You know, brothers and sisters, for those of us who find that we are required periodically to share from the Scriptures, it is not always easy to discern whether what the Lord has put in your heart is just for you, or something He wants you to share with His dear children.
I have to say to you this morning, I am not totally clear whether what I have in my heart is just for me, or if it is something He wants all of us to consider together. But I guess we will just have to go with our best impression that it is something the Lord wants us to consider together.
So I trust that we will open our hearts and let our wonderful Lord be our Teacher. He is the only Teacher we have. He loves us, and the wonderful thing is that He knows everything about us. And you know what else? He is not even discouraged after knowing all of that.
So He has something He wants to speak to our hearts by way of encouragement. Let us keep our hearts open for Him to speak what He might want to share with us today.
Let us turn to the Gospel according to Matthew. I know that all of the groups that have been meeting on Friday nights have been considering the Gospel of Matthew. For those of you who have been involved, what would you say the overall theme of Matthew’s Gospel is?
The King and the kingdom.
In other words, when Matthew wrote his Gospel, it was in his heart, by the Holy Spirit, to place before us our Lord Jesus as God’s King, Who has brought in the reality of the kingdom. This morning, we want to look at some verses in Matthew 4 and Matthew 5 and consider this matter of the kingdom.
Matthew 4:17
From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 4:23
And Jesus went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues,
and preaching the gospel of the kingdom,
and healing all manner of disease and all manner of sickness among the people.
Matthew 5:1-3
And seeing the multitudes, He went up into the mountain:
and when He had sat down, His disciples came unto Him:
and He opened His mouth and taught them, saying,
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Lord, we do want to bless You that today, once again, You have provided an opportunity for Your redeemed ones to come and sit at table with You.
Lord, we bless You for the help that Your Holy Spirit gave us, and how, in our own little way, we sought to express our love and appreciation to You for the great work that You have accomplished through Your death.
Lord, we thank You that, if God has given us His own Son, how would He withhold anything from us? All the blessings that we need have been richly imparted to us through our Lord Jesus.
This morning, we are grateful that we have in our hands and before us a copy of Your written Word. Lord, this is such a treasure. Such a price has been paid, and we want to thank You that we have it.
Having read these verses, we want to open our hearts to You and ask that the Holy Spirit would come and take the written Word and the spoken word and make it a living word to each of our hearts.
Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Help us today to hear what You want to say to us from Your Word. We ask it in Your name. Amen.
It is interesting that our Lord Jesus, in a sense, follows in the footsteps of John the Baptist. John was very clear as to his mission. He was sent as one to go before and prepare the way for the Messiah to come.
The central theme of his preaching was, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” When our Lord Jesus began His public ministry, He began with the same message. The message had to do with the government of God.
Now, my brothers and sisters, it seems to me that often, when we as the Lord’s people consider God’s great salvation, there is a part of it that gets ignored. As part of God’s great salvation, we have been taken out of one kingdom and transferred into another kingdom.
You find this in Colossians 1:13: we have been taken out of the domain of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of the Son of His love.
Maybe you have not thought that you needed such an experience, but it is part of God’s great salvation. When we are born naturally into the human race, we are born living in a kingdom.
In an overall sense, the god of this world is the king in this kingdom. He is God’s enemy. He has set up his own kingdom here on this planet, and he runs things, under God’s permission, the way he wants things to be run. It is called the world. It is hostile toward God because its king is a bitter enemy of God Himself.
There is also another dimension of kingdom that we experience when we are born into the human race: we become our own king.
I had some books in my library by a brother called Earl Jabay. He was a chaplain in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, and I had the joy of meeting him some years ago.
One of his books was entitled The God Players. You know who he was talking about: us. The second was entitled The Kingdom of Self. The first chapter in that book is entitled, “His Majesty the Baby”—how the baby, at a very early age, establishes himself as king over his own little kingdom.
So when we hear our Lord Jesus beginning His ministry with a call for repentance, it is not only because we need to have our sins forgiven—though that certainly is the case. The Lord Jesus, along with John the Baptist, called people to repent because they were living in the wrong kingdom.
