The Ingredients of Happiness
Part 1: Matt 5:3 Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Pastor Charles Price
I am going to read the first twelve verses, which mark the introduction to a section that we know as the Sermon on the Mount, the most intensive record of anything Jesus stated in His public ministry. I am going to read from Verse 1 of Matthew 5.
“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’”
That’s as far as we’ll read and there are no prizes for guessing those verses are all about being “blessed”. That word reoccurs nine times in those verses. But that probably doesn’t excite you very much because the word blessed is one of these very vague words that we Christians use without often a lot of meaning. You know, you get up in the morning and you begin the day by saying, “Lord please bless today.” And then you eat your breakfast and you say, “Lord, please bless the food.” And then maybe you have a prayer time and you pray for the missionaries, “Lord please bless the missionaries”, which is very nice of you - you just asked God to do it to the food and now you say, “do it to the missionaries”. And then you go to work and you hear something you’ve never heard before and you say, “Well bless my soul”. And then somebody sneezes and you say, “Bless you”. And then you get home in the evening and you find that the cat has eaten the food you left out for dinner and you say, “That blessed cat has eaten the food.”
And we tend to use this word in all kinds of general, vague ways. When you pray, you don’t know what else to pray for somebody so you say, “Bless them”. What you are saying to God usually is, “Lord fill in the blank Yourself; I don’t know what they need”. Because we use this word bless and blessed in such vague ways.
But you would be very happy to know that the word blessed actually has a meaning. The word translated “blessed” here in our Bible is the Greek word “markariŏs” and the word “markariŏs” literally means: “to be happy”. Now most translations steer away from using the word happy simply because in our English use of that word, it’s got lots of superficial connotations. It’s when everything is comfortable and easy and you feel good.
So it’s a nice hot sunny day and you’re laying on the beach with a big ice cream in one hand and a girl in the other and you’re happy. Then a thick black cloud comes across the sky, stops above you, drops cold wet raindrops on you, the girl gets up and walks away and the ice cream falls in the sand, and you’re not happy anymore. And we tend to think of happiness in those kinds of fairly superficial terms.
But the word “markariŏs” – happiness “markariŏs” style, speaks of a deep inner sense of well-being and satisfaction that is there irrespective of what our external circumstances may be like. It’s the kind of thing Paul knew when he wrote from the jail in Rome to the Philippians in Philippians Chapter 4 and Verse 4. He said to them, “Rejoice and again I say (in case you think I wrote the wrong word down by mistake, I’ll say it twice) rejoice.” Not because the prison was comfortable, not because the food was good, not because the sanitation was clean, not because the company was nice, but because “I’ve discovered” he says in that same passage, “a secret – I can be content in any and every situation whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I’ve discovered something, which is not dependent on my circumstances for my sense of well-being.” That’s what “markariŏs” - happiness - is about.
Now if Jesus is talking here about happiness, as He evidently is, He is actually talking about something that most people are looking for. Many years ago when I began with a group of friends to try and reach young people in our town for Christ, we devised a questionnaire – we’d go into coffee bars, which is where our young people used to hang out in those days. And we would ask them this set of questions and the first question was: what is your main ambition in life? The second question was: how do you hope to reach that ambition? And so on, until eventually we asked questions like: who do you think Jesus Christ was? Why do you think He died? And it was a way of getting into conversation with them.
Some time later we sat down with all these filled out questionnaires to work out how the young people in our town were thinking. And it was very interesting. In answer to the question: what is your main ambition in life? The overwhelming majority said: my main ambition in life is to be happy. Now if the main ambition in life of most people is to be happy and Jesus here talks about the ingredients of happiness, then most people need to understand what Jesus was talking about.
But, when you look at the list of things that Jesus lists here as making for happiness, you get some very big surprises. It seems to be the opposite of what most people are looking for when they look for happiness. For instance it begins: “Blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit”. Who ever heard of poverty of any kind making you happy?
On this questionnaire, when we asked, what is your main ambition in life, we then asked: how do you hope to reach that ambition? And most people who wanted to be happy wanted to reach that ambition by becoming rich. That’s why lots of you play the lottery. Because they think that “will solve my problems”. Yet Jesus says, blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit – whatever the “in spirit” means – we’ll see in a moment. Who ever heard of poverty making you happy?
Next one is even stranger: “Blessed are those who mourn”. That sounds very strange. If I were to say to you, “Look, I’m feeling so miserable today. I wish somebody would die and that would cheer me up”, you’d say “What in the world are you talking about?”
It then says, “Blessed are the meek”. I mean meek sounds a bit pathetic doesn’t it? It’s sort of “excuse me for being alive” kind of thing. Who wants to be meek?
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. Whoever heard of hungering and thirsting making you happy? Normally it’s having what you are looking for – not looking for it that makes you happy you think. And you go through this list, you get to the last one and He says it twice, “Blessed are you when you are persecuted”. I mean can you imagine if I came up to you at the end of the service and said, “Look, I’m feeling so down today. Would you smack me in the face and beat me up and that would make me feel better?”
You look at this list of ingredients that Jesus says makes for happiness and it seems to be the almost total opposite of the things that most of us look for when we’re looking for happiness. When you look at it more closely, you realize that He says things like, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” – not the poor in pocket. You say, “What is He talking about?”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” – not hunger and thirst for a hamburger and coke. What in the world is righteousness?
He talks about “Theirs is the kingdom of God”. What in the world is that? He talks about those who will see God. What is He talking about?
And you realize as you examine this list of ingredients for happiness that Jesus is not talking about physical things in the physical area of life, which is the area in which most people are looking for happiness. But He is talking about spiritual issues – whatever that is, whatever that means.
Let me illustrate this to you. When I first started preaching I used to spend a lot of time going into high schools and talking to classes of kids up and down England. I remember once going to a school. I did this several times, but I’ll tell you about one instance – probably ninth or tenth grade equivalent – about 30 kids in the class and I began the class by saying, “How many of you here want to be happy – please put your hand up”. And as far as I could see, everybody in the class put their hand up. I said, “Alright, you and I have something in common. I want to be happy; you want to be happy. How many of you have thought about the things that would make you happy? Put your hand up.” And again, as far as I could see, most people put their hands up. I said, “Alright, I’ve got a piece of chalk here” (I had a chalkboard behind me). “I want you to tell me some of the things that make you happy and I’m going to write them down on the chalkboard and then we’re going to talk about them one by one.” So I said, “Put your hand up one by one and just tell me some of the things that make you happy.”
Now I can’t remember the order in which they came but for instance somebody at one point said, “food” so I wrote down the word “food”. Somebody put their hand up and said, “sport” and I wrote down the word “sport”. Somebody said “music” so I wrote down the word “music”. Somebody said, “girls” (it was a boy who said that), so I wrote down, “girls”. And then somebody said, “boys”, so I wrote down “boys”. Eventually I had about thirty things on the board. I said, “Alright, these are the things that make you happy?”
They said, “Yes”.
