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.
And 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 whether 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 just open our hearts and let our wonderful Lord be our Teacher. You know, 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, even 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 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.
First of all, Matthew 4:17:
From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Then, in 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.
And the report of Him went forth into all Syria: and they brought unto Him all that were sick, holden with divers diseases and torments, possessed with demons, and epileptic, and palsied; and He healed them.
And there followed Him great multitudes from Galilee and Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judaea and from beyond the Jordan.
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.
Can we turn our hearts to the Lord and ask for His help and blessing?
Lord, we do want to bless You that today, once again, You have provided an opportunity for Your redeemed ones to come and set a table with You. Lord, we bless You for the help that Your Holy Spirit gave us, how then, 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 in that song, 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.
Now, having read these verses from it, 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.
Lord, we remember what You say in Your Word:
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word 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 God is at hand.” We find that when our Lord Jesus begins His spoken ministry, He begins with the same message. The message had to do with the government of God.
Now, my brothers and sisters, it seems to me that so 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 will find this in Colossians 1: 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, born 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 towards God because its king is a bitter enemy of God Himself.
There is also another dimension of a kingdom that we experience when we are born into the human race: we become our own king.
I had some books in my library—I am not sure they are still there—by a brother called Earl Jabay. Earl Jabay was a chaplain in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. I had the joy of meeting him a number of years ago.
The two books of his that I read are very interesting books. The first one is entitled The God Players. You know who he is talking about. He is talking about us.
The second one is entitled The Kingdom of Self. The first chapter in this book, The Kingdom of Self, is entitled “His Majesty the Baby”: how the baby, at a very early age, establishes himself as a king over his own little kingdom.
So when we hear our Lord Jesus beginning His ministry by a call for repentance, it is not merely because we need to have our sins forgiven, though that certainly is the case. The Lord Jesus’ call, along with the call of John the Baptist, was a call to repent because we are living in the wrong kingdom.
Somebody other than God Himself, other than the Lord Jesus Christ, is king in our life. 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. That means 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 an opportunity to visit a city in Brazil called Petrópolis. Petrópolis is an hour or so north of Rio de Janeiro. The reason it was called Petrópolis was because Dom Pedro II, the second king in Brazil, had another residence there.
It was a beautiful city, with many streams and mountains, and it was cool there, whereas Rio was very hot. The king wanted to get away from the hot weather, so he could go on weekends or for an extended time and spend time in Petrópolis.
They took me one day to a museum and showed me the king’s throne. Now, his headquarters was actually in Rio de Janeiro, but he also had a throne in Petrópolis. That meant that when he was not in Rio and 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, I believe, 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, then 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 God 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 the earth in a way that had never been available previously.
How is that possible? It was possible because the King had come.
When you go back to Matthew 2, how is our Lord Jesus identified when He is born? 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 the King of the Jews so that they would have an opportunity to allow God to bring the reality of His kingdom into the Jewish people.
He came to His own. How did they respond to Him? They 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 it goes on to say that as many as received Him, to them He gave the privilege, or the right, to become the children of God.
So, 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 our sin and our nature to keep on sinning. We need Someone to intervene on our behalf, and praise God, it 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 to go on sinning; we need to be 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 it miserable for us and miserable for a lot of other people because we are living under the wrong kingdom.
Our Lord Jesus’ appeal is to repent. Again, brothers and sisters, let us not make this something that Scripture does not want it to be made. Repentance means you are going one direction, and it is the wrong direction. You put on the brakes, you do a one-eighty, and you go the other direction.
It is that simple. It is not complicated. There do not have to be tears. There does not have to be anything coming out of your mouth, because it is a heart decision. You see that you are going the wrong way, and you simply stop, turn around, and go the other direction.
“Lord, You said I am living in the wrong kingdom. I have the wrong king. I need to stop living under that king and now come and live under Your kingship—under Yours.”
So, brothers and sisters, 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.
It says that our Lord Jesus went into these different areas proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. This matter of the gospel is another matter we need to give some thought to.