Somebody other than God Himself, other than the Lord Jesus Christ, is king in our lives. We need a transfer from one kingdom to another kingdom.
For the last year, and especially for the last month or so, we have had a lot thrown at us about government—about who was going to be our king. We do not call him a king; we call him a president. But he nonetheless represents the authority involved in American democracy.
One concern I have had in my heart, as I have heard many of God’s people make various comments about it, is this: would it not be wonderful if we became just as informed about the way God governs things as we are concerned about how things are governed in an American democracy?
My brothers and sisters, I hope this comes across rightly, but we need to be very clear: the kingdom of God and American democracy are not synonymous. They are not the same thing.
God’s kingdom is an eternal kingdom. It never had a beginning because it originated in God Himself. All authority rests in Him; therefore, His kingdom is eternal.
It is a spiritual kingdom. That means it is possible for human beings to know the reality of this kingdom, even though we are not living in the place where the King Himself is in residence.
A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to visit a city in Brazil called Petrópolis, about an hour north of Rio de Janeiro. It was called Petrópolis because Dom Pedro II, the second emperor of Brazil, had a residence there.
His headquarters were actually in Rio de Janeiro, but he also had a throne in Petrópolis. That meant that when he was not in Rio but was in Petrópolis, he was still the king. Wherever he went, he took with him the authority of the king.
What we need to understand is that God’s kingdom is a spiritual kingdom. Wherever God finds a condition in which His authority—His being God—is recognised, appreciated, and responded to, the kingdom of God can be a reality right then and there.
When the Lord Jesus says, along with John the Baptist, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” it means that God has moved. God has done something to make it possible for His rulership, His government, and His will to be experienced here on earth in a way that had never been available previously.
How is that possible? It is possible because the King has come.
When you go back to Matthew 2, how is our Lord Jesus identified at His birth? As King of the Jews.
He was especially to be King of the Jews because the Jews were God’s covenant people. He was to be their God; they were to be His people; and His kingdom was to be a reality in their midst.
We know that is not the way it always worked out. But when the Lord Jesus came, He came as King of the Jews so that they would have an opportunity to allow God to bring in the reality of His kingdom among the Jewish people.
He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. They did not embrace Him as their King. Therefore, they rejected the kingdom. They rejected God’s rulership in their lives.
But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God.
Brothers and sisters, in the coming of our Lord Jesus, it is true that we need a Saviour. We need Someone to do something about our hopeless situation regarding sin and our nature that keeps on sinning. We need Someone to intervene on our behalf, and praise God, that has happened in the person of the Lord Jesus.
But we not only need to be forgiven and to have something done about our condition of continuing in sin; we need to come under somebody else’s government.
We have already proven, by looking at our own lives and the lives of others, that we are not capable of running our own lives. We inevitably make a big mess and make life miserable for ourselves and for many other people because we are living under the wrong kingdom.
Our Lord Jesus’ appeal is to repent. Repentance means that you are going one direction, and it is the wrong direction. You put on the brakes, you do a complete turn, and you go the other direction. It is that simple. It is not complicated.
The Lord says, “You are living in the wrong kingdom. You have the wrong king. You need to stop living under that king and come and live under My kingship.”
This is the place to begin. There is something that God has already done for us, but we need to enter into it by faith, experientially, and know something of the reality of God being King in our lives.
Our Lord Jesus went into different areas proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. This matter of the gospel is another matter to which we need to give thought.
To me, the gospel in its biggest dimension is the gospel of the kingdom. The problem in the whole universe is that there are situations and people living outside of God’s government. They are not living according to God’s will.
God’s great issue is that the whole created order will be brought into line with what He originally designed.
Sometimes our view is too narrow. We become satisfied merely to know the forgiveness of our sins. That is wonderful—indescribable. To know the peace that passes all understanding, to stand before a holy and righteous God with no fear and no hesitation because there is no more record of our sin—this is wonderful indeed.
But that is not the end. It is part of it, but it is not the end. The bigger picture is that we should live according to the will of God.
We were not created for ourselves. We were not created to live for ourselves. We were created for God, for God to have glory.
