Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

Matthew 5:3 says, “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
 
        Blessed are the underprivileged, the downcast, and the have-nots. Blessed are the marginalized—those who know they are spiritually bankrupt. There is no particular virtue in poverty; but there is virtue in knowing your poverty.
Of course, the world has a different standard. The world’s standard is blessed are the beautiful, the powerful, and the privileged; those who are easily noticed, unique, and not hard to look at. No one wants to recognize their poverty because poverty equals weakness and no one in their right mind wants to be seen as weak.
        In church we often allow give voice to the worlds’ standard. You may have heard the phrase, sometimes given as an invitation at the end of a service, for people to ‘make a decision for Christ’. But is that really what God wants? He asks us to follow him and to yield to him, but those things don’t rely on our strength, but on our weakness. To yield means to recognize our own poverty. That means we cannot enter into His Kingdom because of our goodness, or our standing, or our resources; we can only enter the Kingdom as have-nots.
        In other words, we must recognize that we are a needy and broken people. We don’t need a guru to give us words to live by. We need a savior to save us from our sin and depravity. We are powerless to save ourselves. It is in our poverty that God meets us; when there is less of us, there is more of Him. Our poverty makes room for God in our lives, and in our poverty we are truly blessed.
-Pastor Dino Griffin