I said, “Alright, let’s forget about that for a moment. I’m going to write three words on the bottom of this chalkboard that describe how every single one of you is made.” And I wrote down the words, “body, soul, spirit”. I said, “Let me explain those three things because all of you are made up of body, soul and spirit. First of all, the most obvious part about you is your body. That’s what you see every time you look in the mirror and it usually smiles back at you. You dress it, you feed it, you wash it – some of you, you paint it, you know you tickle it, and you all know you’ve got a body. It’s the most obvious thing about you.
“You also know you’ve got a soul, because you know that the most important thing in your life every day is making sure you never do anything which causes your body and your soul to separate from each other. Because if that happens, what happens then is that your relatives get your body, put it in a box, dig a hole, stand around the hole, sing some songs, usually cry, fill the hole in and then go home and leave you there. So you don’t do anything which causes your body and soul to get separated because you know you’re not just a body – your body needs a soul, a life. That’s you – your mind, your emotion, your will, your personality that lives inside your body.”
“But then the third area is probably the area you are least conscious of – it’s your spirit. It’s the part of you that makes you different to every other living being. You see there are three kinds of life that exist – there’s plant life, animal life and human life.” That’s what I said to the kids. “Plant life is just body. If you had a tree outside your house, you could go outside in the morning and say, ‘Good morning tree; did you have a good night. How many birds sat on you last night?’ You don’t talk to trees because although it’s alive, it’s just body; it doesn’t have a soul, a mind, emotion, will. Most people don’t talk to trees. Some people do but most people don’t.
On the other hand animals have a body and a soul. In fact the Hebrew word for soul in the Bible is the word for animal life. So you can communicate with an animal. They have a mind to think with, emotions to feel with, a will to decide. You can say to a dog, “sit” and the dogs says to itself, ‘that means put my rear end on the floor’, and it does and hopes he’ll get some food now. You can communicate to a cat. You can say, “Scat!” and the cat says, ‘uh-oh that means I need to run away’. You can say to a horse, “giddyap” and it says, ‘Uh-oh, I’m supposed to go faster’. You can communicate with animals because they have a mind, an emotion and a will of some sort. They have a soul.”
But I said, “The thing which makes you different – you’re not just a smart animal – you’ve got a spirit. You’ve got a capacity animals don’t have. And it’s this capacity to reach outside of yourself that causes you to ask questions animals never ask. Where do I come from? Where am I going to? What is the meaning of my life? You look up in the sky on a starry night and you say, ‘I wonder what’s up there’. Now animals don’t do that. You don’t find dogs trying to trace their ancestry to find out where they came from. You don’t find cows in a field looking up into the sky saying, ‘I wonder if there’s milk on Mars.’ You don’t find cats committing suicide because they’re lost the meaning to life. They don’t have any meaning; they’re just cats. But human beings do. Why? It’s part of the spiritual capacity designed to reach outside of yourself in order to know and experience and to enjoy God.”
Now I said to these kids, “Which of these three is the most important – the body, the soul or the spirit?”
One boy put his hand up and he said, “spirit”.
I said, “Are you sure?”
He said, “I think that’s what you want me to say.”
I said, “Alright, anybody else?”
Somebody said, “Soul”.
I said, “Are you sure?”
He said, “I’m guessing.”
I said, “Anybody else?”
Somebody said, “body”.
I said, “Why body?”
She said, “That’s the only one left.”
I said, “What you are saying is you don’t know, do you? But actually you’ve thought about it. You gave me thirty things just now that had to do with happiness. I’ve got a piece of colored chalk here”, I said, “and I’m going to draw a line between each of these thirty things with whether they have to do with the body or the soul or the spirit. First one: food. Does that have to do with the body or the soul or the spirit?
And a very intelligent looking boy said, “body”. So I drew a line down to the body.
“Sport” – body.
“Music“– soul. Somebody else said, “No I like to dance to it.”
“Alright, soul and body.”
“Girls”. I won’t tell you what they said.
But at the end of that list, we had about 25 things that went to the body, about 10 that went to the soul because there was overlap, and none that went to the spirit.
So I said, “So which have said is the most important?”
And they said, “Oh, body.”
I said, “That’s right. What you have said is this: look after the body, thrill the body, excite the body, slim down the body or pump up the body – which ever you need. Now I want to ask you a question: how many of you here”, I said to these kids, “how many of you here are really happy? Put your hand up.”
Nobody put their hand up. I said, “You’ve got a problem. You all want to be happy – you said so – you’ve all thought about the things that would make you happy. We’ve listed them. None of you are happy. Do you know why? I’ll tell you why. You’ve got this whole thing back to front. Jesus said in Matthew 6 (the next chapter to where I read) Verse 33,
“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness”.
That is, you get wrapped up with the things that are to do with God and all these things will be added to you. The “these things” – you read the context – are food, clothing, length of life. They are all physical things.” And I said to those kids, “We have twenty minutes left in this class and I’m going to tell you in the next twenty minutes how to get your spirit sorted out, because then everything else falls into place.”
You see, somebody’s got it all wrong. Either Jesus Christ has it all wrong in this list of ingredients for happiness or the world at large has it all wrong in its aspirations and the things it looks for. And I think I know who’s right.
And over eight Sunday’s I am going to look with you at the eight ingredients – there are nine beatitudes (the last one is repeated twice and therefore it’s eight separate things) that are the ingredients of real happiness. And this is a progression. It’s not eight different kinds of people – one over here is poor in spirit, one back there is mourning, one over here is meek, somebody back here is hungry after righteousness, etc. Rather it’s eight qualities that need to be true in each one person, beginning with the first, building on the second, building on the third, building on the fourth until the eighth. I want you to notice that each of these statements contain both a condition and a promise.
Here’s the first one (the condition): Blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven. If you want to know the kingdom you must understand what it means to be poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn; they will be comforted. If you are going to know the comforting, you need to know what it is to mourn, etc.
And we’re going to stress the condition in particular but also of course look at the promise.
Now let me talk about the first one for the little time I’ve got left, which in Verse 3 says,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
The first step, says Jesus, to real happiness is becoming clear about one fundamental fact and it’s this: I do not have what it takes to be what I am supposed to be. Now it is vitally important we understand that. You see probably some of us here, many of us here, immediately think of this in terms of those who are not Christians. Yes, they need to recognize that in order to come to Christ, which of course is true. But that isn’t what I am talking about. This is equally true for those who are already Christians. This recognition – in fact this is the biggest barrier to the Christian life that we do not recognize this – that in myself and of myself and by myself, I do not have what it takes. I am poor in spirit. We don’t grow out of this poverty; we actually live in this state of poverty, which we’ll see in just a moment is not a bleak thing I’m saying, because that poverty becomes exchanged for something else. But recognizing our own inherent inability is crucial if we are going to live the life that God has called us to live. You see Paul in Romans 7:18, speaking in the present tense of his own life says,
“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh, my natural self.”
That’s a pretty devastating statement to make, isn’t it? I know that nothing good lives in me. Now I’m saying this because it’s there in the New Testament and you’re listening to me and probably not thinking over it. But if at the end of this service you came to me and said, “You said something this morning which I really agree with. You said nothing good lives in you and I agree – I’ve noticed.”