The glory that God desires is that He should be free to impart Himself in the fullness of His nature to every one of His creatures, and that the whole universe should manifest the beauty we discover in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.
As far as we can tell, this earth is the only place in the universe where rebellion has broken out. This little planet is where the will of God is not being done.
God’s heart is to re-establish His government—His kingdom—here on this planet, so that the whole universe will be free to manifest the glory of God.
The marvel of all marvels, as far as I am concerned, is that God has caught you and me up in this matter.
What did He tell Adam was to be his responsibility? “You are to rule.”
Adam was brought into a world that had been recovered to a certain degree, and God wanted Adam to be an agent of bringing God’s kingdom into fuller reality on this planet.
But we know what happened. Satan transformed himself into a serpent. He came and deceived the woman. She ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and she gave to her husband. Knowing what he was doing, out of disobedience, Adam ate.
Through this experience, the same poison that was in Lucifer found its way into human nature. Did you notice that no one had to teach you how to sin? It just came naturally. You did not have to go to school or read any books. It came naturally because you have that nature.
From Adam and Eve, every one of us, without exception, has inherited a nature that is rebellious and hostile towards God. It does not want God’s will and cannot do God’s will.
God’s government cannot be manifested in the flesh because the flesh is hostile towards God and cannot do His will.
When our Lord Jesus proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom, He also manifested the reality of the kingdom by healing people with different kinds of problems.
What He was doing was showing that sickness, disease, and oppression were not the way God originally designed things. God did not create human beings to experience such things. They came in because of rebellion.
So our Lord Jesus went in and manifested what the kingdom of God is by healing people.
Many people came from many different areas and began following Him. Then He did one of the most unusual things that I can remember reading about our Lord Jesus doing: He left the multitude.
Knowing us, we would not leave the multitude. We would want a bigger multitude. But our Lord Jesus left the multitudes, found a mountain in Galilee—a little rise of land—and went up the side of it. He sat down, and His disciples came to Him.
At this point, as I understand Matthew’s Gospel, He had four disciples. These four men came and sat down, and He began to speak to them about the kingdom of God.
Let us try to get some kind of working definition of the kingdom of God. There are certain things in the Bible that we should never try to define, because the more you try, the worse you end up. Have you ever tried to define the word glory? If you get a good definition, I wish you would come and share it with me.
The kingdom of God is difficult to define adequately. But for our purposes this morning, let me give a simple definition: the kingdom of God is the righteous rule of a sovereign God.
The sovereignty of God means that all authority originates in Him. Everything began in Him; everything belongs to Him. He has the right to rule everything the way He wants to rule. He needs to have the freedom to be Himself.
And Who is He? He is God.
What is the biggest word in your vocabulary? I did not say the longest; I said the biggest. I hope it is God, because it does not get any bigger than that, brothers and sisters.
God, Who has revealed Himself to us in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, has the right, because He is God and has created all things, to reign sovereignly over everything, including us.
The kingdom of God is not a place that you merely go to after you die. The moment you believe in the Lord Jesus as King and as Lord, you come under His lordship. That is when the kingdom of God becomes yours experientially.
The kingdom of God is God’s way of ruling. It is not a democracy, and it is not an oligarchy. It is not the rule of a few, and it is not the rule of everybody. It is the government of a sovereign King.
Everything God wants and the way He rules have to do with the kind of Being He is. He is a righteous Being, and therefore His rulership is righteous.
I am grateful to live under American democracy, but, brothers and sisters, it is not the kingdom of God. We need to keep that clear. Do not mix the two things up.
The kingdom of God is eternal. American democracy had its birth some two hundred years ago. God may manifest Himself in any circumstance, but democracy is not His way of ruling. His way is to be King.
He has established His King. His name is Jesus, born King of the Jews and ultimately King of kings and Lord of lords.
Our Lord Jesus sat on that mountainside with four men before Him, as I understand it, and spoke what are, in my estimation, the greatest words ever spoken through human language.
Matthew 5, 6, and 7 require—almost demand—that we give ourselves to reading, studying, and considering them on an ongoing basis. If you do not, you deprive yourself of something very precious.
