Theologian in Residence Michael Allen continues our series on the Beatitudes, focusing on the poor in spirit.
Hello everyone. This is Pastor Damian. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, orlando. At New City, we believe all of us need all of Jesus for all of life. For more resources, visit our website at NewCityOrlandocom. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:Hi, my name is Brooke and I'm part of the South Orlando community. Yes, please join me in the prayer of illumination. Living God, help us to hear your word with open hearts so that we may truly understand and believe in believing that we may follow in faithfulness and obedience. Through Christ, our Lord, amen. Our scripture today is from Matthew 5.1-12.
Speaker 2:During the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you, when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you, falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. This is God's word.
Speaker 1:Rejoice, a phrase from antiquity, a Latinism Phenus originae pendet. The end is determined by the beginning. And here, as we begin our way through these beatitudes one by one, it's important to realize that we are considering the beginning. It's the first of five lengthy teachings of Jesus recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew. It's the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most famous sermon ever preached, which will take up the totality of Matthew 5, 6, and 7. And this is the beginning.
Speaker 1:Beginnings often involve a focus and a fixation on ways to invest well for the long run, and so it is here. In a very real sense, we can think about these beatitudes as ways to invest well now, things to throw our lives, our very hearts toward now, because they will have lasting, long-term benefit and blessing. This morning we want to consider this first word blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is nothing less than the kingdom of heaven. As we consider that there's three things, this passage invites us to reflect on Something of the stated aim of the verse, the surprising shape of the verse itself and something of the substructure, what it assumes or presumes for it to make sense. We want to consider all three of those things. First, the stated aim we see here.
Speaker 1:As Ben suggested last week, happiness is his gift. This may not seem obvious, but in this passage and in all the beatitudes that follow, we see that Jesus, like the Bible more broadly, is committed to the cause of human happiness. I say this this may not be something we can simply assume, because we live in a world where, for not merely years or decades, but even centuries, it has often been assumed otherwise. It's not a recent thing that Christians would be referred to as down, as somehow restrictive or prudish. That goes back centuries where there were folks referred to as being holier than thou, or puritans and puritanical people who believed that God wanted us to restrict our pleasure, to calm down our pursuit of delight. And so it's not for nothing that when many people, and perhaps many of us, even in here, if we're honest, as we think about the image deep in our hearts of the Christian or the church, it involves someone with a frown, someone saying no to pleasure and to joy and to happiness, someone who is called or shamed into feeling that they ought to care less about their gladness. But, sisters and brothers, friends and neighbors, if we pay attention to Jesus and we learn from Jesus to pay attention to the whole Bible, we see that Christianity, the good news, is in fact news about God's commitment to bless, to fill, to enrich and to care about something as elemental as human happiness.
Speaker 1:We can consider the very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 1 and 2, where God not only gave them subsistence, but he provided them with a rich garden full of joys and delights, restricting but one tree and placing them in the middle of so much excess and generosity. We can pan forward to the story of Father Abraham in Genesis 12, when God was calling him out from Ur and God was choosing him and through him to build a people, he promised him not merely land, not merely descendants, but blessedness, and that others might be blessed by his blessing. We see that repeated time and again. So much so that, hundreds of years later, as those people, the people of Abraham, had found their way into slavery in Egypt, god was not satisfied to liberate them from enslavement, but he carried them across the wilderness and he gave them a promised land, a land we are told is flowing with milk and honey. Not content to rescue them from death and tyranny, he was committed to their cause and their happiness and blessing, so much so that, as they sang and prayed, we can listen to the Psalter and across it. Yes, it laments our woes, it names our pains, but it speaks also of God's commitment to our joy and our gladness. Psalm 1611 says you make known to me the path of life in your presence. Oh God, is fullness of joy at your right hand. Father our pleasures forevermore.