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.
Since that is the case, God’s great issue is that the whole created order will be lined up according to what He originally designed.
I think our view is sometimes too narrow. We get satisfied knowing the forgiveness of our sins, and that is wonderful. What words can you use to describe it? It is indescribable.
To know this peace that passes all understanding; to know that you can stand right in front of a holy, righteous God and have no fear and no hesitation—why? Because there is no more record of your sin. It is as if you had never committed any sin at all.
The peace that floods our hearts when that becomes our experience overwhelms us, and we get the idea that this is the end of it. This is not the end. It is part of it, but it is not the end.
The bigger picture is that we should be living according to the will of God. This is the only place we will discover what life was really for.
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 God desires is that He is free to impart Himself in His full nature to every one of His creatures, and then for the whole universe to manifest the beauty that we discover in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.
When we look around, as well as when we read the Scriptures, there is only one place in the universe where God’s will is not being done. Where is that? This earth.
This little planet, by comparison, is just a little speck of dust. But as far as we can tell, this is the only place where rebellion has broken out.
It broke out originally with an archangel, but then he apparently was given responsibility for this galaxy. He was given freedom by God to come and set up his kingdom here. Men and women were drawn into this rebellion.
But 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 thing. What did He tell Adam was to be his responsibility? “You are to rule.”
Adam was brought in, not into a perfect world, but into a world that was recovered to a certain degree. God wanted Adam to be an agent of bringing God’s kingdom into a fuller reality here on this planet.
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. She gave to her husband, and, knowing what he was doing, out of disobedience he ate of the tree.
Through this experience that Adam and Eve had, the same poison that was located 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. You did not have to read any books. It just came naturally. Why? 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 it cannot do God’s will.
This is not an easy matter for us to agree with, because we look around at other people and begin to judge ourselves on the basis of what we see in them. We say, “Well, I am not all that bad, you know.” Because love is blind, we love ourselves so much that we are blind to all the things that are wrong in us.
Yet God has said that we need Someone to help us. No matter how many lifetimes you and I would live, we would never, in our natural selves, be able to live in the reality of God’s kingdom.
God’s government cannot be manifested in the flesh. Why? Because the flesh is hostile toward God and cannot do the will of God.
Our Lord Jesus went around preaching the gospel of the kingdom, which to me is the larger picture. In a smaller way, we can say that it is the gospel of grace, the gospel of forgiveness, the gospel of God giving and giving and giving.
But please understand that with all these other things God is doing, His ultimate goal is to establish His perfect government in this whole universe. You and I have been caught up in this wonderful process.
In Matthew 5, we find something very interesting that our Lord Jesus does. When He goes out and proclaims the gospel of the kingdom, He also manifests the reality of the kingdom by healing people with different kinds of problems.
What our Lord Jesus is doing is showing that this is not the way God originally designed things. He did not create human beings, nor did He desire human beings, to experience these kinds of illnesses and sicknesses. This was not part of His plan.
This has come in because of the rebellion of Satan, and then man also rebelled. This opened the door for all these kinds of things to come in. It is an indication that God’s kingdom is not a reality in these situations.
So what does our Lord Jesus do? He goes in and manifests what the kingdom of God is by healing them.
In doing this, many people came from many different areas and started following Him. Then He does one of the most unusual things that I can remember reading about our Lord Jesus doing: He leaves 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 there in Galilee—not a mountain like we have here, but a little rise of dirt—and He walked up its side and sat down.
When His disciples came to Him, how many disciples did our Lord Jesus have at this point, as I read Matthew’s Gospel? Four. Four disciples came and sat down, and He began, as I understand it, to speak to these four men about the kingdom of God.
There were others listening, but He was not addressing them. He was addressing His disciples regarding the matter of the kingdom of God.
For a moment or two, let us try to get some kind of working definition of the kingdom of God. There are certain things we find in the Bible that we should never try to define, because the more you try, the worse you end up.
For example, 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. I think the same is true when we come to this matter of the kingdom of God.
