and he was in the middle of a party.

You know, he had all his golden drinking vessels and all his wives and concubines,

slaves, friends, magicians, all the people that surrounded a kingdom of that kind.

And in the middle of this party, as you read in Daniel, a hand came in and started

writing on the wall.

And what that hand wrote, one of the things was translated to say,

God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it.

So now, Belshazzar has a spiritual problem and all the physical riches, all the

physical pleasures, all the physical possessions aren't sufficient to solve that.

But I wanna wrap this little concept up with one of the best quotes that I think I've ever heard on this.

So there's a commentator, his name is William Henriksen, and he was writing on the futility of seeking blessings and

happiness in worldly things.

So he wrote this, one's outward condition may be ever so enviable.

In the end, it vanishes like a dream, but that's not the good part.

This to me is the payoff.

He says, God never made a soul so small that the whole world will satisfy it.

Think about that for just a second.

God has created us, our souls, our eternal souls, and every single one of

us has an eternal soul, and it's either going to hell or it's going to heaven, but everybody's eternal.

But he created those souls so big that there's only one thing that could truly satisfy that soul,

and not even the whole world is big enough for that.

And that's a remarkable concept to me.

No, I get amazed by stuff, even as I uncover it now, because it really gets to the heart of the

fact that there's only one thing that can satisfy us.

So that's going to bring us into the first beatitude, and this is Matthew chapter five, verse three,

and it says, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

So what does it mean for us to be poor in spirit?

Now, sometimes I like to keep you guys in suspense, and I ask the question, and then I go talk about something else for 10 minutes, and then we come back to

it later.

But I'm not going to do that today.

I'm going to give you the definition up front, or the concept up front, because I think it's really important.

The being poor in spirit is a reflection of the recognition of your true spiritual

standing before God.

It's the recognition that in the face of the holiness,

the righteousness, the perfection of God, that you have no

business standing before God.

Because on your own, you're absolutely unworthy of being there.

Being poor in spirit acknowledges your deep and profound need for God's mercy,

and at the same time, your utter inability to do anything on your own to earn it.

DA Carson says that being poor in spirit also represents the deepest form of repentance.

Now, I want to say that it's not true and it's not coincidental that this is the first beatitude,

and the reason for this, Jesus didn't say this in some kind of random order.

He put this sermon together perfectly, flawlessly, better than anybody else ever could, but the reason

this is first is because this idea, this concept of being

poor in spirit is essential in order to experience anything

else that he preaches about.

It's the prerequisite for all that comes after in the Sermon on the Mount.

So we have to make sure that we can fully grasp this concept before we move on.

So what I wanna spend the rest of our time together discussing is what poor in

spirit is not.

So make sure we don't misunderstand what being poor in spirit is.

How to know we're poor in spirit, and I have a few examples from scripture here.

And the result or the reward that comes from being poor in spirit.

So let's start with what being poor in spirit is not.

And one clarification that I wanna make at the beginning relates to this same beatitude in Luke.

So I mentioned that a lot of these things are paralleled in Luke chapter six.

And Luke chapter 6, 20 puts it this way.

He says, blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

So that's almost the same thing, but not quite.

And a very surface level, literal interpretation of that could lead you to

believe that in order to be blessed, you have to be materially poor.

You have to give away all of your possessions.

And we do see, I mean, we just read in Acts a second ago about people in the church selling their possessions and giving it to the

church so it could be distributed as they have need.

And this is also the kind of concept that led some people in the early church to become monks or to become

ascetics, to go live out in the wilderness away from society, to give up everything

to try to make themselves more holy.

You know, separating from a society was an attempt to do that.

But I think that it's a misrepresentation of this verse for a few reasons.

And first is that, you know, we've already said that eternal blessings aren't related to

material blessings.

But I would say that works in both directions.

While, you know, being materially blessed does not make you spiritually blessed, but removing material blessings is not

necessarily gonna make you spiritually blessed either.

It doesn't automatically increase God's opinion of you when you get rid

of material things.

Second, anecdotally, we can see from our own experience in life that

poverty doesn't always bring people closer to God.