Speaker 1:And when we come to the New Testament, when we come to this Jesus, we find one who is known and even viewed with suspicion by other religious leaders because he and his disciples are having such a good time and other Jewish leaders sin word. Why is it that you and your followers are smiling? You're not fasting, you're not looking down, beaten overwhelmed by the seriousness that's involved in following God with rigor. And Jesus said it's a time to celebrate. When God arrives, there will be a time to fast again, but it is a time to celebrate here and now.
Speaker 1:And perhaps most amazingly, at the end of the passage that was just read, in verse 12, jesus speaks of us and of followers around the globe and through the ages. And he says when they persecute, you don't just keep on keeping on. When they persecute, you don't just grid it out another day. When they persecute you, rejoice and be glad, even in the face of the hardest and the most challenging circumstances. Jesus, like God above, is committed not merely to you eking it out, not only to you making it another day, but to your happiness in every sphere of life. Happiness is his gift. But secondly, as we pay attention to this passage, we see happiness may not look like what you expect and the way to invest in real and substantive, lasting happiness may seem terribly counterintuitive. We see, secondly, happiness made strange here in this verse blessed or happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This seems terribly counterintuitive to so much that is integral to our being.
Speaker 1:We tend to want to be known and to know ourselves as being those who are capable. We want to know ourselves as those who have capacity. We want others to know us as those who have clarity about where we're going and how we get there. Competence, capacity, clarity these are ideals that we treasure, that we long to project to others, that we aim to build up in ourselves, and that's nothing new. 150 years ago, ralph Waldo Emerson would speak about self-reliance as the great belief in the divinity of God in humanity and we continue to struggle with that desire to be self-reliant, women and men.
Speaker 1:Now, in calling us to be poor in spirit, there's a couple things Jesus is not suggesting ought to be idealized. He's not suggesting that somehow material poverty is itself a good thing. We learn earlier in the Bible and later in the words of Paul that circumstantial reality is rather beside the point in many respects. Much more definitive is the way in which we learn to be content and loving and trust ourselves to God. God cares greatly about resources and daily bread and begs us pray for it, but this is not celebrating poverty as some sort of ideal circumstance, far from it. That's why God has a special concern for those who suffer poverty and Christians. You and I are called to do so as well. This is also not celebrating what we might call poor spirituality. This is not somehow suggesting, as was envisioned by Paul in Roman 6 1, perhaps we should continue on in sin that grace may abound more and more. God, who forgives so much, god whose strength is made perfect in weakness, doesn't want you, therefore, to remain weak, however. He wants to build you up, he wants to grow you, he wants to mature you, and so this is not celebrating remaining spiritually poor. Rather, this is calling us to embrace our fundamental poverty and to spiritually own and embrace our dependence on life from the outside.
Speaker 1:Last week has been rattled through a variety of ways. You might paraphrase the different Beatitudes. He used the phrase open-handed trust and that really gets at the idea. That's fundamental here in this first Beatitude. It's a call to faith. Here at New City, we're descendants of the Protestant Reformation. If there was one thing that was recaptured afresh hundreds of years ago in that era, it was the centrality of faith. Not just faith at the beginning of the Christian life when we think about what's going on in G45 and the earliest days of faith and following Christ being formed in our little daughters and sons, but rather faith that is always and ever the foundation of everything we are and do, and that's what we see here. Jesus wants to describe ways you can invest in your long-term happiness and before you try any of the others, before you aim at mourning and meekness and justice and peacemaking and the like, before you get anywhere close to being persecuted, he wants you to know that the goal is nothing less than the kingdom of heaven and the gateway is always a road of faith.