How do you adequately define what it means for God to govern His universe? I find it utterly impossible. But for our purposes this morning, let me be foolish and try to give a simple definition of what I think the kingdom of God has to do with.
It is very simple: the righteous rule of a sovereign God.
You have two things here. First of all, you have the sovereignty of God. What does that mean? It means that all authority, 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. What is the biggest word? I hope it is God, because it does not get any bigger than that, brothers and sisters.
This God, Who has revealed Himself to us in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, has the right—because He is God, because He created all things, because He is a perfect being and a righteous being—to be given the freedom to sovereignly reign over everything, including us.
When we think about the kingdom of God, do not think about a place you are going to go to. This has gotten all mixed up in Christian songs and Christian talk, where we speak about getting into the kingdom.
My brothers and sisters, I think our Bible would teach us that you do not wait until you die to get into the kingdom. It happens the moment you believe in the Lord Jesus as King, 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. Notice: 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 not a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. It is a government of a King Who is sovereign and has not asked anybody what kind of principles and laws are to be established in His kingdom. They all originate in Him.
Everything that God wants, the way He rules, has to do with the kind of Being He is. He is a righteous Being, and therefore His rulership will be a righteous rulership.
There is something in me that longs to be ushered fully into God’s righteous rule. Men try, and I have to say that I am proud to be an American. I am so grateful to be able to live under American democracy.
But, my brothers and sisters, it is not the kingdom of God. We need to keep it clear. Do not bring the two things together. Do not mix them up. The kingdom of God is eternal; American democracy had its birth two hundred years ago.
God can come and manifest Himself within American democracy, but it is not His way of ruling. His way is to be a King. He has established His King. His name is Jesus, born King of the Jews, to ultimately become King of kings and Lord of lords.
Our Lord Jesus is seated on this mountainside, with four men sitting there, as I understand it, and He speaks to them what, in my estimation, are the greatest words ever spoken through human language.
Matthew 5, 6, and 7, my brothers and sisters, requires—almost demands—that we give ourselves to reading, studying, and considering it on an ongoing basis. If you do not do it, you are depriving yourself of something very precious.
In Matthew 5, 6, and 7, our Lord Jesus gives us what we need to know in order to be able to live in the reality of the kingdom of God.
Remember what He says in Matthew 7:
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 our Lord Jesus is seeking to communicate in these three chapters is: What is the will of God, and how can we live in the will of God, even while we are living here on this planet?
We are living in enemy territory, under the wrong kind of kingdom, but He says there is a way for us to experience the reality of living in the kingdom even while we are here in this situation.
Our Lord Jesus goes on to give what we usually refer to as the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
He goes on and mentions the others, but today we want to focus, the Lord helping us, on this matter of being poor in spirit.
Notice, first of all, that being poor in spirit is a condition necessary for the kingdom of God to be yours. We are not talking about something happening in the future.
The kingdom of God has two dimensions. It has the dimension of being here now, in our midst, at hand; but there is also a dimension of the kingdom coming, when God is free to usher in, in fullness and completeness, His rule here on this planet.
That is not true now. It does not mean that God is not at work. He is at work, and one by one He is seeking to get us to know the reality of that kingdom—of Jesus being King, the Lord in our lives.
Our Lord Jesus begins with this statement:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
When this condition of poverty of spirit is a reality, then the kingdom of God can be a reality there.
Our Lord Jesus puts at the top of His list the most important thing. Without this, you cannot go on into the other things. This first Beatitude is absolutely necessary before you can experience the others.
It is very important that we understand what it means to be poor in spirit. Probably different translations say humble, meekness, lowliness, or something like that.
Recently, in reading a different translation—probably one that most of you do not have in your library—by a fellow named George Lamsa, I found an interesting way of helping us see what was in the heart of our Lord Jesus when He spoke these words.
He translated it, “Blessed are the humble, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But then he puts a footnote. This is a man who understood the Eastern way of thinking and Eastern language, and in his translation he tries to bring in that dimension.
In his footnote, he says this word humble means: poor of pride; unassuming.
