What does it mean to be poor? As a teenager living in Hong Kong, the shortest route home from school was through a crowded “cardboard village,” where the residents lived in homes shackled together from scraps of tin, plastic and old boards. I can remember pondering, as I walked to our comfortable apartment, what it must have been like to live in a home like that, without the basic necessities of running water, waste facilities or heat. Yet, in the eyes on many of my friends at school, I was also poor. Their parents were high powered executives of international companies, and lived in big homes in expensive neighborhoods. While travelling around the city on busses and trams was normal for me, some of them had never been on a bus; their chauffeurs drove them where they wanted, or they took taxis. And then I consider the vast slums of Durban, South Africa, or on the slopes of Săo Paulo, Brazil, filled with orphaned children, many of whom would only dream of living in one of the ramshackle houses in the cardboard village I used to travel through.
There are also different kinds of poverty. One can live in a mansion and still be abjectly poor, devoid of love or a sense of meaning or purpose for their lives. As he began his Sermon on the Mount, recorded in Matthew chapter five, Jesus pronounced a blessing on those who are “poor in spirit.” The Greek word means “destitute,” or to be completely without resources or hope. Jesus was referring, of course, to our spiritual condition, and calling people to consider the state of their souls. It is those who find themselves in this condition spiritually, Jesus said, to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs.
His statement seems to imply that some are poor in Spirit while others are not; but his meaning is actually quite different. The fact is that we are all abjectly poor in spirit, but it is those who realize that they are to whom the kingdom belongs. In his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, John Stott notes three things about the kind of poverty Jesus is talking about. First is the realization that we are in such a desperate condition that we have no hope and we cannot save ourselves; second is the understanding that only God can save us; and, third, is the recognition that we have no claim on him and are completely at his mercy. The necessity of acknowledging this spiritual poverty is not because God demands that we grovel before him before he will help us. Rather it is that, until we recognize our desperate need, we will not see ourselves in need of his help.
The old hymn says it well…
Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to thee for dress;
Helpless, look to thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die!
But for all who do recognize their need, he stands ever ready to lift us up out of our spiritual misery. Through the prophet Isaiah, God promised, “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of the valleys, I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water” (Is. 41:17-18).
What amazing grace it is that God has not left us to languish in our spiritual poverty, but has made a way through his son, not only to make us rich in Christ, but also to adopt us as his own sons and daughters, and give us all the rights of the children of the king!
Pastor Jon Enright
January 1, 2024