Sometimes it does.

And sometimes it makes them rage against God.

So it's not an automatic thing that poverty gets you the kingdom of heaven.

In addition to this, we have just basic rules for interpreting scripture.

And John MacArthur gives sort of a helpful rule of thumb for situations like this.

Now, the first rule of interpreting scripture, and this is called hermeneutics.

It's how you interpret scripture.

Hermeneutics, the process of interpreting scripture.

And it's important, not that you need to remember that word, but the idea is important.

So the first rule is that typically the simplest explanation

is the explanation.

But that doesn't always work.

Because what happens when you have a verse like this where Matthew says, blessed are the poor in spirit, and Luke said,

blessed are the poor.

Well, the second rule is that scripture interprets scripture.

But again, this doesn't help us here either because it doesn't clarify it.

So then we move on to the next rule, which is that if two passages seem to

be the same and saying the same thing, if one of them has a clearer explanation or has

more detail, then that's the one you use to interpret the other one.

You don't confuse the issue by taking the one with less information and trying to add what you think it should be and then put

it on the one that actually has the information that you're looking for.

So that's another reason.

And in this case, Matthew's recounting of the beatitude has a little more information.

It's a little more clear about the actual intent.

So poor in spirit is how we're gonna look at this as opposed to simply materially poor or impoverished.

And finally, nowhere in God's word are all believers commanded to give up everything and become

materially poor.

As a condition of their salvation.

We don't see this anywhere.

In fact, throughout scripture, we see there are blessed people who are poor as well as

those who are well off.

So material things, we give so much weight to them that we assume that this has

to mean something.

But these aren't necessarily the conditions for your salvation.

And the interesting thing that happens too is that, for example, like the people who give up all their

possessions to go live a monastic lifestyle,

sometimes they become so proud of the fact that they did that, that they're losing their

holiness in their pride.

And we'll talk about that too.

So all that to say, being poor

in wealth or possessions is not the same as being poor in spirit.

Now the second thing is that being sad or depressed or just kind of in a

low emotional state, that's also not the same thing as being poor in spirit.

Because whether you're dissatisfied with your life for some reason, or

you're beat down at work, or your husband, or your wife, or your kids, or

your parents won't do exactly what you want them to do.

Or you're sad because you don't have something.

That you want.

None of these things make you poor in spirit by the biblical definition.

And it's because, and I know that nobody likes to hear this, but often

those kind of feelings, they're related to a sin condition of some kind.

They're related to a valuing of something else, a value of something else above God, and putting something else

in the place of God that's making you so upset with your life that you feel like you're poor in spirit.

And we all go through those times, don't get me wrong.

We all feel sad.

We all get to the point at some point where we feel at least a little depressed.

But a lot of times that has a spiritual cause.

And you have to stop and look and think about what that might be.

So those things don't automatically make us poor in spirit like the definition refers to

it.

And another thing we just have to say, I talked about pride a little bit just a second ago, is that if you

constantly reflect or think about how good you are at being poor in spirit, then you're not poor in spirit either.

And I know that kind of sounds silly.

It's like saying, I'm so poor in spirit that I took the time today to pray for so -and -so,

even though they're a big jerk.

Look how spiritual I am.

Poor in spirit, kingdom of heaven is mine.

Or maybe you're considering yourself poor in spirit because you sacrificially give of your time to help other

people, to help less fortunate people.

And this is good.

This is like halfway there.

But here's the thing.

Being poor in spirit can in no way ever result in a feeling of self -satisfaction for what you've

done.

And that brings us to another important and related point on being poor in spirit.

And being poor in spirit implies, and probably actually even requires,

a true sense of humility.

Because when you consider your own righteousness and your own holiness

in light of God's righteousness and holiness, then you come to realize that this is

not about how you compare with someone.

This is not about how you compare with someone else.

This is not about what you've done.

Because when you stand before God, it is only your righteousness that

is being judged.

It doesn't matter how someone else stacks up to you.

Of course, what I said, it's not just entirely true, right?

You stand before God, thankfully, having put your faith in Christ, it's not your

righteousness that's being judged.