How do you expect me to respond? What does it mean: in me there dwells no good thing? Because surely there are some good things about us, aren’t there? What about the ability to love? Isn’t that a good thing? What about the ability to do a good day’s work? Isn’t that a good thing? What about the ability to exercise some gift that I might have in some area of life? Isn’t that a good thing? What about the ability to paint a picture? Isn’t that a good thing? What does Paul mean, “In me there dwells no good thing”?
Let me illustrate it this way. Just supposing I was to get a brand new car and let’s say for want of argument it was a Rolls Royce and let’s say it was the biggest and best Rolls Royce, which I checked on the internet yesterday is what they call the Phantom. Fantasy for me, but Phantom anyway. Suppose I got a Phantom Rolls Royce and it was, you know, the best color for Rolls Royce. It was a kind of silver with a black strip down either side and red flames at the back. It’s got leather upholstery of course. It’s got state of the art surround sound. It’s got a DVD screen and unit. It’s got a bar in the back seat. It’s got satellite tracking. And I park this impressive Rolls Royce Phantom outside my home.
But just suppose the car had no engine under the hood. You came down the road and you saw this beautiful silver-grey black strip Rolls Royce Phantom, you looked through the window, “Wow look at this leather upholstery, look at this state of the art surround sound, look at this DVD, look at the bar in the back seat there – what’s in it? Oh Coca-Cola. Look at the satellite tracking” and you say, “Wow, that’s very impressive”. But if you see me through the window of my house and say, “Excuse me, Charles, can I come for a ride in your car?”
I look a little embarrassed and say, “I’m sorry, I’m not going anywhere at the moment.” Because if my car does not have an engine, it’ll still have it’s leather upholstery which is fine, it’ll still have its state of the art surround sound, still have its bar in the back seat, its DVD unit, its satellite tracking, still be the right color, but as far as being a car is concerned, it is totally incapable of behaving like a car. I mean the best thing I could do is keep some chickens in it. But you couldn’t go anywhere. And when Paul says, “In me there dwells no good thing”, he’s not saying, “I’m just one big puss-filled wart” – not that warts – sorry about the fault in that analogy – warts don’t have puss but anyway. But he’s not speaking in that kind of negativism about himself going around. No, because once when he wrote to the Philippians he said, “if I was to boast” and then he says, “but I won’t, but if I was to boast, this is what I would tell you”. And then he gives a list of things that he could boast if he was going to boast. It’s a very humble way of letting people know some things about yourself. And he lists some things, which the readers then would have been very impressed with. And he says, “but you know all this I count as” – the literal word – “garbage” for the sake of knowing Christ.
Because you see there is an engine that makes the car behave like a car. Let me read you what C.S. Lewis, who of course is the author of the Narnia series, in a book of his called “Mere Christianity”, he wrote this: “God made us, or invented us, as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He, Himself, is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn. He is the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why is it just no good asking God to make us happy without Himself. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing”, says C.S. Lewis, simply because we were created that way.
We were created as a car is created to run on gasoline – he uses slightly different illustrations than mine –mine is the engine, his is the gasoline – it’s okay, same principle. You can have an engine with no gasoline and you won’t go anywhere either. And recognizing our poverty of spirit, recognizing our own inherent bankruptcy, recognizing that the fuel for life, the fuel to equip us to be what human beings were equipped to be, is God Himself living in us and operating in us.
And to discover that, you’ve got to discover something else – your own poverty of spirit. You don’t learn this listening to a sermon by the way; you learn this when your back is up against the wall and you are flat on your face to change the metaphor and you run out of steam and you say, “Where in the world am I going to go from here?” And that’s when you discover God is God. That’s why God in His mercy allows us to go into those situations where we discover out of despair that we’re insufficient in ourselves.
I want you to grasp this very carefully because they are many, many Christians who have been Christians for 10, 20, 30, 50 years who have never understood this and they are simply trying to live the Christian life for Jesus and it’s as exciting as pushing a bus up a hill and you know it in your heart of hearts, because you were never created to live this way, alone. And we’ll never be equipped to live the Christian life until we recognize it’s utterly impossible to us; it is only possible by the indwelling life of God.
Let me read you what Martin Lloyd Jones, who was one of the great preachers of the last century – he wrote a book on the Sermon on the Mount – and this is what he says at one point: “The Sermon on the Mount condemns every idea that the Christian life is something you and I can do ourselves. This first beatitude (which is what we’re looking at), Blessed are the poor in the spirit, says to us in other words: there is a mountain that you have to scale, there are heights you have to climb and the first thing you realize as you look at that mountain which you are told you must ascend, is that you cannot do it and that you are utterly incapable in and of yourself and that any attempt to do so in your own strength is proof positive that you have never understood the Christian life.”
But the sad thing is there are folks who have been Christians for years and not understood the Christian life. And their Christian life is basically trying to be like Jesus as best you can, it’s trying to live by Biblical principles, trying to live by Christian principles and God could take a vacation and it would make no difference to the way you would do that. Instead of realizing that the Christian life is Christ’s life lived in us by Himself, as we give Him the elbowroom in our lives, to live and work.
And most of us have to discover this the hard way as I discovered this the hard way. You see, when I first became a Christian I concluded the Christian life would be fairly easy. The reason is I had grown up in a Christian environment, now I had given my life to Christ, I had my sins forgiven, was going to heaven when I died. In the meantime my job was to read my Bible, say my prayers and just obey the things that I knew. In fact somebody came to me after the first service this morning and said, “That’s been my Christian life for 20 years.” She said, “I’m going to heaven when I die, my sins are forgiven, I’ve been trying for 20 years to just keep up a Christian kind of appearance and I wondered”, she said, “why it has been so utterly empty.”
Be honest. Many of you feel that way, because you will feel this way until you discover this fact. I thought it would be quite easy until I began to read my Bible and I discovered that it says things like, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength” – which means everything your heart is spent on, everything your strength is spent on, everything your soul is preoccupied with, will be saying to everybody around you, “I love God”.
A lot of things I did said, “I actually not that interested; I couldn’t care less, I’m living for myself.”
And then it says, not only love the Lord your God with your heart and soul and so on, it says, “And you shall love your neighbor” – you know how much? As much as you love yourself. And I had two problems – one, you should have seen my neighbors. Two, you should see how much I love myself… and to love my neighbor as much as I love myself? And I came to the conclusion that the Christian life is certainly not easy. In fact, it’s difficult, very difficult. And then I read things like the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said, “Have you heard it said you must not commit adultery?”
And they all said, “Yeah, we’ve heard that one, yeah we know that one, yeah good one.
“I say unto you”, said Jesus, “if you look at a woman and you lust after her, even though you don’t know her name and you don’t know her address, you wouldn’t dare go knock on her door, you are already guilty of adultery.”
“I beg your pardon? Even if I had never talked to her?”
“Have you heard it said you must not murder?”
“Yeah, we know that one. That’s a good one; we keep that one.”
“I say to you, if you are angry with your brother even though you would never dare put a knife in his back or a bullet between his eyes, you’re already guilty of murder.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding.”
Because at the end of that message He said this – end of Matthew 5, it’s the same chapter – Matthew 5, He said,
“Be perfect therefore even as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
In other words, He said, “Ladies and gentlemen will you please be perfect. If you are not sure how perfect, I mean would you please be as perfect as God.”
