Friday 13 July 2018

The Foundational Position: Poverty of Spirit ~ Ganeida

There is a dichotomy between what people believe the church should be & how Jesus
envisioned the church. They do not look anything like each other. It is important that we understand what Jesus meant us to look like & not get caught up in the trap of how other people think the church is meant to be.

Do you remember the lady in the park who was upset with us for preaching the word of God?  She thought we should only be handing out cups of tea & doing *something useful* as she put it because that is what she believed the church should do. There is a time & a place for cups of tea, soup kitchens, homeless housing but those things were never meant to be the church's first priority.  Her first priority is to love God. This is what Jesus taught.  None of the rest matters if we get this first principle wrong. This is where Jesus began when He sat down on the mountainside & began to teach. This, according to both Old & New Testament, is the 1st & greatest commandment.


The Jewish people were given the Torah to help them build a relationship with God but because they never understood the heart they bogged an entire people down in rules & regulations that became an intolerable burden as Jesus pointed out: Woe to you as well, experts in the law!” He replied. “You weigh men down with heavy burdens, but you yourselves will not lift a finger to lighten their load." Luke 11:46 


They were pedantic about tithing, even to the smallest of herbs: 

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint, dill, and cumin, but you have disregarded the weightier matters of the Law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. Matthew 23:23

Happiness is so desired that the Americans inscribed it in their Declaration of IndependenceWe hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; ... 



There was a schism between what God meant when He gave Moses the Torah & how the Jewish people came to understand the Torah. It is this discrepancy Jesus addresses on the Mount & he begins by addressing this deep desire in the human heart for happiness. Blessed...in the Greek makarios which means * happy *. It can also mean someone who receives divine favour ~ which is how we usually define the grace of God: His unmerited favour towards us.  We looked at the Hebrew meaning of bless when we looked @ the Aaronic Blessing in Numbers: Barak ~ to kneel.  Now remember Hebrew is both concrete & pictorial so the meaning is to kneel with respect while bringing a gift to another.

In effect Jesus is saying: This is how the Grace of God works... Don't misunderstand me.  This is not a salvation issue.  You can be saved & redeemed of the Lord without ever once applying any of the beatitudes to your life but if you want to truly experience happiness & fulfillment & all God has for you then : Your ears will hear a word behind you, "This is the way, walk in it," whenever you turn to the right or to the left. Isaiah 30:21

Grace, like salvation, is a free gift just because God loves us so much but just like any other gift it doesn't do anything for us if we never unwrap it, never take it out of it's box & use it.  Here is the thing, & our churches have suffered from it for centuries: the church was never meant to be a weak, passive, meek [in our English sense of the word] entity.  It was meant to be robust, pro~active, assertive: know the word; speak the word; apply the word! 

It starts here with Jesus first teaching: Happy...Happy are those who bring this gift of poverty of spirit & lay it @ the Father's feet. Paul learnt this for he says of Christ in 2 Corinthians 12:9 ...My power works best in weakness... When we are working from our place of strength we leave no room for the Holy Spirit to work in us but when we come to the end of us, then Jesus can begin to work!  This is exactly what Jesus means for the Greek,  ptōchos, means
reduced to beggary, mendicant; poor, indigent, destitute. The picture is of someone who has lost absolutely everything, is homeless & reduced to begging in the streets.  

In our humanity we often admire people who *pull themselves up by their own bootstraps* & *Get their act together*  but the bible says the exact opposite: Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. James 1:17 A man can receive only what is given him from heaven...John 3:27 ...He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous...Matthew 5:45 Or as Luke points out in Acts 17:28 ...for in him we live, and move, and have our being...

When we begin to understand that everything we are, everything we have, is freely given out of the love & mercy & grace of God we have begun to position ourselves where we can receive the fullness of His blessing, the abundant life that Jesus promises.

