Being Poor in Spirit Does Not Come by Works
As I was recently listening to a podcast, I was reminded of the blog post I wrote as my first post back after a long hiatus. The Lord convicted me on the teachings of the Beatitudes, so I reread that post and found I had committed a grave error. While entirely unintentional on my part, I had more than implied that to become poor in Spirit, we must work our way through a process, thereby teaching, in a sense, that part of our salvation and sanctification is done by our own works. Today, I want to correct that.
Who Are the Poor in Spirit?
One of the first corrections I need to make is a matter of identity. While attempting to make my point about the difficult of relying on God when you’re fully capable of doing many things without Him, I misidentified Christians as a whole. See, even when you’re fully capable, you’re still poor in spirit. It’s a given identifier of the believer, one that each person gets because you have to recognize poorness in spirit before you can ever come to Christ. To be poor in spirit is to recognize an inability to save ourselves from suffering, sin, and moral failure. To be poor in spirit is to understand the necessity of Christ’s life and death. So, by default, all believers are poor in spirit because we have all come to understand this and believe in Jesus who died and rose again.
“Therefore, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
My goal was to express the working out of salvation that Paul mentions in Philippians 2:12. The goal has already been accomplished: poorness in spirit. However, our understanding and living by that truth is not so quick or easy to come by. Had I spent more time with the Scripture and the idea I wanted to speak on, I would not have committed the error I did. That said, I now want to say it clearly: we are already poor in spirit, but we are sometimes incapable of living as though we were. Pride will puff us up and cause us to believe, as we once did, that we are capable of doing all that is necessary for salvation on our own, adding works into the faith given to us by Jesus.
What is the Purpose of the Rest of the Beatitudes?
I stand by my working through of the rest of the Beatitudes, but I want to change the mental approach I declared in my first post. Rather than marketing these truths, yet again, as a path of works, I want to frame it as working out our salvation. When Paul writes we are to do this with fear and trembling, he’s pointing us back to God, to look at Him in awe and reverence, with hatred of evil and weakness in our limbs, relying on God for strength. This idea is given to us directly in two places: Proverbs 8:13 says, “To fear the Lord is to hate evil. I hate arrogant pride, evil conduct, and perverse speech;” and 2 Corinthians 12:9 says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.”
Leaning on ourselves and forgetting our poorness in spirit is a quick way to commit arrogance by price, evil conduct, and perverse speech, and the cure to such a thing is to look to God in awe, hate what He hates, and rely on His grace to be sufficient and perfect in our weakness. We must return to the mental and heart posture of the weakness that drove us to Christ in the first place. This is the goal of the rest of the Beatitudes. Regardless of what sin we commit or where our pride turns us to, if we can transform ourselves by renewing our minds (Romans 12:2) and be like any of these grace-filled archetypes of believers, we can return ourselves to our poorness in spirit.
For example, if we can humble ourselves from pride, remembering who God is and who others are (dearly loved images of the Creator), we can find our way back to the weakness that makes us poor in spirit and incapable without God. If we can be merciful and forgiving, we can remember that we, too, were forgiven much (Luke 7:47). This, in turn, will remind us of our own spiritual poverty. This is all meant to be a reminder that, without Christ’s righteousness covering us like a cloak, we are all incapable of anything of significance. It is only by grace and Christ’s goodness by His Spirit within us that we can do good, that we can be called righteous.
I hope this counts as a solid correction to what should have been written better in the first place. If you want solid teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, and, indeed, the entirety of the New Testament—or if you just want to hear what convicted me—check out the podcast, “30 Minutes in the New Testament” wherever you get your podcasts. There are some very wise men teaching on Scripture there, and you should find it not only enlightening but also convicting.