It's Christ's righteousness through his death on the cross that's being given to

you.

It's being put on you like clothing so that you have

the righteousness to stand before God.

But again, that should result in a feeling of humility too, in a feeling of poverty of

spirit because it's not your righteousness.

Somebody else, Jesus, had to give it to you in order for you to be there and in order for you to

stand before God.

Because if it was just your righteousness, you'd be in hell.

So somebody who congratulates themselves on how humble they are is not actually humble.

So how do we recognize true humility?

How do we recognize that humility that relies on God and the work that Jesus has

done?

Well, again, this is another thing that we see throughout scripture.

So let's take a couple examples of this.

I wanna go to Luke chapter 18, verses nine through 14.

And this is a story that you will probably recognize.

All right, Luke chapter 18, verses nine through 14.

And he also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed

others with contempt.

So this is exactly what we're talking about.

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

The Pharisee stood and was praying these things to himself.

God, I thank you that I am not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or

even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week.

I pay tithes of all that I get.

But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven,

but was beating his chest, saying, God, be merciful to me, the sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other, for everyone who exalts

himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.

So what we see in this story, obviously, is the self -righteous Pharisee.

This is the exact opposite of being poor in spirit, because this is a person who is trusting in the

things that they've done, who's trusting in their works to make them righteous

before God.

Again, this is the essence of legalism, to trust in the things that you've done to believe that they

can somehow add to your salvation.

But on the other hand, we see the tax collector.

And the reason the tax collector, which is a group of people that were hated in that time, so just briefly, we'll probably have a chance

to touch on this, but tax collectors were hired by the government, and they had a certain amount that they had to

collect, but anything they collected over and above that, they could keep.

So tax collectors were often very wealthy because they were extorting money from the citizens.

So everybody hated tax collectors, and they knew they were doing stuff wrong.

But the tax collector recognized in the face of God that he was a sinner,

and he understood his complete hopelessness.

He understood his condition, and he begged for the mercy of God.

And actually, there's so many examples of this.

The apostle Peter, he's another one.

Peter was very confident, probably to the point of being overconfident in his abilities, in his skills,

and in himself.

But there's a story also in Luke, Luke 5, verses four through eight, that gives an

example of poverty of spirit.

So as we know, the first disciples, the first apostles were fishermen,

and they had been fishing all night and had caught nothing.

And Jesus was teaching, and after he finished speaking in chapter five, verse four, and when he had finished speaking, he

said to Simon, put out into the deep water and let your nets down for a catch.

Simon answered and said, master, we labored all night and caught nothing, but at your word, I will let down the nets.

And when they had done this, they enclosed a great quantity of fish and their nets began to break.

So they signaled to their partners in the other boat for them to come and help them.

And they came and filled both of the boats so that they began to sink.

And it's Peter's response to this.

Trusting in his own ability, they caught nothing.

And Jesus told him what to do.

And thankfully, he had enough humility to do what Jesus said he should do, even though he had already tried and it didn't work.

Verse eight, but when Simon Peter saw this, which is all of the fish, he fell down at

Jesus' knees saying, go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

And that's the appropriate reaction to the work of Jesus.

That's the appropriate reaction in Peter's life.

And that's the appropriate reaction to the work of Jesus in our lives as well.

We could say, along with the Apostle Paul in Romans 7, 18, for I know that nothing good

dwells in me that is in my flesh.

We also see this in the Old Testament.

Gideon is a great example of poor, or poor in spirit, of humility.

God asks him directly to save Israel from Midian.

And in Judges 6, 15, we see this.

Once God calls upon Gideon to do this.

But he said to him, O Lord, with what shall I save Israel?

Behold, my clan is the least in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father's house.

So despite God coming directly to him, he sees God and knows that he's not worthy.

We see this in Moses as well.

Moses often insisted that he wasn't capable of doing what God asked him to do, even though

he had personal contact with God in a way that no one else has.

And then one more that I couldn't leave alone is Isaiah, the prophet.

In Isaiah chapter six, verse five, he has a vision where he sees God and he sees the angels

around the throne.