Now, this really caught my attention. When we talk about being poor in spirit, what does this really mean? What kind of condition is God looking for in order for His kingdom to be experienced in our lives?
I think this brother has caught something of the truth: to be poor in pride. Is that our natural condition? Is that the way the Lord finds us—poor in pride?
No, brothers and sisters. We are rich in pride and poor in humility, poor in our own estimation and in our understanding of who we are and what we are supposed to do with our lives.
For just a moment, let us go back and consider: how did we get this pride? How did we get to a place where God has to say to us, “The way My kingdom can be experienced by you is by you becoming poor in spirit”?
It means we have to go back into some history of which we do not have much record: a time in eternity past when one of God’s creatures, one of God’s beings whom He created for His own purpose and glory, decided that he no longer wanted to remain in his present condition.
His name was Lucifer. As I have read the Scriptures, I have discovered that he was one of three archangels, along with Gabriel and Michael.
It seems, when you read the Word of God, that Lucifer was given the highest position of all created beings. He was the cherub who covers. He had a very special place in the way God was ruling things.
He was part of the inner, inner circle. But he was a created being. Do not ever let him become something eternal. He was not eternal. He was a created being, an angel, a spirit being, but with tremendous wisdom and ability.
He was given this very special place of responsibility. But a problem arose.
Let us look in Isaiah 14. Let us begin with verse 12:
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;
And I will sit 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.
It seems to me that here in Isaiah’s prophecy we get something of a glimpse into eternity past, when there was a conflict between one of God’s creatures—perhaps the greatest creature, if we can put it that way—and God Himself, a sovereign God.
Notice what the creature says: “I will. I will. I will. I will.”
We are told elsewhere that probably this was the result of Lucifer looking at himself and seeing how wonderful he was. He was a wonderful being, created by God, but he got focused on himself.
This turning inward produced such pride that he was seemingly convinced that he was able to dethrone God from being God and become God himself.
Maybe we can sit here this morning and say, “How could a created being ever even think this way?” But brothers and sisters, pride can do some very upsetting things.
I believe pride blinded Lucifer to the reality that he was a creature, and he determined that he wanted to be God.
Let us come down to the Garden of Eden, Genesis 3, where the Lord made it very clear to Adam: “Adam, I am giving you a very important responsibility. I want you to establish My rulership here on this planet.”
“You are to rule. Take dominion. Bring everything under subjection to Me.”
As a test, if we can put it that way, and also as a training ground, God put the man and woman in the garden. They were new at this. They had not been taught. It was not natural for them. They had to undergo training.
The Lord put them in the garden and told them they could eat of all the trees. Then He pointed out two different trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Very simply, brothers and sisters, it seems to me that the tree of life represented God’s own life: uncreated, eternal, perfect.
God’s purpose for man was that He would be able to take His own life and impart it to man, allowing His life in man to be manifested. Thus, God would be glorified.
But we know the wrong choice was made: by deception on the part of the woman, but by direct disobedience on the part of Adam.
When Adam and Eve ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I believe it represented living life independently of God.
Let me come back to something. It seems that in God’s heart and mind, in His great wisdom, He created human beings so that they would live a totally dependent life. Dependent upon Whom? Upon Him.
They were not to live independently. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil represented that man would have his own life, do his own thing, make his own decisions, without having to bring God into the picture or consult with God about anything.
This is what the serpent told Eve would be her experience: she would become like God, knowing good and evil.
When she looked at the tree, she saw that it was good for food, satisfying her physical body; it was pleasant to the eyes, satisfying her soul; but then it would make her wise. Why? So that she would not need God. She could make her own decisions.
We are told that the woman ate of the tree, and then the man ate. I believe that into the human race was brought the same poison that affected Lucifer.
Man is in a condition where he does not want to live—and cannot live—in the reality of God’s kingdom. So our Lord Jesus brings us to this crucial point: the initial thing, the most important thing, the absolutely necessary thing, is for us to become poor in spirit, to be poor in pride.