Now how do you think the people responded at the end of this message? How would you have responded? Would you have said, “Well that was a great word this morning. Oh I loved that. I think I’ll get the CD.” No, you would respond the way they responded. How did they respond? It says in Matthew Chapter 7 at the end of the Sermon on the Mount,
“They were amazed at his teaching.”
Why were they amazed - because He was so good? No, because He was – listen to this – so ridiculous, from every human perspective. And there is only one conclusion you can come to after listening to Jesus: I cannot live this Christian life. And that is the most wonderful thing to discover but some of us have never discovered it because we’re trying our best all the time.
Do you know disciples are never called followers of Jesus after Pentecost? Don’t be a follower of Jesus – I think I have said this to you before. At Pentecost they are in Christ; He is in them. They are no longer followers. As long as they were followers they were failures. Following Jesus is guaranteed to bring you to failure because you can’t keep it up. You can’t follow Him. What happened at Pentecost? He came to live in them. So when they began to behave in ways they had never behaved before Pentecost, the people said of Peter and John,
“They were amazed at their courage and they took note that they had been with Jesus.”
They almost got it right. They said, you know, “At last something of Jesus obviously rubbed off on them; you can see they have been with Jesus.” That isn’t what happened. That’s what they thought. What happened was what they saw was actually Jesus now operating in them.
But Peter had to find his bankruptcy, his barrenness, come to the point of bankruptcy, come to the point of realizing his poverty of spirit – “I can’t live this life” – and that’s when Jesus said to him, “Peter (after he had denied Jesus), “just wait in Jerusalem – just hang on – the story will come together on the Day of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the same Jesus who lived amongst you will live in you and He’ll be your strength and your life.”
And I came to the conclusion that the Christian life wasn’t easy. That was the first stage; it wasn’t difficult. It was the second stage I came to the conclusion the Christian life was impossible. And that’s the way I live every day. Because you don’t grow out of that - you live in that. You live with the impossibility of the Christian life and say, “Lord I cannot live the way You have called me to live today. I cannot accomplish anything You want to accomplish but thank You so much all You expect of me is failure because You said, “Without Me you can do how much? Nothing.” We don’t believe that of course. We think He’s expecting something. We think Jesus is expecting us – go on, He’s expecting you – go on trying.
Do you know what He expects of you? Nothing. He said so. “Without Me – but you abide in Me, I abide in you”. That’s what happened at Pentecost. At Pentecost the disciples received the Holy Spirit and Christ received a new body. We are in Christ - He is in them - and you will bear fruit. “But apart from Me” – you can still be evangelical; you can be in the Peoples’ Church every week but you will accomplish nothing.
It’s liberating, absolutely liberating. And you will discover something. You will have energy you never knew you would have because you are no longer living with human resources; you are living in the divine energy of the Lord Jesus. That’s why the Psalmist wrote – Psalm 16 Verse 2:
“You are my Lord and apart from you I have no good thing.”
It doesn’t mean you can’t do a good day’s work or paint a picture or love your family – you can. But it’s like the Rolls Royce with the upholstery and the surround sound and the DVD and the bar and the satellite tracking, but no engine. Those things are good but no power to live the way we were intended to live.
And here’s the marvellous thing. I haven’t time to say as much as I would like to about this. He says,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
To the person who faces their poverty, accepts their poverty, do you know what they discover? They don’t actually live in poverty; they become richer than they could ever have otherwise been. They discover all the resources of the kingdom of heaven. Don’t complicate the kingdom of heaven by the way. It’s not somewhere you’re going to; it’s the sphere of God’s rule. You see, a kingdom is firstly about a king and secondly it’s about a sphere of rule. And the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is the sphere of the rule of God in your life. And only when you face your poverty, not to spend your life saying, “Oh dear, I’m nothing good in me”, but realizing that and trading that for Christ as King operating in your life and through your life. All the riches of the kingdom become yours.
And we’re going to see that as we go through these beatitudes over a number of weeks. You don’t grow out of your poverty of spirit. You live in that poverty. But along with poor you say, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me and the life I live I live by faith in the Son of God in dependence on the Son of God”.
You know in our evangelical Christianity it seems to me there is far too much “been there, done that” kind of thinking. I prayed that prayer that day. I had this experience that day. All those things are valid and good but if our Christian life was just looking back on a few landmarks rather than living in a disposition of trust, recognizing my poverty, turning from myself and saying, “Lord thank You that You are my strength, You are my sufficiency, You are at work in me and that is where I place my trust. I have nothing to offer but Jesus.”
I heard Alan Redpath, who I have quoted many times, say years ago, “the only good thing about Alan Redpath is Jesus Christ”. Very challenging statement he made that. I thought, “Wow”. And I have learned the only good thing about Charles Price is Jesus Christ and the moment I start to think there might be something else that’s good about me, that’s the moment He says, “Okay fine, good ahead”, and you fall flat on your face again.
You may have been a Christian for years but you’ve never learned to be honest about your poverty because you think it’s not supposed to be that way. I wish this of myself, but I wish it of us corporately, that we could be really honest about the fact that I am a messed up person inside and I struggle with all the issues of that. I have an old nature that is alive, that fights against the Spirit and is corrupt as any nature in this building.
But you say, “Lord I’m poor in spirit; I recognize my weakness, my inability but thank You so much it’s in that that You exercise Your Kingship and You work.”
And the Christian life is saying, “Today, Lord I can’t but You can. You alone can produce the character of Jesus in me and do His work through me.”
The next day you say, “I can’t but You can. You alone can do this.”
Next day: “I can’t but You can.” It becomes a disposition of life. It’s not a decision; it’s a disposition. It’s everyday. And the sad thing is – we’ll see this later in the beatitudes – you can learn it today and forget it tomorrow. You can have lived it for a month and forget it. You can have lived it for five years and forget it and start to live in the flesh. But it’s a day-by-day spirit of dependency, recognizing my weakness. Don’t get preoccupied with your weakness any more than when you drive your car down the road, don’t get preoccupied with an empty tank. You know that without gas the tank is not going to get you anywhere. Just make sure it’s filled and then you’ll make the journey. Just make sure that Jesus is your life, your strength and that alone is where you place your dependency. And you will discover with all the weaknesses and failures and temptations that you yourself live with and are and have to cope with, that Jesus will surprise you. He will work in you and through you and even display something of His character even though you won’t see it – it’s the other folks who will see it.
That’s the Christian life and this is just the first step, the first ingredient. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is all the riches of the kingdom.
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You so much this morning that You are not like the ringmaster standing with a whip getting us to perform some kind of evangelical tricks and pretend that we are living a good life when we know the battle of our hearts every day. But You invite us to come just as we are, with all our frailty and weakness and poverty, with our fallen nature, which we will live with until the day we die. And thank You that then we will leave it in the grave. But in the midst of all that struggle and weakness and awareness of our own poverty, that as we trust You, You fill us with Yourself. You work in us and through us and You do in us and through us what we could never do ourselves and You go on amazing us, for Your power is made perfect in weakness. Help us to recognize this and live every moment in the good of this. We pray it in Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Part 1: Matt 5:3 Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Pastor Charles Price
I am going to read the first twelve verses, which mark the introduction to a section that we know as the Sermon on the Mount, the most intensive record of anything Jesus stated in His public ministry. I am going to read from Verse 1 of Matthew 5.