In these chapters, our Lord Jesus gives us what we need to know in order to live in the reality of the kingdom of God.
Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven;
but he that doeth the will of My Father Who is in heaven.
The issue that our Lord Jesus seeks to communicate is this: What is the will of God, and how can we live in the will of God, even while living here on this planet?
Our Lord Jesus begins with what we call the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the poor in spirit:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
For today, we want to focus on this matter of being poor in spirit.
Being poor in spirit is a condition necessary for the kingdom of God to be ours. We are not talking only about something that will happen in the future. The kingdom has two dimensions: it is here now, in our midst, at hand; but there is also a coming dimension, when God is free to usher in the fullness of His rule on this planet.
Our Lord Jesus begins with this statement because it is foundational. When this condition of poverty of spirit is a reality, then the kingdom of God can be a reality there.
This first Beatitude is absolutely necessary before we can experience the others. Therefore, it is very important that we understand what it means to be poor in spirit.
Some translations use words such as humble, meek, or lowly. A translation by George Lamsa renders the passage, “Blessed are the humble,” and in a footnote explains this as “poor of pride, unassuming.”
That really caught my attention.
What kind of condition is God looking for in order for His kingdom to be experienced in our lives? I believe this brother caught something of the truth: to be poor in spirit is to be poor in pride.
Is that our natural condition? No, brothers and sisters. We are rich in pride and poor in humility. We are poor in our own estimation and understanding of who we are and what we are supposed to do with our lives.
How did we get into this condition? We need to go back into history—even into eternity past.
There was a time in eternity past when one of God’s creatures decided that he no longer wanted to remain in his present condition. His name was Lucifer.
As I read the Scriptures, I understand that Lucifer was one of three archangels, along with Gabriel and Michael. It seems that Lucifer was given the highest position of all created beings. He was the cherub that covereth. He had a very special place in the way God was ruling things.
But a problem arose.
Isaiah 14:12-14
How art thou fallen from heaven, O day-star, son of the morning!
how art thou cut down to the ground, that didst lay low the nations!
And thou saidst in thy heart, I will ascend into heaven,
I will exalt my throne above the stars of God;
I will sit also upon the mount of congregation, in the uttermost parts of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.
Here in Isaiah’s prophecy, we get something of a glimpse into eternity past, when this conflict arose between a sovereign God and one of His creatures.
Notice what the creature says: “I will. I will. I will.”
It seems that Lucifer looked at himself and saw how wonderful he was. He was indeed a wonderful being, created by God. But he became focused upon himself. This turning inward produced such pride that he apparently became convinced that he could dethrone God and become God himself.
Pride can do some very upsetting things. Pride blinded Lucifer to the reality that he was a creature. He determined that he wanted to be God.
Let us come down to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. The Lord made it very clear to Adam that He had given him an important responsibility: to rule, to take dominion, and to bring everything under subjection to God.
God put the man and woman in the garden as a place of testing and training. He pointed out two trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The tree of life represented God’s own life—uncreated, eternal, and perfect. God’s purpose for man was that He would impart His own life to man and allow that life to be manifested through man, so that God would be glorified.
But the wrong choice was made: by deception on the part of the woman, and by direct disobedience on the part of Adam.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents living independently of God. In God’s heart and wisdom, He created human beings to live a totally dependent life—dependent upon Him.
The serpent told Eve that she would become like God, knowing good and evil. She saw that the tree was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise. The temptation was this: she would not need God; she could make her own decisions.
When the woman ate and the man ate, the same poison that had affected Lucifer infected the human race. Humanity became unable to live in the reality of God’s kingdom.
The initial, most important, and absolutely necessary matter is for us to become poor in spirit—to be poor in pride.
In Genesis 6, God says that He was grieved that He had made man because the thoughts of man were continually evil. Man was totally disqualified. There was nothing in him that God could accept.
Yet Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord. Noah was not a perfect man, but somehow God found in Noah something through which He could continue His work.
I wonder whether there was not some dimension of being poor in spirit that God was able to find in Noah. There was something there that God could identify with, gain a foothold in, and use.