I mentioned Genesis 6 a little earlier. In Genesis 6 we have something that, for me, is not easy to grasp. You know what God actually says in Genesis 6? “I am sorry that I ever made man,” because the thoughts of man were continually evil.
Man is totally disqualified. There is nothing in him, it seems to me, that God can accept. God is totally displeased with everything.
But then there is a wonderful statement: Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord.
Out of all the humanity that was there, there was only one man. We know Noah—I am sorry, I have to meet him someday, so I have to be careful what I say—but Noah was nothing special. He was a sinner.
Somehow, God found in Noah something in which He could continue His work. God brought judgement on the rest of humanity, and through Noah and his family He continued His marvellous work of redeeming and recovering this planet to what He originally wanted it to be.
Why did Noah find favour in the eyes of the Lord? I wonder if there was not some dimension, some element, of this matter of being poor in spirit that God was able to find.
Even though Noah was not a perfect man, there was something there that God was able to identify with, get a foothold in his life, and use Noah in this way.
Our Lord Jesus, at the beginning of His teaching, helps us understand a necessary condition in order for us to know experientially the kingdom of God.
We mentioned earlier that the kingdom of God is the righteous rule of a sovereign God. Brothers and sisters, are we this morning aware that God wants this 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:
God is not interested, if we can put it this way, in establishing His kingdom in this present world. His judgement has already come upon this world. This world is going to be destroyed. There will be a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
But in this whole process of recovery, God is apparently focusing His attention on human hearts, believers’ homes, and the church.
This condition that our Lord Jesus speaks about in Matthew 5 is the number one necessary condition for the kingdom of God to be a reality in our hearts, homes, and church. There has to be poverty of spirit.
In order for this to happen, it seems to me that every one of us, without exception, needs to see what we are really like outside of Christ—who we really are outside of Christ.
I do not know if you have ever had this experience, but from time to time in my life I have recognised myself doing some thinking. Bottom line, this is the way I would put it, even though these would not be the words I would say: “You know, the Lord really did Himself a good favour when He saved me.”
“He got a plum when He got me.” There is something in us that somehow feels that God got something good when He got me.
You talk about love being blind. That is real blindness, brothers and sisters.
In Romans 7, I do not know how you interpret it, but I think it is Paul giving us something of his own history. He recognised that he had been crucified with Christ; he talks about that in Romans 6.
Going back to Romans 5, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God. So we have forgiveness. But then there is the issue of having been crucified with Christ, taking that old sinner and putting him in a place of death.
You would think that would be the end of it, but apparently in Paul’s experience that was not the case, and I think it is probably true in all our experiences.
What was the problem in Romans 7? He understood what it was that God wanted. There was nothing wrong with the law, but the problem was in the one who tried to keep it.
Paul came to the conclusion:
In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.
Brothers and sisters, even when we hear that, how many “amens” do we get? Not many, do we? No, because we are not fully convinced.
But Paul had to be convinced, and God took him through experiences where he came to know 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 righteousness—the best we can produce—is as filthy rags before God.
It is a difficult place to come to, brothers and sisters, for you and me honestly to say in our hearts, “In me”—use your own name—“there is no good thing.”
You know that there is no good in a lot of your brothers and sisters, but what about you? Have you come to that conclusion?
If we have not, then we are holding on to some false riches. We are holding on to something we think is valuable. We have not come to a place of total poverty.
The Lord Jesus says this is where we have to start. We have to start in a place where we are willing to recognise that in us, in our own Adamic nature, in our flesh, there is nothing good.
God cannot accept any of it.
The problem comes in when we try to balance this thing between the good flesh and the bad flesh. We can look at ourselves and honestly admit that there are some things about us that are horrible and need to go.
But then, on the other side, our evaluation says, “Now, this is pretty good. I am kind. I am honest,” and so forth. We say, “Well, this can stay. This has to go—my lying, my cheating, all that—but this can stay.”
But what does God say? That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and it is of no value—no value in the sight of God. It only brings pollution to Him, to us, and to other people.