“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’”
That’s as far as we’ll read and there are no prizes for guessing those verses are all about being “blessed”. That word reoccurs nine times in those verses. But that probably doesn’t excite you very much because the word blessed is one of these very vague words that we Christians use without often a lot of meaning. You know, you get up in the morning and you begin the day by saying, “Lord please bless today.” And then you eat your breakfast and you say, “Lord, please bless the food.” And then maybe you have a prayer time and you pray for the missionaries, “Lord please bless the missionaries”, which is very nice of you - you just asked God to do it to the food and now you say, “do it to the missionaries”. And then you go to work and you hear something you’ve never heard before and you say, “Well bless my soul”. And then somebody sneezes and you say, “Bless you”. And then you get home in the evening and you find that the cat has eaten the food you left out for dinner and you say, “That blessed cat has eaten the food.”
And we tend to use this word in all kinds of general, vague ways. When you pray, you don’t know what else to pray for somebody so you say, “Bless them”. What you are saying to God usually is, “Lord fill in the blank Yourself; I don’t know what they need”. Because we use this word bless and blessed in such vague ways.
But you would be very happy to know that the word blessed actually has a meaning. The word translated “blessed” here in our Bible is the Greek word “markariŏs” and the word “markariŏs” literally means: “to be happy”. Now most translations steer away from using the word happy simply because in our English use of that word, it’s got lots of superficial connotations. It’s when everything is comfortable and easy and you feel good.
So it’s a nice hot sunny day and you’re laying on the beach with a big ice cream in one hand and a girl in the other and you’re happy. Then a thick black cloud comes across the sky, stops above you, drops cold wet raindrops on you, the girl gets up and walks away and the ice cream falls in the sand, and you’re not happy anymore. And we tend to think of happiness in those kinds of fairly superficial terms.
But the word “markariŏs” – happiness “markariŏs” style, speaks of a deep inner sense of well-being and satisfaction that is there irrespective of what our external circumstances may be like. It’s the kind of thing Paul knew when he wrote from the jail in Rome to the Philippians in Philippians Chapter 4 and Verse 4. He said to them, “Rejoice and again I say (in case you think I wrote the wrong word down by mistake, I’ll say it twice) rejoice.” Not because the prison was comfortable, not because the food was good, not because the sanitation was clean, not because the company was nice, but because “I’ve discovered” he says in that same passage, “a secret – I can be content in any and every situation whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I’ve discovered something, which is not dependent on my circumstances for my sense of well-being.” That’s what “markariŏs” - happiness - is about.
Now if Jesus is talking here about happiness, as He evidently is, He is actually talking about something that most people are looking for. Many years ago when I began with a group of friends to try and reach young people in our town for Christ, we devised a questionnaire – we’d go into coffee bars, which is where our young people used to hang out in those days. And we would ask them this set of questions and the first question was: what is your main ambition in life? The second question was: how do you hope to reach that ambition? And so on, until eventually we asked questions like: who do you think Jesus Christ was? Why do you think He died? And it was a way of getting into conversation with them.
Some time later we sat down with all these filled out questionnaires to work out how the young people in our town were thinking. And it was very interesting. In answer to the question: what is your main ambition in life? The overwhelming majority said: my main ambition in life is to be happy. Now if the main ambition in life of most people is to be happy and Jesus here talks about the ingredients of happiness, then most people need to understand what Jesus was talking about.
But, when you look at the list of things that Jesus lists here as making for happiness, you get some very big surprises. It seems to be the opposite of what most people are looking for when they look for happiness. For instance it begins: “Blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit”. Who ever heard of poverty of any kind making you happy?
On this questionnaire, when we asked, what is your main ambition in life, we then asked: how do you hope to reach that ambition? And most people who wanted to be happy wanted to reach that ambition by becoming rich. That’s why lots of you play the lottery. Because they think that “will solve my problems”. Yet Jesus says, blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit – whatever the “in spirit” means – we’ll see in a moment. Who ever heard of poverty making you happy?
Next one is even stranger: “Blessed are those who mourn”. That sounds very strange. If I were to say to you, “Look, I’m feeling so miserable today. I wish somebody would die and that would cheer me up”, you’d say “What in the world are you talking about?”
It then says, “Blessed are the meek”. I mean meek sounds a bit pathetic doesn’t it? It’s sort of “excuse me for being alive” kind of thing. Who wants to be meek?
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. Whoever heard of hungering and thirsting making you happy? Normally it’s having what you are looking for – not looking for it that makes you happy you think. And you go through this list, you get to the last one and He says it twice, “Blessed are you when you are persecuted”. I mean can you imagine if I came up to you at the end of the service and said, “Look, I’m feeling so down today. Would you smack me in the face and beat me up and that would make me feel better?”
You look at this list of ingredients that Jesus says makes for happiness and it seems to be the almost total opposite of the things that most of us look for when we’re looking for happiness. When you look at it more closely, you realize that He says things like, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” – not the poor in pocket. You say, “What is He talking about?”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” – not hunger and thirst for a hamburger and coke. What in the world is righteousness?
He talks about “Theirs is the kingdom of God”. What in the world is that? He talks about those who will see God. What is He talking about?
And you realize as you examine this list of ingredients for happiness that Jesus is not talking about physical things in the physical area of life, which is the area in which most people are looking for happiness. But He is talking about spiritual issues – whatever that is, whatever that means.
Let me illustrate this to you. When I first started preaching I used to spend a lot of time going into high schools and talking to classes of kids up and down England. I remember once going to a school. I did this several times, but I’ll tell you about one instance – probably ninth or tenth grade equivalent – about 30 kids in the class and I began the class by saying, “How many of you here want to be happy – please put your hand up”. And as far as I could see, everybody in the class put their hand up. I said, “Alright, you and I have something in common. I want to be happy; you want to be happy. How many of you have thought about the things that would make you happy? Put your hand up.” And again, as far as I could see, most people put their hands up. I said, “Alright, I’ve got a piece of chalk here” (I had a chalkboard behind me). “I want you to tell me some of the things that make you happy and I’m going to write them down on the chalkboard and then we’re going to talk about them one by one.” So I said, “Put your hand up one by one and just tell me some of the things that make you happy.”
Now I can’t remember the order in which they came but for instance somebody at one point said, “food” so I wrote down the word “food”. Somebody put their hand up and said, “sport” and I wrote down the word “sport”. Somebody said “music” so I wrote down the word “music”. Somebody said, “girls” (it was a boy who said that), so I wrote down, “girls”. And then somebody said, “boys”, so I wrote down “boys”. Eventually I had about thirty things on the board. I said, “Alright, these are the things that make you happy?”
They said, “Yes”.
