Good Friday morning, my friends.
Please forgive me for my C.S. Lewis kick, but his book "Mere Christianity" is incredibly insightful.
In Matthew 5:3 Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." My understanding of "poor in spirit" is that it means recognizing your need for God and salvation. What if you are not "poor in spirit"? What if you are "rich in spirit?"
To answer this, Lewis looks to another well known statements of Jesus, this time Matthew 19:24: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God". Lewis talks of riches as something other than worldly wealth (I apologize for the length of this but it was just too good not to include it all):
One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of
happiness money can give and so fail to realise your need for God. If everything seems to come
simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
Now quite plainly, natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves and
intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with
your character as it is. "Why drag God into it?" you may ask.
A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched
creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper.
Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely
to believe dial all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better
kind of goodness.
Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need
for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is
shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are "rich" in this sense to enter the Kingdom.
It is very different for the nasty people—the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or
the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in
double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and
following—or else despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them.
They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the "poor": He blessed diem. They are the "awful set" he
goes about with—and of course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, "If there were
anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians."
There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us. If you are a nice person—if
virtue comes easily to you beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given.
If you mistake for your own merits what are really God's gifts to you through nature, and if you are
contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall
more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The Devil was
an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.
But if you are a poor creature—poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar
jealousies and senseless quarrels—saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual
perversion—nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best
friends—do not despair.
He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine
you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far
sooner than that) he will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may
astonish us all—not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school. (Some of the
last will be first and some of the first will be last.)
As Lewis says, there is both a warning and an encouragement here. Which one applies to you? I know which one applies to me.
Grace and peace be yours in abundance,
Bruce
God, impoverish our hearts.
Strip us bare.
It will probably hurt, but we don't want to continue trying to puff ourselves up and to pretend that we know what we're doing.
We need you and only you, God.
On our own, we can't do anything, but with you, the kingdom of Heaven is available to us!
God, crumble the walls of our hearts. Break us so that we can be rebuilt in you.
You created us in your image, but we have distorted that image by bending it, adding stuff to it, and getting it all dirty.
Cleanse us and restore us to the glimmering, empty cups that you created us to be, ready to be filled with your love.
We accept your unconditional love.
We accept your correction.
We celebrate being poor in spirit, God, because this poverty brings us closer to you than we have ever been before.
Thank you, Jesus. We love you!
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