Now when we teach on grace we generally point out 2 things: the unmerited favour of God wherein there is nothing we can do to earn God's favour, nothing we can do to lose it, & our legal position before God as opposed to our experiential position. What we need to understand is the tension between these 2 opposing positions.  When we understand the divide between our legal position & our experiential position we will seek to realign ourselves to receive  more of God's grace ~ the blessing.  

We need the grace of God to even begin to see how truly poverty stricken we are. In our arrogance we are like the  Laodicean church saying: Because you say, "I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing," and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked... [Revelation 3:17] We think because we have experienced something of God we are rich when in truth we've barely dipped our little toe in the waters of God's goodness, grace, mercy, power, majesty... There is so much more available to us.  And because of who God is there is always gong  to be more & more of Him to know, to experience, to enjoy.  It is a relationship of such incredible depth & expanse we can never come to the end of it. 

The irony is we can bend all of our willpower, all of our intellect, to cultivating  poverty of spirit & none of it will make the least difference to our heart's condition!  We desperately need the Holy Spirit's help to take even this first step in our relationship with God.  It is always God who initiates.  The response is up to us. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13  but it is clear from Jeremiah 24:7 that we cannot achieve this seeking & finding by our own efforts for God says: I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the LORD. They will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with all their heart.

It is God who gives us the new heart.  It is God who places the desire for greater intimacy within us.  It is God who initiates the changes within us that will draw us closer to Himself.  All is already freely available but we need to learn how to access all that has already been given.  It's a bit like fishing. All the fish in the sea are ours to catch but until we actually bait our line & caste it into the water we have no hope of catching even one little tiddler.

So we bait our hook & we caste it into the waters saying: God, I want more of you.  I want to experience more of you.  I want to understand how much I lack in order that you can fill me with more of yourself.  I want to know you more.  Show me your glory.  Show me your majesty.  Show me your power.

This was Moses cry:  Show me your glory. [Exodus 33:18] The people drew back, you remember, but Moses pressed in to God.

This was David's cry: Make Your face shine upon Your servant, And teach me Your statutes [Psalm 119:135]

God is always seeking more of us, a deeper, more intimate relationship.  It is we who limit that intimacy .  We fail to set aside time.  We fail to seek Him in prayer.  We neglect our almsgiving, our fasting, our serving in the daily press of making ends meet & running our lives whereas if we would just put God first, not just nominally but as our greatest priority, all the rest would fall into place. You see, we must respond.  We can see our lack & not do anything, be totally passive ~ & nothing will change. Or maybe we don't see our lack; that is pride & nothing will change.  But when we see our lack & respond, that is where God will meet us & supply our need.

Of all the beatitudes poverty of spirit is the hardest to maintain.  We see a little progress & it is so much more than we imagined we sit back on our laurels.  Or something happens in our life that sends us spiralling out of control & all our energy becomes focused on that one thing, pushing aside our sense of urgency about pressing in to God. But here is the interesting thing: each of the beatitudes has a promise attached. If you mourn, you will be comforted.  If you hunger & thirst, you will be filled. The meek will inherit the earth. They are all future promises but this first one & the last 2 ~ those are promises for now!  The Kingdom  IS theirs.  That is present tense.  Their reward IS great.  Present tense. 

When you walk in poverty of Spirit you are living in the Kingdom NOW!  When we pray, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, when we pray Thy kingdom come...we are meant to be helping that happen because we walk according to the Spirit of God, because we obey His precepts as the angels in Heaven do, because we are living out Kingdom precepts in the here & now with pureness of heart, poverty of Spirit, mercy, righteousness, meekness & peace.

Throughout scripture we find this continuous tension. There is grace, & there is legalism.  There is Spirit & there is Truth.  There is the least who are great & the great who are least. There is the servant King, the living sacrifice, the dead who live.  We were created for relationship.  Everything in scripture is designed to elicit a response from us, to move us positionally into relationship with God.  He has initiated, but it is up to us to respond. It is in our best interests to respond because there is no true happiness outside of happiness in God. In Hs grace & mercy He shows us how to achieve that.

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