Speaker 1:We see here that this is not only the first of the Beatitudes. It's a foundational Beatitude. There's a couple of reasons. We know it's foundational that it's the pathway through which the others come. We see first and foremost the promise the kingdom of heaven is going to come up again in the last and final Beatitude when we get to talking about persecution and mistreatment. Again, that's the promised word. It reminds us that it ends still with our concern for where we begin, pursuing nothing less than the kingdom of heaven. And if we pay attention further in the Sermon on the Mount, if we read into chapter 6 and chapter 7, we'll see that what this promises us here nothing less than heaven is that which we ought to seek first. In Matthew 6, we learn we ought to seek first the kingdom. All else will be added later. Other things do matter. God's not unconcerned about your other needs and aspirations, but this is always primary. This is always supposed to be the foundational first concern and love. And this is the pathway.
Speaker 1:If we want to seek first the kingdom, we need to hear and evermore be poor in spirit to be marked by faith, trust, reliance not upon self but upon the sovereign and good kindness of God. Here we see the challenge. Rowan Williams names it. He says at root it all has to do with whether we believe religion is about fullness of life or about control. Too often, if we're honest, I suspect you and I would choose control. That's why in Milton's Paradise Lost, there's that famous and haunting line better to rule in hell than to be a servant in heaven. It is the voice of Satan. We don't like to acknowledge that, but it is one that we often can appreciate and identify with too much. And what we're told here is we're instead to embrace a posture of being poor in spirit, of knowing we need to depend, of observing that we have to trust and of owning, of consciously embracing the fact that we live by faith alone. Here we see this remarkable call and challenge In France.
Speaker 1:We can see also, as we pay attention to the Beatitudes, how things go terribly awry if we leave this behind, if we treat it as something that was good for a while, an immature early phase of Christianity, a necessary step beyond which we've graduated. If we forget to continue on by faith, we'll find that all the other efforts, all the other investments the Beatitudes call us to, they lead to something that becomes remarkably ugly, disfigured, something that perhaps we see far too often around the world in the name of Christianity. Consider ways in which pursuing the other Beatitudes in a spirit other than the impoverished spiritual life of dependence might take. Being can turn manipulative. Meekness that sure can be self-protective, can't it? Zeal for justice, we know, can be performative. Mercy can be about whitewashing our desire to control others. Purity of heart sure is a good justification for monomaniacal imbalance, isn't it? Peacemaking, it can be a pious language to describe our desire to exercise power over others, and persecution that can be a great stoic strategy for success.
Speaker 1:Each of these, the various other Beatitudes, can go sideways. They can go ugly if they're not things that we pursue, investments we make in a posture of faith, a posture of reliance, a journey of trust, and I suspect we're willing to acknowledge our need and our dependence here and there. But I wanna ask you are you willing to acknowledge your dependence in the areas where you identify yourself or you perceive others doing so as being competent and capable and clear? For myself it's not that much. It's not terribly costly for me to acknowledge, when my son wants to go fishing, that I haven't the first clue about how to fish effectively. I am not a fisherman, my livelihood has never depended upon it, my reputation doesn't stand on it, and so it comes rather cheaply for me to say YouTube probably knows better, let's watch a video.
Speaker 1:But am I willing to acknowledge that where I'm known, am I willing to name that need, that dependence, that reliance on one outside of me, where I make my money, where I burnish my reputation, where I gain the plaudits of others? Are you willing to acknowledge, in an ongoing way, as you grow older and more mature, that you continue to live dependently, even in those spots that are most close to what makes you you, to how others know you and distinguish you and identify you? That's where we're most idolatrously tempted to believe that we can trust Jesus, yes, and go about our work and business in our own strength. And that's what it costs, if we're to begin in being poor in spirit, that we would be willing to own our need, our poverty, our dependence, and to embrace his generosity, his care, his gospel, even there, even in what's most defining of you, even in what's most accomplished about you, even in what others cherish most, in your character and in your CV. And that leads us to a third point, something underneath the surface of the text. There's a superstructure here and there's a question that has to arise why on earth would becoming poor in spirit be a good long-term investment? And this is one of many things. This is a strange picture of happiness, and it's not alone. The Bible calls us to a host of things that have seemed strange to humans near and far in the time of the Romans, and still true today, and some of them I wanna suggest you shouldn't try at home, unless that home is the home the Bible describes.