I said, “Alright, let’s forget about that for a moment. I’m going to write three words on the bottom of this chalkboard that describe how every single one of you is made.” And I wrote down the words, “body, soul, spirit”. I said, “Let me explain those three things because all of you are made up of body, soul and spirit. First of all, the most obvious part about you is your body. That’s what you see every time you look in the mirror and it usually smiles back at you. You dress it, you feed it, you wash it – some of you, you paint it, you know you tickle it, and you all know you’ve got a body. It’s the most obvious thing about you.
“You also know you’ve got a soul, because you know that the most important thing in your life every day is making sure you never do anything which causes your body and your soul to separate from each other. Because if that happens, what happens then is that your relatives get your body, put it in a box, dig a hole, stand around the hole, sing some songs, usually cry, fill the hole in and then go home and leave you there. So you don’t do anything which causes your body and soul to get separated because you know you’re not just a body – your body needs a soul, a life. That’s you – your mind, your emotion, your will, your personality that lives inside your body.”
“But then the third area is probably the area you are least conscious of – it’s your spirit. It’s the part of you that makes you different to every other living being. You see there are three kinds of life that exist – there’s plant life, animal life and human life.” That’s what I said to the kids. “Plant life is just body. If you had a tree outside your house, you could go outside in the morning and say, ‘Good morning tree; did you have a good night. How many birds sat on you last night?’ You don’t talk to trees because although it’s alive, it’s just body; it doesn’t have a soul, a mind, emotion, will. Most people don’t talk to trees. Some people do but most people don’t.
On the other hand animals have a body and a soul. In fact the Hebrew word for soul in the Bible is the word for animal life. So you can communicate with an animal. They have a mind to think with, emotions to feel with, a will to decide. You can say to a dog, “sit” and the dogs says to itself, ‘that means put my rear end on the floor’, and it does and hopes he’ll get some food now. You can communicate to a cat. You can say, “Scat!” and the cat says, ‘uh-oh that means I need to run away’. You can say to a horse, “giddyap” and it says, ‘Uh-oh, I’m supposed to go faster’. You can communicate with animals because they have a mind, an emotion and a will of some sort. They have a soul.”
But I said, “The thing which makes you different – you’re not just a smart animal – you’ve got a spirit. You’ve got a capacity animals don’t have. And it’s this capacity to reach outside of yourself that causes you to ask questions animals never ask. Where do I come from? Where am I going to? What is the meaning of my life? You look up in the sky on a starry night and you say, ‘I wonder what’s up there’. Now animals don’t do that. You don’t find dogs trying to trace their ancestry to find out where they came from. You don’t find cows in a field looking up into the sky saying, ‘I wonder if there’s milk on Mars.’ You don’t find cats committing suicide because they’re lost the meaning to life. They don’t have any meaning; they’re just cats. But human beings do. Why? It’s part of the spiritual capacity designed to reach outside of yourself in order to know and experience and to enjoy God.”
Now I said to these kids, “Which of these three is the most important – the body, the soul or the spirit?”
One boy put his hand up and he said, “spirit”.
I said, “Are you sure?”
He said, “I think that’s what you want me to say.”
I said, “Alright, anybody else?”
Somebody said, “Soul”.
I said, “Are you sure?”
He said, “I’m guessing.”
I said, “Anybody else?”
Somebody said, “body”.
I said, “Why body?”
She said, “That’s the only one left.”
I said, “What you are saying is you don’t know, do you? But actually you’ve thought about it. You gave me thirty things just now that had to do with happiness. I’ve got a piece of colored chalk here”, I said, “and I’m going to draw a line between each of these thirty things with whether they have to do with the body or the soul or the spirit. First one: food. Does that have to do with the body or the soul or the spirit?
And a very intelligent looking boy said, “body”. So I drew a line down to the body.
“Sport” – body.
“Music“– soul. Somebody else said, “No I like to dance to it.”
“Alright, soul and body.”
“Girls”. I won’t tell you what they said.
But at the end of that list, we had about 25 things that went to the body, about 10 that went to the soul because there was overlap, and none that went to the spirit.
So I said, “So which have said is the most important?”
And they said, “Oh, body.”
I said, “That’s right. What you have said is this: look after the body, thrill the body, excite the body, slim down the body or pump up the body – which ever you need. Now I want to ask you a question: how many of you here”, I said to these kids, “how many of you here are really happy? Put your hand up.”
Nobody put their hand up. I said, “You’ve got a problem. You all want to be happy – you said so – you’ve all thought about the things that would make you happy. We’ve listed them. None of you are happy. Do you know why? I’ll tell you why. You’ve got this whole thing back to front. Jesus said in Matthew 6 (the next chapter to where I read) Verse 33,
“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness”.
That is, you get wrapped up with the things that are to do with God and all these things will be added to you. The “these things” – you read the context – are food, clothing, length of life. They are all physical things.” And I said to those kids, “We have twenty minutes left in this class and I’m going to tell you in the next twenty minutes how to get your spirit sorted out, because then everything else falls into place.”
You see, somebody’s got it all wrong. Either Jesus Christ has it all wrong in this list of ingredients for happiness or the world at large has it all wrong in its aspirations and the things it looks for. And I think I know who’s right.
And over eight Sunday’s I am going to look with you at the eight ingredients – there are nine beatitudes (the last one is repeated twice and therefore it’s eight separate things) that are the ingredients of real happiness. And this is a progression. It’s not eight different kinds of people – one over here is poor in spirit, one back there is mourning, one over here is meek, somebody back here is hungry after righteousness, etc. Rather it’s eight qualities that need to be true in each one person, beginning with the first, building on the second, building on the third, building on the fourth until the eighth. I want you to notice that each of these statements contain both a condition and a promise.
Here’s the first one (the condition): Blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven. If you want to know the kingdom you must understand what it means to be poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn; they will be comforted. If you are going to know the comforting, you need to know what it is to mourn, etc.
And we’re going to stress the condition in particular but also of course look at the promise.
Now let me talk about the first one for the little time I’ve got left, which in Verse 3 says,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
The first step, says Jesus, to real happiness is becoming clear about one fundamental fact and it’s this: I do not have what it takes to be what I am supposed to be. Now it is vitally important we understand that. You see probably some of us here, many of us here, immediately think of this in terms of those who are not Christians. Yes, they need to recognize that in order to come to Christ, which of course is true. But that isn’t what I am talking about. This is equally true for those who are already Christians. This recognition – in fact this is the biggest barrier to the Christian life that we do not recognize this – that in myself and of myself and by myself, I do not have what it takes. I am poor in spirit. We don’t grow out of this poverty; we actually live in this state of poverty, which we’ll see in just a moment is not a bleak thing I’m saying, because that poverty becomes exchanged for something else. But recognizing our own inherent inability is crucial if we are going to live the life that God has called us to live. You see Paul in Romans 7:18, speaking in the present tense of his own life says,
“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh, my natural self.”
That’s a pretty devastating statement to make, isn’t it? I know that nothing good lives in me. Now I’m saying this because it’s there in the New Testament and you’re listening to me and probably not thinking over it. But if at the end of this service you came to me and said, “You said something this morning which I really agree with. You said nothing good lives in you and I agree – I’ve noticed.”