And his response to that is not, wow, this is neat.

His response is, woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean

lips.

For my eyes have seen the king, Yahweh of hosts.

Those are all examples of what it is to be poor in spirit.

To be poor in spirit is to recognize your true standing before God based on

your own righteousness, and it's nothing.

But Jesus has fixed that for us.

The work of Jesus is what has saved that for us, and only the work of Jesus could ever have done that.

And I mentioned that I also wanted to talk about what the reward for being poor in spirit is, and

that's the kingdom of God, which is a concept that we've discussed before.

But let's consider this.

I read that people who come to God with a broken, contrite heart, who come to God with a

heart of repentance, don't leave with that same broken heart.

Back to Isaiah chapter 57, verse 15, it says, for thus says the

one high and lifted up who dwells forever, whose name is holy.

I dwell on a high and holy place, and also with the crushed and lowly of spirit

in order to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the

heart of the crushed.

So we see from his word that God promises to heal us.

But how do we achieve this type of poor in spirit humility?

And I'm gonna suggest three ways, and obviously this is not an exhaustive list.

There are plenty of ways to approach this, but this is a place to start.

And I put these in the wrong order, I realized, as I was going over it, so I might flip back and forth in a weird way.

The first way to achieve this humility, to become poor in spirit,

is to stop focusing on yourself and to start focusing on God.

And the simplest and most obvious way for us to do that, for us to do that as Christians, or for us to do that as the

church, is through prayer and through the reading of Scripture.

Because when you read your Bible, when you read it seriously, when you read it to

understand who God is and not just to have read it, then you'll start to

develop a right understanding of God.

You'll start to develop the proper doctrine of who God is.

And when you develop a right understanding of who God is, that is

naturally going to put you into a state of humility,

into a state of being poor in spirit.

And the reason for that should be gratitude.

It should be gratitude for what was done for you.

I think that a lot of what passes for church today doesn't

understand this, because I think a lot of what passes for church today lacks the

reverence that we need to be showing to God.

And as a result of that, it gives us an inflated view of who we are.

When we come to get our needs met and we come to hear about how our

lives can be better, or we come just for someone to

take our kids away so we can have a little bit of a break, and we come to church

for ourselves, so we start to think that we're more important than God, and it makes sense.

I mean, that's what you're being told if you're just being entertained and you're not being taught

the fact that God is holy.

And as such, you should revere God and you should act before

God in the way that you would somebody who is holy.

Hire, who is better, who is more important.

We do this with people all the time.

It might be your boss, it might be someone famous.

So we do that with people, yet we treat God casually.

So the first way to understand humility or poverty of spirit is to understand who

God really is.

And this is why we're going through the Bible in the way that we're going through, because my hope is that we can

all come to understand the reality of who God is.

The second way is that you can ask God for humility.

You can come to God in prayer for anything.

And Scripture says when you pray according to his will, your prayers will be answered,

which is why prayers for stuff don't always get you stuff.

But any prayer that is according to God's will will be answered.

And here's a perfect example.

Psalm 51 10 says, create in me a clean heart, oh God, and

renew a steadfast spirit in me.

This is the kind of thing you can ask for when you pray.

This is the kind of thing you should ask for when you pray, at least at some point.

Jeremiah 24 seven says, I will give them a heart to know me, for I am Yahweh,

and they will be my people, and I will be their God, and they will return to me with their whole heart.

So it's perfectly acceptable to pray for God to fulfill what's in his word.

It's perfectly acceptable to pray Scripture directly to God to ask for these things, to

ask for humility, to ask for a clean heart.

Add Psalm 51 10 into your prayers next time you pray, which is hopefully soon.

And then finally, and I had listed this first, but I realized that it comes last, because without these other

two things, it's not gonna work.

Number three is to resist the worldly things that make your heart

proud.

For some people, it's possessions, it's houses, it's cars, it's whatever.

For some people, it's financial security.

For others, it's the affirmation or the praise of other people.

But the point is, you have to recognize what it is in your life that

starts pushing you to believe that you're great, that you can do it on your own,

that makes you bigger while you're making God smaller.