Speaker 1:Think about the way in which, in the Old Testament, god so regularly challenges his people about how they go to war. There are lots of stories about this, there's legislation and commands, but perhaps one illustration will do. Think of the story of Gideon. He and his army are there and it's gonna be a real battle. And the Lord tells Gideon don't go attack, we're not ready. You need to send many of your men away. Gideon, surely, is feeling a bit timid about what's before him now he's less strong and he wasn't so confident before. And the Lord says no, you can't go attack, you need to send even more men away Until finally, gideon has this tiny troop there to face a larger, daunting army and the Lord tells him to send them out and basically to take the equivalent of agent Tupperware and bang it in the night and somehow victory is going to come. Now I wouldn't suggest that as something you ought to do at home, that you should go, threaten war and then, when a large army comes at you, you ought to show up with a small troop and ancient Tupperware and yell in the night and believe that you're gonna defeat a large army. That's likely not being discussed in the Pentagon in any strategy session.
Speaker 1:It doesn't make sense unless the God who called Gideon to that journey is the God who himself gives the victory. We see something more common. Most of us won't be called to wage military campaigns, much less in the style of Gideon. All of us are called to Sabbath rest on the regular, and the Bible tells us that the Sabbath is a great test of our trust in God. Why? Because Sabbath thing is actually kind of strange. We live in a world where if I'm taking the day off, if my business is shut down, if I'm not going about my business, a competitor can get ahead. And I'm no economist, but that puts you at a bit of a down right. You're behind Sabbath thing doesn't make sense unless God is who he says. He is a God who provides, a God who blesses, a God who enriches his people. And so it is here, friends, that a God who calls us to be poor in spirit is the only way this makes sense as a wise investment for your future.
Speaker 1:Why is it that being poor in spirit, embracing dependence, is a happy way to go about life? Because this same Jesus who calls us to poverty of spirit, the apostle Paul, tells us in 2 Corinthians 8, though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor that by his life, death, resurrection and ascension we ourselves might be enriched. What we learn there and throughout the New Testament is that God himself has skin in the game. He has invested with us, and that God has a track record of making good. We've already sung of resurrection power and we can see in the life and the journey of Jesus himself what Hebrews 12 names that for the joy set before him he endured the cross. He despised it shame, and yet he endured the cross. For the joy set before him. He is the author and finisher, or perfecter, of faith. He wasn't delighting in being brutalized and being killed. He despised that. He knew it was shameful, it was painful, it was ostracizing. But he knew also that if he invested in faith and if he pursued heaven, above that joy set before him, god would in fact justify him and vindicate him and raise him to new life. And we learn immediately thereafter that God did. He was blessed with indestructible life and he lives ever more to make intercession for us.
Speaker 1:Joseph Piper says happiness is essentially a gift. We can't forge our own felicity, but happiness is the kind of gift God has time and again shown that he's capable of giving. We aren't capable of forging our felicity, but God is a master worker, and in creation, in the beginning, and in the exodus, at that needed time, and in the coming of Jesus Christ above all else, god has shown himself quite capable of providing happiness. Happiness to those who seem to be the most hurting, happiness to those who seem in fact to be dying. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last, it seems, is the most common way Jesus describes the ethic, the way of the cross. And so, friends, as we think about the habitat in which happiness grows, we need to think about God's goodness and generosity, god's commitment to our cause and God's track record of making good on his commitments.