How do you expect me to respond? What does it mean: in me there dwells no good thing? Because surely there are some good things about us, aren’t there? What about the ability to love? Isn’t that a good thing? What about the ability to do a good day’s work? Isn’t that a good thing? What about the ability to exercise some gift that I might have in some area of life? Isn’t that a good thing? What about the ability to paint a picture? Isn’t that a good thing? What does Paul mean, “In me there dwells no good thing”?
Let me illustrate it this way. Just supposing I was to get a brand new car and let’s say for want of argument it was a Rolls Royce and let’s say it was the biggest and best Rolls Royce, which I checked on the internet yesterday is what they call the Phantom. Fantasy for me, but Phantom anyway. Suppose I got a Phantom Rolls Royce and it was, you know, the best color for Rolls Royce. It was a kind of silver with a black strip down either side and red flames at the back. It’s got leather upholstery of course. It’s got state of the art surround sound. It’s got a DVD screen and unit. It’s got a bar in the back seat. It’s got satellite tracking. And I park this impressive Rolls Royce Phantom outside my home.
But just suppose the car had no engine under the hood. You came down the road and you saw this beautiful silver-grey black strip Rolls Royce Phantom, you looked through the window, “Wow look at this leather upholstery, look at this state of the art surround sound, look at this DVD, look at the bar in the back seat there – what’s in it? Oh Coca-Cola. Look at the satellite tracking” and you say, “Wow, that’s very impressive”. But if you see me through the window of my house and say, “Excuse me, Charles, can I come for a ride in your car?”
I look a little embarrassed and say, “I’m sorry, I’m not going anywhere at the moment.” Because if my car does not have an engine, it’ll still have it’s leather upholstery which is fine, it’ll still have its state of the art surround sound, still have its bar in the back seat, its DVD unit, its satellite tracking, still be the right color, but as far as being a car is concerned, it is totally incapable of behaving like a car. I mean the best thing I could do is keep some chickens in it. But you couldn’t go anywhere. And when Paul says, “In me there dwells no good thing”, he’s not saying, “I’m just one big puss-filled wart” – not that warts – sorry about the fault in that analogy – warts don’t have puss but anyway. But he’s not speaking in that kind of negativism about himself going around. No, because once when he wrote to the Philippians he said, “if I was to boast” and then he says, “but I won’t, but if I was to boast, this is what I would tell you”. And then he gives a list of things that he could boast if he was going to boast. It’s a very humble way of letting people know some things about yourself. And he lists some things, which the readers then would have been very impressed with. And he says, “but you know all this I count as” – the literal word – “garbage” for the sake of knowing Christ.
Because you see there is an engine that makes the car behave like a car. Let me read you what C.S. Lewis, who of course is the author of the Narnia series, in a book of his called “Mere Christianity”, he wrote this: “God made us, or invented us, as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He, Himself, is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn. He is the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why is it just no good asking God to make us happy without Himself. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing”, says C.S. Lewis, simply because we were created that way.
We were created as a car is created to run on gasoline – he uses slightly different illustrations than mine –mine is the engine, his is the gasoline – it’s okay, same principle. You can have an engine with no gasoline and you won’t go anywhere either. And recognizing our poverty of spirit, recognizing our own inherent bankruptcy, recognizing that the fuel for life, the fuel to equip us to be what human beings were equipped to be, is God Himself living in us and operating in us.
And to discover that, you’ve got to discover something else – your own poverty of spirit. You don’t learn this listening to a sermon by the way; you learn this when your back is up against the wall and you are flat on your face to change the metaphor and you run out of steam and you say, “Where in the world am I going to go from here?” And that’s when you discover God is God. That’s why God in His mercy allows us to go into those situations where we discover out of despair that we’re insufficient in ourselves.
I want you to grasp this very carefully because they are many, many Christians who have been Christians for 10, 20, 30, 50 years who have never understood this and they are simply trying to live the Christian life for Jesus and it’s as exciting as pushing a bus up a hill and you know it in your heart of hearts, because you were never created to live this way, alone. And we’ll never be equipped to live the Christian life until we recognize it’s utterly impossible to us; it is only possible by the indwelling life of God.
Let me read you what Martin Lloyd Jones, who was one of the great preachers of the last century – he wrote a book on the Sermon on the Mount – and this is what he says at one point: “The Sermon on the Mount condemns every idea that the Christian life is something you and I can do ourselves. This first beatitude (which is what we’re looking at), Blessed are the poor in the spirit, says to us in other words: there is a mountain that you have to scale, there are heights you have to climb and the first thing you realize as you look at that mountain which you are told you must ascend, is that you cannot do it and that you are utterly incapable in and of yourself and that any attempt to do so in your own strength is proof positive that you have never understood the Christian life.”
But the sad thing is there are folks who have been Christians for years and not understood the Christian life. And their Christian life is basically trying to be like Jesus as best you can, it’s trying to live by Biblical principles, trying to live by Christian principles and God could take a vacation and it would make no difference to the way you would do that. Instead of realizing that the Christian life is Christ’s life lived in us by Himself, as we give Him the elbowroom in our lives, to live and work.
And most of us have to discover this the hard way as I discovered this the hard way. You see, when I first became a Christian I concluded the Christian life would be fairly easy. The reason is I had grown up in a Christian environment, now I had given my life to Christ, I had my sins forgiven, was going to heaven when I died. In the meantime my job was to read my Bible, say my prayers and just obey the things that I knew. In fact somebody came to me after the first service this morning and said, “That’s been my Christian life for 20 years.” She said, “I’m going to heaven when I die, my sins are forgiven, I’ve been trying for 20 years to just keep up a Christian kind of appearance and I wondered”, she said, “why it has been so utterly empty.”
Be honest. Many of you feel that way, because you will feel this way until you discover this fact. I thought it would be quite easy until I began to read my Bible and I discovered that it says things like, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength” – which means everything your heart is spent on, everything your strength is spent on, everything your soul is preoccupied with, will be saying to everybody around you, “I love God”.
A lot of things I did said, “I actually not that interested; I couldn’t care less, I’m living for myself.”
And then it says, not only love the Lord your God with your heart and soul and so on, it says, “And you shall love your neighbor” – you know how much? As much as you love yourself. And I had two problems – one, you should have seen my neighbors. Two, you should see how much I love myself… and to love my neighbor as much as I love myself? And I came to the conclusion that the Christian life is certainly not easy. In fact, it’s difficult, very difficult. And then I read things like the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said, “Have you heard it said you must not commit adultery?”
And they all said, “Yeah, we’ve heard that one, yeah we know that one, yeah good one.
“I say unto you”, said Jesus, “if you look at a woman and you lust after her, even though you don’t know her name and you don’t know her address, you wouldn’t dare go knock on her door, you are already guilty of adultery.”
“I beg your pardon? Even if I had never talked to her?”
“Have you heard it said you must not murder?”
“Yeah, we know that one. That’s a good one; we keep that one.”
“I say to you, if you are angry with your brother even though you would never dare put a knife in his back or a bullet between his eyes, you’re already guilty of murder.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding.”
Because at the end of that message He said this – end of Matthew 5, it’s the same chapter – Matthew 5, He said,
“Be perfect therefore even as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
In other words, He said, “Ladies and gentlemen will you please be perfect. If you are not sure how perfect, I mean would you please be as perfect as God.”