The Lord Jesus helps us understand a necessary condition for knowing the kingdom of God experientially. God wants His righteous rule to be a reality in all of us.
It seems to me that there are three main areas in which the Lord is working to produce the reality of the kingdom:
There has to be poverty of spirit for the kingdom of God to become a reality in our hearts, our homes, and the church.
Every one of us needs to see what we are really like outside of Christ—who we really are outside of Christ.
From time to time, I have recognised myself thinking, “The Lord really did Himself a good favour when He saved me. He got a plum when He got me.”
You talk about love being blind. That is real blindness, brothers and sisters.
In Romans 7, I believe Paul gives us something of his own history. He had known justification by faith and peace with God. He had known that the old man had been crucified with Christ. Yet he still came to the place where he had to say:
In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.
There is nothing wrong with God’s law. The problem is in the one who tries to keep it.
Paul had to become convinced that in himself, in his flesh, in his Adamic nature—who he was outside of Christ—there was not one good thing.
Isaiah said that even our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. What is our righteousness? It is the best we can produce.
It is difficult for you and me to say honestly in our hearts, “In me”—and use your own name—“there is no good thing.”
We may know that many of our brothers and sisters have no good in them, but what about us? Have we come to that conclusion?
If we have not, we are holding on to false riches. We are holding on to something we think is valuable. We have not come to a place of total poverty.
We tend to divide the flesh into good flesh and bad flesh. We can admit that some things about us are horrible and need to go. But then we say, “I am kind. I am honest. Surely this can stay.”
But what does God say? That which is born of the flesh is flesh. It is of no value in the sight of God.
We need to be willing to face this.
John 15:5
Apart from Me ye can do nothing.
Are we convinced of that? Are we convinced that without Him we can do nothing?
In recent years, many college and high-school students have worn bracelets asking, “What would Jesus do?” There is nothing wrong with that question. But after you know what Jesus would do, are you able to do it?
The question is not merely, “What would Jesus do?” The question is, “Am I willing to let Jesus do it in me and through me?”
If we continue, even as believers in the Lord Jesus, to live independently, what we produce is of no value. It is not the fruit that God is looking for.
In Revelation 3, when the Lord Jesus speaks to the church at Laodicea, they say, “We have need of nothing.” They had become wealthy and self-sufficient. Where was the Lord Jesus? He was outside, seeking entrance into His own church.
They held on to what they considered valuable, but it was garbage. There was no value in it.
This is the same thing that happened to the children of Israel. In Deuteronomy 8, God warned them through Moses that they would enter a wonderful land, flowing with milk and honey, with everything they needed.
But once they entered the land and received its blessings, they would become proud in heart and say, “My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth.”
One of the most dangerous things God can do is bless His children. Why? Because we become satisfied and occupied with the blessing rather than with God Himself.
We can begin holding on to precious truths God has given us, to experiences through which He has taken us, to His faithfulness and mercies. Those things themselves become the focus of our attention. Then we begin to think that it is because of something we are—that we are something special.
When that attitude begins to settle upon our hearts, we are no longer living in the reality of the kingdom of God. We have put ourselves outside of His rule. We are ruling; He is not ruling.
This does not mean that He has left us. But it means that we have put ourselves in a place where the rulership of God through the Lord Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, is not being experienced.
Poverty of spirit is not merely something with which we begin. It is something that must continue all the way through.
It is being bankrupt of self, seeing that in yourself you can do nothing. It is utter, total dependence upon the Lord.
This is humility, brothers and sisters. When you are poor, you have nowhere else to go. You have no resources of your own. You are poverty-stricken. You are a pauper.
When we have this attitude toward the Lord and toward our brothers and sisters, it allows the Lord Jesus to come in, be real there, and manifest Himself in a rich way.
I remember when I was a student in seminary in the 1960s. They were offering a class on church renewal, in the early days of what became the charismatic movement.
As I sat there, I began to ask myself, why is renewal necessary? Why does the church have to be renewed? Has the Lord somehow turned off the switch so that His life is no longer flowing?
No, brothers and sisters. Somehow, we have become detached from the Vine and have produced something that is not of the Lord.