Speaker 1:For, honest though we realize, most of us have trouble trusting God, not because God necessarily has done something wrong, but because we and others have been wronged and have wronged one another. I can often struggle to trust one friend or neighbor, not because of anything they've done, but because I've had others make promises and under deliver. I've had others who've said they'll be there and then they've disappeared. And we all, to greater or lesser extents, and some of us profoundly struggle to place our faith again and again, in the most important areas of life, in God, not because of what God has done, but because the way others have disappointed us. Perhaps a parent hasn't been there, perhaps a spouse was unfaithful, perhaps an employer or a pastor was not loving, was not a servant but was exploitative. Sadly, it takes many forms and one of the things we see is that God, this Jesus, is committed not merely to our being called to be poor in spirit, to our call to be faithful, to trust again and again, but he provides pathways that will instill in us a habitat that will grow in us this happy life of dependence.
Speaker 1:Here at New City, we talk so often about the common rhythm, these various ways in which God longs to form in us this life of trust and of happiness, personally and corporately. Some of them are strange. We talk about fasting. We talk about giving up good things not sins, but good things for a season that we might focus upon God. We talk about turning away from our own building to blessing others, to building them up not building up our names, our bank accounts, our reputations. In lots of ways those are counterintuitive challenges, asking us to think of others and not merely ourselves, asking us to envision what's way down the line, what's not simply immediately gratifying but in a real way, whether it's coming to the table on a Sunday morning or it's gathering in community where we bless one another with words of encouragement and gratitude, whether it's forming in circles to pray with and for one another and for the city together, whether it's fasting and turning together away from a good to pursue a greater hope and happiness.
Speaker 1:In each and every one of those areas, god is trying to revive a muscle. God is trying to revive a love. God is trying to strengthen our weak faith that it might become more plausible, that it might be enriched by the habitat, the community, the fellowship of the saints, as we think about slow down spirituality, as we think about what it means to give ourselves, to invest in rhythms and practices and to give up other rhythms and other practices. That's what the ultimate purpose is. The end is determined by the beginning. And the sermon goes on.
Speaker 1:And if you read on from Matthew five through six and seven, jesus lands the plane describing two ways of building you can build upon a rock, you can build upon the sand. He describes the way in which building upon the rock is a building that lasts. It's a home that weathers the storms. It's a shelter that's safe for the long haul. It's a way of life, it's a journey that doesn't disappoint. It's an investment that richly repays, above and beyond what was put into it and what we see here is, the end depends upon the beginning, the embracing poverty of spirit, owning our dependence and, underneath that, naming and knowing and growing together in our awareness of the goodness and grace of God.
Speaker 1:Let's pray and ask that God might write that goodness, that provision and that grace into each of our hearts. Our Father, we thank you. We know what it is to be weak and so often we are ashamed and we confess the way in which we so often struggle to depend and to trust on those around us, much less on you. We thank you for your steadfast love, o Lord. We rejoice in those words Josh read earlier. While we were still sinners, while we were yet weak, you showed your love. You have bestowed kindness and mercy on us, even as we've been ungodly, and so you know us at our worst and our weakest and our most wayward. And yet you have nothing but goodness and loving kindness for us. We rejoice in that and we praise you, o Jesus, for being the great gift above all gifts. Committed to completing that great work and bestowing on us nothing less than the happiness of your heavenly kingdom, grow in us that faith. We pray that we might invest well and build upon the rock that lasts, and that we might not be fooled by the shifting sands and by the promise of this earthly moment, and for that we need your grace and power. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen, as is our custom.
Speaker 1:We wanna respond momentarily here, with an opportunity for you to take stock of ways in which God's word may shine light into your hearts, and I wanna simply put two questions before you this day. It's one thing for us to confess that we believe Jesus. It's another thing for us to continue believing Jesus, especially where it's most pointed and necessary. So I want you to ask the Lord first, where are those places in your life where you've been refusing to own up to your reliance upon God and you've instead journeyed with a sense of self-reliance, a confidence that needs to be repented of? And second, where is it that you've, underneath that, refused to see God as good and present and God is committed to providing, not just for eternity, not just on Sunday, but in this area of life, in this relationship, in this crisis, in this aspect of your journey? Take a few moments. Ask the Lord to illumine your life as you consider his word, and Damien will lead us to the table.