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Seeking to be Poor in Spirit

Filed under: Intimacy

I’ve been meditating lately on what it means when Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus has set the bar high for all believers when He set the vision before us in Mt. 5:48 – “You shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” The foundational call in the Sermon on the Mount is to cultivate the 8 beatitudes, and being poor in spirit is the first of the eight. Seeking to be perfect is seeking to be mature in the Spirit by pursuing complete obedience (2 Pet. 1:10; Jas 3:2). This pursuit is not to be confused with attainment. We will never fully attain perfection on this side of eternity, but Jesus is perfecting His bride through a process that takes time. We must work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

First, I wanted to define being poor in spirit, and this is what I found:

“to continually acknowledge in the depth of my heart that I am in great need of help to attain genuine love for God and righteousness.”

Being poor in spirit is to accept that we are in a serious dilemma with God and need understanding and power to live in mature godliness. We come before God broken knowing that He is truly our only hope. 

Having this understanding and continually acknowledging that we have no righteousness of our own is the only way we will truly lean soley and completely on Jesus. We’re given His strength and His purity in our poverty. Only when we are in touch with our weakness is He truly strong for us. Then and only then, when we die daily to our own strength, embrace weakness, and in all our ways acknowledge Him will we truly be found perfect, whole, successful and complete before God. 

Tags: Beatitudes, Complete Obedience, Poor in Spirit, Sermon on the Mount, Weakness