Then another question came into my heart: what can we do to prevent this repeated history? We see it in the children of Israel and throughout church history. The Lord pours out His life abundantly upon His people. Something wonderful happens. Then, in less than one generation, it crystallises and becomes something from which God, in a sense, has to set Himself aside.
Why? Because people learn how to do it without Him. There is no longer poverty of spirit, no desperate need for Him. They learn how to do it.
Tradition is something we love because we can do it without Him.
I would rather crawl on my hands and knees from Richmond, Virginia, to Los Angeles and back again than have to trust the Lord.
You say, “Oh, Arnie.” But brothers and sisters, ask the Lord to show you that in your flesh is proud flesh. It is so proud that it does not want to have to trust God for anything.
The flesh will do all kinds of things. It will learn how to pray. It will learn how to use spiritual language. It will do it all, as long as it does not have to die and give up its right to itself.
What can keep the Lord’s people from always having to undergo renewal? The Lord has already given us the answer, though it is something we do not like. It is the cross.
The cross filters out everything that is not of the Lord.
The Lord brought to my mind the oil filter on a car. All the oil flows through the filter, and the designer intends that the filter catch everything that is not supposed to be in that oil and filter it out.
How does the Lord filter? By putting the cross in our lives.
The cross is brought by the Holy Spirit to make sure that man, his flesh, the things of the world, and the designs of men do not find their way into the church.
When those things do find their way into the church, we end up with a hybrid—something that is not of the Lord.
God has made things wonderfully simple. It is not complicated. When it gets complicated, we have gotten our fingers into the matter and imposed our own ideas on it.
The Lord simply wants us to find a way to die to ourselves—to our own ideas, opinions, and rights—and allow the Lord Jesus to find His way through.
None of us finds it easy to die. That is where we need one another. We need to learn how to encourage one another to die to the things that are not of the Lord.
When we try to understand humility, it is sometimes best to look at its opposite. What is the opposite of humility? Pride. Self-sufficiency.
When we see pride and self-sufficiency in ourselves, we can be sure that this is not from the Lord. This is not the condition necessary for the Lord to manifest His government, His rulership, and His kingdom in our midst.
Our time is gone, but I want to encourage you to read Philippians 2 sometime today or in the next few days.
Paul wrote to the Philippian believers:
Do nothing through faction or through vainglory,
but in lowliness of mind each counting other better than himself;
not looking each of you to his own things,
but each of you also to the things of others.
This is not naturally a part of what we are outside of Christ. It can only be experienced when we have the measure of Christ’s life in us and that life is becoming our life.
Paul goes on to say:
Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.
What is the attitude? One of poverty of spirit.
He was God, with all the privileges of being God. What did He do with those privileges? He set them all aside and became a human being.
Do you understand how far down He came just to become a man? But then Paul goes on to say that, as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Our Lord Jesus came and gave us the ultimate example of what it means to be poor in spirit. In Him, we see the reality of God’s kingdom one hundred per cent.
I do only what I see My Father doing.
I say only what I hear My Father saying.
My will is to do the will of Him that sent Me.
There is only one place where we can obtain this humility. The Lord Jesus said to the church at Laodicea, “Buy of Me gold refined by fire.” Why buy it from Him? Because He is the only place you can get it.
If we want to know the reality of the kingdom of God, this matter of humility has to be there. It is not optional. It is not in us naturally. Where are we going to find it? Only in Christ Himself.
May the Lord be merciful to us. I do not know what your goal is for the year 2001, but, brothers and sisters, I want God to deal with me. I want to know more of what it means to be poor in spirit.
Lord, we thank You that You never give us an ideal without giving us an illustration, an example.
You have called us and told us what is necessary for us to live in the reality of Your kingdom and under Your government. Even if we understand only a little, we understand that in ourselves we are not able to produce this kind of condition.
But You saw our plight. You saw our hopeless condition, and You responded by giving us Your very Son.
Lord, our cry to You is this: help us, beginning today, to know our Lord Jesus Christ in a fuller way, so that He becomes our humility and we know how to be poor in spirit in experience.
We ask it in His name. Amen.