The point Jesus is making is that we, as people, cannot do the work in others all the time. In fact, we don’t ever really do that work. We plant the seed of the gospel, water it, and harvest it when it’s grown, but it is God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6, Matthew 9:38). This kind of rebellion only ceases by our own desire for it to cease; it only goes away by our willingness to let God make us decrease. It only goes away by obedience.

If you have ever found yourself, even subtly and silently, pleading to God to heal someone because of “insert thing they did” or to provide something for you because of “insert thing you’ve done/believed,” then you’ve fallen prey to the same fallacy Abraham did: presuming God answers prayers because of human righteousness.

Here we finally have something tangible. No human heart can conceive it; the unsaved cannot comprehend it. Our deceptive inner selves are confused and baffled; our hearts are deceived because only the Spirit of God can search out His depths and speak them to us spiritually. Spirit begets Truth, and so we know we are near. But we cannot rely on a voice speaking in our mind for our minds are yet untransformed by renewal (Romans 12:2). So the psalmists are helpful again here: “How I love your instruction! It is my meditation all day long. Your command makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is always with me” (Psalm 119:97-98).

As I’ve worked through these thoughts over the last two months in lieu of writing this, I’ve had to challenge myself to actually forgive: I make the same challenge to any who read this: consider whether your forgiveness hurts. If it doesn’t, I’d argue there was no swallowing pain but rather a vomiting of it at your offender. And if it does hurt? Congratulations! You’re doing it right.

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.

The thing about faith is that if we had our own to rely on, we’d have none. We’d have no desserts, and that would be plenty just. Yet God is righteous and just, and, as Hannah prayed, a person does not prevail by his own strength but by God’s, which is credited to us in faith and righteousness as it was to Abraham.

Lo and behold, God answered not only that prayer but also an unspoken one I had been throwing up in my declaration of wrestling with Him as Jacob. On Friday, my faith was dead, but on Sunday, I was reborn just a little bit stronger as I first attended a sermon preached by my aforementioned good friend (his first). His message? The blessings of Jacob on his children, of course. The wrestler himself, after having been blessed, got to give out blessings of his own.

Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is given to the poor in spirit, but what about those rich in spirit? Well, it’s a bit of a longer path to get to where we need to go. For the rich in spirit, it is as difficult to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The first step is humility, and from there, we can trudge the path through the Beatitudes.