What is it that makes your heart just well up with pride over what you have

accomplished?

Those are the kind of things that you may just need to

cut out of your life.

And not all of them are even inherently bad, but when they come to the point that they're

causing you to be prideful in yourself, then they're standing between you and this poor

in spirit idea that we're talking about today.

And these things come from all over the place.

I mean, it could be as simple as compliments.

And one of the worst ways that we see this today, in my opinion, is on social media, where we post

all this stuff just so people will like it.

We post and we get more affirmation from somebody

liking our post than we do from the idea that

God may be pleased somehow with what we've done or with our humility or our approach to Him.

So these are the things that we have to be careful of.

So that was three things, just three ways to start looking for this humility.

Stop focusing on yourself, start focusing on God.

Ask God for humility and resist the worldly things that make your heart proud.

And now I just wanna wrap up with a little bit of closing thoughts on what we looked at

today, being poor in spirit.

So I already mentioned this, but being poor in spirit is the first beatitude.

And that is because being poor in spirit is a necessary condition for all the other

beatitudes that will follow.

So you can think of it this way.

Being poor in spirit is emptying yourself of everything that

is not worthy of God.

Being poor in spirit is emptying yourself of your own pride.

It's emptying yourself of your own righteousness, because all those things are worthless.

And it's emptying yourself of those things so that you can then be filled with

the righteousness of God through Jesus.

But this is so far removed from the message that we get from

our society.

Everything is self -esteem.

It's take care of yourself first.

It's you deserve this.

And even churches like this, sometimes churches bend over backwards to

meet the felt needs of congregations.

We're all worried.

We all have anxiety, right?

So there's no solution outside of scripture, but you gotta put it

in a coherent context and you have to look at it in its totality.

You can't just take a verse from here that says, don't worry, look at the whole thing.

But people come to be told that there's a way to make their lives better.

But the truth about the way to make your life better is not popular, because the way to make your

life better is that Jesus died because we were sinners and now we need to take

up our cross and follow him.

We have to die to ourselves to follow him.

And that's not what people wanna hear, but that's what we all need to hear.

And some people would complain about that idea and they would wonder why it is that we might want to

worship a God that would expect this of us.

Why would we wanna worship a God that didn't want us to increase our self -esteem?

But this all comes down to the question that we kinda started out with earlier.

Whose blessing am I seeking?

Whose blessing are you seeking?

And what are the eternal benefits of that blessing?

What is it that we're going after?

What is it that we're chasing?

And what is it that we are using to attempt to satisfy

ourselves with the things of this world?

Why are we chasing that?

Second Corinthians 4 .18 reminds us that the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are

not seen are eternal.

And the things that are not seen are the kingdom of God.

And the kingdom of God is exactly what is promised to those of us who begin, who begin by

coming to him humble and poor in spirit.

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

You guys pray with me.

Heavenly Father, thank you for telling us exactly what it is that you

need us to know, God.

We know that we need to come before you with a humble heart, but the messages that we get every day are so mixed

up and can be so confusing that we don't know always where we should turn.

But it's only when we start drifting away from your word and we start drifting away from prayer and we start

drifting away from who you are that that confusion really sets in.

God, your word is clear as to what a Christian should be.

And it's not our part to argue it, it's our part to look at ourselves and see how we can get there.

Lord, and we see from your word that it comes from prayer as well.

God, we can pray like the words of Psalm 51 10, to create in me a clean heart.

God, I pray again that the Holy Spirit would open our eyes and would open our minds

and would open our hearts to the truth of who we are and to the truth of what we

need and what needs to be done.

God, you've promised the Holy Spirit as a helper for us, Lord.

And we thank you for that.

God, I just that we would listen, that we would hear and that we would pay attention.

So I thank you today, Lord, for faithful churches.

I thank you for faithful Christians who are doing the things that they know they need

to do, even when they're having influences from the outside tell them that

they're wrong.

God, we thank you for people that are standing up in the face of society, that are standing up in the face of churches that are moving in the

wrong direction and that are standing up for you.

Lord, let that be us.

God, we thank you again for your word.

We love you and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.