What I have just painted for you is a picture of poverty.  The reason I used this particular example is because people who call themselves ‘poor’ in this culture are usually not poor by world standards.  The poor in our world today cannot choose what they eat.  Most of them are hungry every day.  We had a woman working for us one day a week while we lived in the Philippines  to help us clean things which were beyond our ability to do well.  She lived in a shanty town.  If her kids were sick so she could not work a particular day, her family did not eat.  She would work the day, we paid her for her work, she stopped at the market on the way home and carefully bought food for the next 24 hours, and went home to make a meal for her family.  When a storm blew the roof off of her shack, she came to work that week in tears.  We had helped her in many small ways already, but I borrowed a jeepney from the church and bought corrugated roofing and some wood, and 3 of us put a new roof on her shack by the polluted river.  Poverty is a reality in the world in which we live.  I want to talk a little about poverty today, but to look at how Jesus used and understood the idea in the Sermon on the Mount.

We are beginning a new sermon series this morning on the Sermon on the Mount which will take us to Easter.  Our theme this morning is The first step in knowing and walking closely with Jesus Christ is embracing our poverty!

I. Setting the stage for the Sermon on the Mount.

I would like to begin by setting the stage for this great sermon by Jesus.  Matthew’s gospel begins with a long list of Jesus’ ancestors.  Most of you skip this part of the reading, but this is important to a Hebrew mind, because the Messiah would come from the line of David.  They would argue that you only know who you are by understanding where you have come from.  After establishing his lineage, the author speaks about Jesus’ miraculous birth and the visit some months later by the Magi.  All of these things point to Jesus as Messiah.  Jesus’ baptism is to fulfill the Old Testament Scriptures, and then Jesus is immediately tempted by the devil and resists everything which can be thrown at Him by quoting the Scriptures.  The next section speaks about Jesus’ ministry of healing the sick in the gentile regions– Galilee and Syria.  Every one of these early passages in Matthew tell the reader about their Messiah who has come!  After a very short period of time, Jesus has gained great popularity.

This stories bring us to our text this morning.  Think about this– the people have long believed that a savior would come to them, a Messiah, and He would deliver them out of all their oppression.  But there has not been a prophet in the land for 400 years!!  They are ready for God to do something!!  When John the Baptist begins preaching and baptizing in the Jordan, huge crowds come to him.  He clearly stated that he was not the Messiah, but was sent to prepare the way for the coming Messiah.  Then, this enigmatic figure appears and begins to do phenomenal miracles.  He preaches and teaches them, heals all the sick and delivers people from demons.  News of this new prophet quickly spreads through the whole region. Could God finally be hearing their prayers?  Has He sent this man or is this a false prophet who will lead them astray?  Many questions would have circulated, and much debate would have happened around the watering hole.  It kind of reminds me of the debates surrounding our elections– Huckabee said this... Yeah, but I like McCain’s position on this...
Well, it is into this needy milieu that Jesus appears, proclaiming to the people that the Kingdom of heaven is among them!!  As a teacher in his day would have done, Jesus sits down in the grassy area on the side of a hill near the sea of Galilee and begins to teach them.  This area forms a natural amphitheater with excellent acoustics.  Jesus begins to teach, what we call the sermon on the Mount.

Jesus’ declaration in each of these opening statements, what we call the Beatitudes, is that someone is blessed.  We speak blessing over people when they sneeze, or in response to a nice gesture by another, but what does the Bible mean when it speaks of blessing?  Blessing is declaring God’s favor and goodness over another person.  It isn’t simply a wish, but has the power to bring this declaration to pass.  There is power in this declaration of blessing when exercised in faith because blessing others affects their thinking and affects the heavenly realm.  There is an earthly physical realm in which we live and breath, and there is a just as real spiritual realm which we cannot see, but has great influence on the physical realm.  This is the Bible’s view of reality.  So, when you bless another, as we have been asked to do in prayer evangelism– speak or pray a blessing over your neighbors, bless those you work near or meet in a restaurant– this has the power of bringing it to pass when combined with our faith.  The opposite of blessing is cursing.  By this I do not mean saying a swear word, but pronouncing a curse over another person, place or thing.  When exercised with our will, curses have very real power!  I pray in faith to break curses off of myself and my family fairly often.  Here, Jesus is speaking God’s favor over people who respond to God’s Word of truth in certain ways.  With all of this as background, let’s look together at the first of these 8 declarations of blessing.

II. What does it mean to be poor in spirit?

Jesus says we are blessed if we are poor in spirit– what does that mean?  I painted you a picture of poverty in the introduction.  Being poor means you have nothing to give away.  You are bankrupt, unable to pay for anything.  This is a crucial concept.  Because poor in spirit has to do with having poverty in our spirit.  In other words, we have nothing in and of ourselves which we can offer to someone else.  We have nothing to offer God to pay for our sin.  We have nothing to give to anyone else because of our own poverty.  What goodness do I add to my own salvation?  Until you reach a place of having nothing to give away to God or others, you will constantly try to pay for things yourself.  We like to think we had something to do with our own salvation.  We believe we contributed some.  Oh, I needed some help from Jesus, maybe even a lot of help, but I gave something.  This kind of thinking will hinder you from fully receiving and embracing the fullness of the incredible grace which God has poured out for you.  Poverty means you literally have nothing to offer God.  You’re absolutely dependent upon Him for your salvation, and for anything He wants to do through you.  It wasn’t your great works, or our great programs, and it wasn’t your incredible talent or my powerful preaching which changed the lives of people!  Certainly the Lord delights in pouring His Spirit through us.  It is His design to fill broken vessels like us with His Spirit and build His Kingdom through us.  But the work of God can easily be done without me– the building of Christ’s church is not dependent upon me or you.  I bring my poverty to Jesus, and He makes something incredible happen through it!  This is grace!!  It is all by grace!