We need to be willing to face that. The Lord Jesus also said in John 15:5:
Apart from Me ye can do nothing.
Are we convinced of that? If we become convinced that in us there is no good thing, are we convinced that without Him we can do nothing?
In recent years, a lot of college and high-school kids have worn little bracelets called “WWJD”—“What Would Jesus Do?” There is no problem with that, but there is a problem.
After you know what Jesus would do, are you able to do it? That is the question. It is not enough to wear the bracelet. There is nothing wrong with wearing it, and nothing wrong with asking that question.
But the question ought to be: “Am I willing to let Jesus do it in me and through me?” Because we need to come to the conclusion that without Him we can do nothing.
We can start out with great things and great ideals, but without Him we can do nothing.
This brings us back to that original situation in the garden, where Adam had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, acted independently, and began to live independently.
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 God is looking for.
In Revelation 3, when our Lord Jesus is speaking to the church at Laodicea, what does He tell them that they say? “We have need of nothing.”
They had become so wealthy, so self-sufficient in themselves, that they needed nothing. Where is the Lord Jesus in the church at Laodicea? He is on the outside, wanting to get into His church, because they had become so wealthy.
They were holding on to something they felt was so valuable, but it was all garbage. There was no value, and they were still holding on to it.
Brothers and sisters, it brings us to this place where we need to see that in ourselves there is no hope.
It is an interesting thing that happens to us as God’s people. It is the same thing that happened to the children of Israel. You can read about it in Deuteronomy 8.
God warned them through Moses: “You will go into this land. It is a wonderful land. It is flowing with milk and has everything you need. But once you get in there and receive it, what will happen? You will become proud in your heart and say, ‘I have got this for myself.’”
Is that something only the children of Israel could experience, or is it something that happens to us as well?
Maybe we can put it this way: one of the most dangerous things that God can do is bless His children.
Why? Because we become satisfied and occupied with the blessing rather than God Himself.
We can begin holding on to all the precious truths God has given us, the experiences through which He has taken us, His faithfulness to us, and the mercies He has poured out upon us.
Those things in themselves become the focus of our attention, and we begin to think it is because of somebody we are—that we are something special.
When that kind of attitude begins to settle upon our hearts, we are no longer living in the reality of the kingdom of God. We put ourselves outside of His rule. We are ruling; He is not ruling.
This does not mean He has left us, but it means we have put ourselves in a place where the kingdom of God—the rulership of God through the Lord Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit—is not being experienced.
Our Lord Jesus makes it very clear: this is not merely something you happen to begin with. All the way through, there must be poverty of spirit—being bankrupt to self, seeing that in yourself you can do nothing.
Oh, brothers and sisters, I am amazed at myself. That is why I did not know whether the Lord wanted me to share this with all of you or just with me. I am amazed at what I become proud of.
Legitimately, the only thing we can be proud of is our sin. That is the only thing we can legitimately be proud of, but we even become proud of that—our arrogance and our sin.
The Lord has to deal with this again and again and again to bring us back to this place of utter, total dependence upon Him.
This is humility, brothers and sisters. This is poverty of spirit. When you are poor, you have no place else to go. You have no resources of your own. You are poverty-stricken. You are a pauper.
When we have this kind of attitude towards the Lord and towards our brothers and sisters, it allows the Lord Jesus to come in and be real there, manifesting Himself in a rich way.
I remember when I was a student in seminary. This was back in the 1960s—some of you were not even born then. They were offering a class on church renewal.
This was kind of the beginning of the seed of the charismatic movement happening back then. I remember being in class one day, and the professor was talking about this matter of church renewal.
I was hearing him, but I was not listening very well. I was doing my own little thing of thinking, and I began to say, “Why, first of all, is it necessary to have renewal? Why does the church have to be renewed?”
Did the Lord somehow turn off the switch, so that His life was no longer flowing? No, brothers and sisters. Somehow, we have got detached from the Vine, and we produce something that is not of the Lord.