Now how do you think the people responded at the end of this message? How would you have responded? Would you have said, “Well that was a great word this morning. Oh I loved that. I think I’ll get the CD.” No, you would respond the way they responded. How did they respond? It says in Matthew Chapter 7 at the end of the Sermon on the Mount,
“They were amazed at his teaching.”
Why were they amazed - because He was so good? No, because He was – listen to this – so ridiculous, from every human perspective. And there is only one conclusion you can come to after listening to Jesus: I cannot live this Christian life. And that is the most wonderful thing to discover but some of us have never discovered it because we’re trying our best all the time.
Do you know disciples are never called followers of Jesus after Pentecost? Don’t be a follower of Jesus – I think I have said this to you before. At Pentecost they are in Christ; He is in them. They are no longer followers. As long as they were followers they were failures. Following Jesus is guaranteed to bring you to failure because you can’t keep it up. You can’t follow Him. What happened at Pentecost? He came to live in them. So when they began to behave in ways they had never behaved before Pentecost, the people said of Peter and John,
“They were amazed at their courage and they took note that they had been with Jesus.”
They almost got it right. They said, you know, “At last something of Jesus obviously rubbed off on them; you can see they have been with Jesus.” That isn’t what happened. That’s what they thought. What happened was what they saw was actually Jesus now operating in them.
But Peter had to find his bankruptcy, his barrenness, come to the point of bankruptcy, come to the point of realizing his poverty of spirit – “I can’t live this life” – and that’s when Jesus said to him, “Peter (after he had denied Jesus), “just wait in Jerusalem – just hang on – the story will come together on the Day of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the same Jesus who lived amongst you will live in you and He’ll be your strength and your life.”
And I came to the conclusion that the Christian life wasn’t easy. That was the first stage; it wasn’t difficult. It was the second stage I came to the conclusion the Christian life was impossible. And that’s the way I live every day. Because you don’t grow out of that - you live in that. You live with the impossibility of the Christian life and say, “Lord I cannot live the way You have called me to live today. I cannot accomplish anything You want to accomplish but thank You so much all You expect of me is failure because You said, “Without Me you can do how much? Nothing.” We don’t believe that of course. We think He’s expecting something. We think Jesus is expecting us – go on, He’s expecting you – go on trying.
Do you know what He expects of you? Nothing. He said so. “Without Me – but you abide in Me, I abide in you”. That’s what happened at Pentecost. At Pentecost the disciples received the Holy Spirit and Christ received a new body. We are in Christ - He is in them - and you will bear fruit. “But apart from Me” – you can still be evangelical; you can be in the Peoples’ Church every week but you will accomplish nothing.
It’s liberating, absolutely liberating. And you will discover something. You will have energy you never knew you would have because you are no longer living with human resources; you are living in the divine energy of the Lord Jesus. That’s why the Psalmist wrote – Psalm 16 Verse 2:
“You are my Lord and apart from you I have no good thing.”
It doesn’t mean you can’t do a good day’s work or paint a picture or love your family – you can. But it’s like the Rolls Royce with the upholstery and the surround sound and the DVD and the bar and the satellite tracking, but no engine. Those things are good but no power to live the way we were intended to live.
And here’s the marvellous thing. I haven’t time to say as much as I would like to about this. He says,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
To the person who faces their poverty, accepts their poverty, do you know what they discover? They don’t actually live in poverty; they become richer than they could ever have otherwise been. They discover all the resources of the kingdom of heaven. Don’t complicate the kingdom of heaven by the way. It’s not somewhere you’re going to; it’s the sphere of God’s rule. You see, a kingdom is firstly about a king and secondly it’s about a sphere of rule. And the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is the sphere of the rule of God in your life. And only when you face your poverty, not to spend your life saying, “Oh dear, I’m nothing good in me”, but realizing that and trading that for Christ as King operating in your life and through your life. All the riches of the kingdom become yours.
And we’re going to see that as we go through these beatitudes over a number of weeks. You don’t grow out of your poverty of spirit. You live in that poverty. But along with poor you say, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me and the life I live I live by faith in the Son of God in dependence on the Son of God”.
You know in our evangelical Christianity it seems to me there is far too much “been there, done that” kind of thinking. I prayed that prayer that day. I had this experience that day. All those things are valid and good but if our Christian life was just looking back on a few landmarks rather than living in a disposition of trust, recognizing my poverty, turning from myself and saying, “Lord thank You that You are my strength, You are my sufficiency, You are at work in me and that is where I place my trust. I have nothing to offer but Jesus.”
I heard Alan Redpath, who I have quoted many times, say years ago, “the only good thing about Alan Redpath is Jesus Christ”. Very challenging statement he made that. I thought, “Wow”. And I have learned the only good thing about Charles Price is Jesus Christ and the moment I start to think there might be something else that’s good about me, that’s the moment He says, “Okay fine, good ahead”, and you fall flat on your face again.
You may have been a Christian for years but you’ve never learned to be honest about your poverty because you think it’s not supposed to be that way. I wish this of myself, but I wish it of us corporately, that we could be really honest about the fact that I am a messed up person inside and I struggle with all the issues of that. I have an old nature that is alive, that fights against the Spirit and is corrupt as any nature in this building.
But you say, “Lord I’m poor in spirit; I recognize my weakness, my inability but thank You so much it’s in that that You exercise Your Kingship and You work.”
And the Christian life is saying, “Today, Lord I can’t but You can. You alone can produce the character of Jesus in me and do His work through me.”
The next day you say, “I can’t but You can. You alone can do this.”
Next day: “I can’t but You can.” It becomes a disposition of life. It’s not a decision; it’s a disposition. It’s everyday. And the sad thing is – we’ll see this later in the beatitudes – you can learn it today and forget it tomorrow. You can have lived it for a month and forget it. You can have lived it for five years and forget it and start to live in the flesh. But it’s a day-by-day spirit of dependency, recognizing my weakness. Don’t get preoccupied with your weakness any more than when you drive your car down the road, don’t get preoccupied with an empty tank. You know that without gas the tank is not going to get you anywhere. Just make sure it’s filled and then you’ll make the journey. Just make sure that Jesus is your life, your strength and that alone is where you place your dependency. And you will discover with all the weaknesses and failures and temptations that you yourself live with and are and have to cope with, that Jesus will surprise you. He will work in you and through you and even display something of His character even though you won’t see it – it’s the other folks who will see it.
That’s the Christian life and this is just the first step, the first ingredient. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is all the riches of the kingdom.
Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You so much this morning that You are not like the ringmaster standing with a whip getting us to perform some kind of evangelical tricks and pretend that we are living a good life when we know the battle of our hearts every day. But You invite us to come just as we are, with all our frailty and weakness and poverty, with our fallen nature, which we will live with until the day we die. And thank You that then we will leave it in the grave. But in the midst of all that struggle and weakness and awareness of our own poverty, that as we trust You, You fill us with Yourself. You work in us and through us and You do in us and through us what we could never do ourselves and You go on amazing us, for Your power is made perfect in weakness. Help us to recognize this and live every moment in the good of this. We pray it in Jesus’ Name, Amen.