Now, I do not want you to operate out of your arrogance, believing you are a crucial component if anything will be done for God’s Kingdom, because there is only one indispensable person– Jesus Christ.  At the same time, I do not want you to be thinking, as I used to think, “I am a good for nothing worm whom God cannot use because of the waywardness of my heart...”  If you know Jesus Christ this morning, if you are born again, then you are a child of His.  You belong to His family.  You still desperately need Him to work in you and through you, but His plan is to fill you with His Spirit, and then pour His Spirit through you to bless others.  That’s right, you are a funnel of God’s grace to others– this is His will for you.  So do not wallow in your sin or flesh on any level.  When you sin, confess it as sin and move on by faith.  The Spirit will lead you as you ask Him to do so...  I have something to give to you this morning only because God has called me to this place and given me this Word, and filled me by His Spirit to give it to you.  This si the way He works!  He deisres to work like this through you too!

III. What does it mean to be given the Kingdom of Heaven?

In the Bible, the Kingdom of Heaven is the same thing as the Kingdom of God in other gospels.  Most Evangelical scholars agree that Matthew is using a term which would have been easier for Hebrew listeners to embrace.  To a Hebrew mind, God’s Name was so holy you could not even say it.  So, they find ways to say the same thing but use alternative terms.  What is the Kingdom of heaven, or the Kingdom of God?  Those of you who are taking the Wednesday evening class on World Views ought to be able to answer this well, but as a reminder, the Kingdom of Heaven is anywhere Jesus is visibly ruling as the King, as the Lord.
When a person prays and asks Jesus Christ to forgive his or her sin and to come into His heart and life and make you His, and so by faith believes and receives Jesus, that person has entered the Kingdom!  When a person becomes a Christian, and is born again, does this automatically mean that everything in this new Christian’s life is in perfect biblical order?  Absolutely not!  As we grow in our faith, we submit more and more areas in our lives to Jesus, asking that He would reign and rule as King!  As these areas come under the Lordship of Jesus, literally, His Kingdom is growing.

John came to faith in Christ and was so excited to discover that he was absolutely forgiven, that he couldn’t get over the amazing grace of God.  As we discipled John in his new faith and began looking at the Scriptures together, John heard how we responded to the Word.  He began to think about his own small business.  The next week, John asked me, “How can God use this business for His glory?”  Instead of answering him, I responded, “I don’t know exactly John.  I know that is what He desires to do though, as you give Him ownership of it–sign the title over to Him by faith and follow Jesus as your CEO.”  That was a revolutionary thought for John, and he began to ask the Lord what needed to change in the business, and slowly began making changes so justice would be established, so that people would be blessed as they interacted with him and so that Jesus would be honored in the office.  Ths Kingdom was coming and had come in John’s life and in John’s business!!  This is how the Kingdom of heaven grows.
So, what does Jesus mean when He declares that if you own the poverty in your spirit, as we talked about earlier, you have the Kingdom?  You are in Jesus’ Kingdom, and it belongs to you.  You are a VIP in Jesus’ Kingdom– isn’t that an exciting thought!!?  Jesus invites you to partake of the blessings of knowing Him now!  It is true that we will come more fully into the Kingdom of God one day when we are with Jesus, what we often call heaven.  But the reality of this Kingdom is now!  As we live by faith, asking for His will to be done in us and through us, Jesus extends His Kingdom through us. 

IV. Living this declaration day by day.

What does this look like?  Each day when I get up, I thank my Lord for the new day.  It is His day, because I am now a part of His Kingdom and as my King, my life is lived in service of Him!  Let me digress for a moment, because there are some people who react to the idea of letting anyone else be your master– they want to be their own master.  I would suggest to you that every person is a slave to someone or something.  I have chosen my master, Jesus, and want everything I do and everything I am to be under His Lordship.  For the person who thinks he is free of any master, the truth is that he is a slave to selfish desires, to Satan, and to addictions of all kinds.  There is no person who does not have a master.  The only question is, “Who is your master?”

So, after giving each day to Jesus my King, I acknowledge, usually on my knees before Him, that I am a man who struggles with my sinful flesh.  I repent of any sin which the Lord brings to my mind, and I ask my Lord for grace not to sin in any manner today.  I acknowledge that nothing good dwells in me except what He has placed there.  I acknowledge my absolute dependence upon His Spirit.  I embrace the poverty of my own spirit, but also the fullness which is in Him!  In fact I give Jesus all my poverty– here it is Lord, and ask Him to make something out of the 5 loaves and 2 fishes I have to offer.  Can you imagine the boy with the loaves and fishes which were given to him by his parents, by God’s provisions ever thinking he could feed 5000 people?  He simply gave what He had to Jesus and Jesus multiplied what the boy gave.  I invite the Holy Spirit to fill my heart, to overflow out of me and I wait on Him in faith, listening as best I can to hear what the Lord would have me pray and what, if anything, I can discern is on His heart.  I begin to pray this direction.  Prayer is one of our responses to our poverty in spirit.  I desperately need for God to work His will through me today!  If you do not embrace your own poverty, you will never see the need to pray as God intends for you to pray, to bring about His purposes in and through you.  It isn’t a perfect science, but it is a relationship where I am learning to hear and respond to my Lord.  I spend some moments blessing the Lord for being a part of His Kingdom, for the certainty that He will walk with me that day, for the understanding that He will use me that day.  I pray through appointments I know about, and people who I intercede for each day.  And I pray for those the Lord places on my heart. 
Then, the challenge comes to walk with Jesus, joining Him in building His Kingdom the rest of the day.  You see, if the Kingdom of God is mine, then I want to be a part of building it in every way possible.  I am learning to trust in Him throughout the day, and see things He is doing around me.