Another question came into my heart: What can we do to prevent this repeated history? Over and over, we see it in the children of Israel and all the way through church history.
The Lord pours out His life in an abundant way upon His people. Something wonderful happens, and then, in less than one generation, it crystallises and becomes something from which God has to set Himself aside because they learn how to do it without Him.
There is no longer poverty of spirit, no longer the desperate need for Him. They learn how to do it.
My brothers and sisters, I am fearful for us because tradition is something we love. The reason we love it is because we can do it without Him.
I do not know if this is true with you. I am telling you it is true about me. I have seen it for a number of years. The Lord, in His mercy, has shown me.
Brothers and sisters, I would rather crawl on my hands and knees from Richmond, Virginia, to Los Angeles, California, and back again than have to trust the Lord.
You say, “Oh, Arnie.” Well, 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.
It 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—give up its right to itself.
What we have before us, brothers and sisters, is this situation: How does the Lord keep His people from always having to undergo renewal?
The thought came to my heart: He has already given us something, something we do not like, but something that is necessary. It is the cross.
You know what the cross does, brothers and sisters? The cross filters out everything that is not of the Lord.
The Lord helped me understand this by bringing back to my mind an oil filter on a car. All the oil flows through this filter, and the intention of the designer is that the filter would catch everything not supposed to be in the oil and filter it out.
How does the Lord filter? By putting the cross in our lives. The cross is brought there 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 they find their way into the church, we end up with something of a hybrid—not something of the Lord.
They do not have to find their way in if we are willing to pay the price.
Brothers and sisters, it seems to me—I do not know if it is my old age or what it is—but I see more and more how wonderfully simple God has made things. It is not complicated.
When it gets complicated, guess what? We have gotten our fingers in the thing and imposed our own ideas upon it.
But it is very simple. It is not complicated.
The Lord simply wants us to find a way to die to ourselves—to our own ideas, our own opinions, and so forth—and allow our 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 the Lord.
When we try to understand humility, it is one of those words that is almost elusive. Sometimes the best way is to look at the opposite. What is the opposite of humility? Pride. Self-sufficiency.
All of us can somehow recognise that in ourselves to a certain degree, and in other people. When we see that kind of thing, we can be sure that it is not from the Lord.
This is not the condition necessary for the Lord to manifest His government, His rulership, His kingdom, in our midst.
Our time is gone, but I want to encourage you: perhaps sometime today, or in the next few days, go back and read Philippians 2.
When Paul was writing to these dear brothers and sisters, they were a good church. They had their problems, but notice Paul’s instruction:
Doing 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.
Brothers and sisters, that 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, being our life. This is not the way we are naturally.
This is why Paul goes on to appeal to them:
Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.
What is the attitude? One of poverty of spirit.
He was God. Again, brothers and sisters, how we need to think about this and meditate on it. 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. We see in Him the reality of God’s kingdom one hundred per cent.
I do nothing of Myself, but as the Father taught Me, I speak these things.
I do always the things that are pleasing to Him.
My food is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to accomplish His work.
Brothers and sisters, I do not know how you read this, but I am telling you for myself: I have discovered, I think in a clear way, that there is only one place.
The Lord Jesus said to the church in Laodicea, “Buy gold of Me.” Why buy gold of Him? Because He is the only place you can get it. You cannot get it anywhere else—gold refined in the fire.
If we want to know the reality of the kingdom of God, then this matter of humility has to be there. It is not an option.
Where are we going to get it, brothers and sisters? It is not in us naturally. Where are we going to find it? Only one place: in Christ Himself.
May the Lord be merciful to us. I do not know what your goal is for the year 2001, but my brothers and sisters, I want God to deal with me. I want to know more of what it means to be poor in spirit.
Let us pray together.
Lord, we thank You that You never give us an ideal without giving us an illustration, an example. You have called us, and You have told us what is necessary in order for us to live in the reality of Your kingdom, being under Your government.
Lord, even if we understand a little bit, 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 have responded by giving us Your very Son.
Lord, our cry to You is: 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.