Well, this morning we are back in the Beatitudes. We started there last week and just really by way of introduction considered who it was that was doing the speaking on this occasion and the kinds of people that he was speaking to. So we move on more precisely now to look at the first of these beatitudes, or blessings, that's what it means. This is happiness. Happiness comes to the people, well, whatever happens to be the thing our Lord is saying there. And so verse three this morning tells us, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. That's Matthew chapter five, verse three. And the title to go with our considerations is Poverty Gains Riches. Poverty Gains Riches. Well, that seems a contradiction in terms, doesn't it? And in fact, if you would read through those things there, well, it doesn't sound great, does it? To be poor in spirit, or to mourn, or to be meek. Well, they get walked over, don't they? People like that. Showing mercy, won't that ever come back in a nice way? People respond the same way, they often don't. Persecution? So, so much of it sounds highly unlikely, doesn't it? That benefits, happinesses, blessednesses, that's why we call them the Beatitudes, should come to people who fit those categories there. Poverty, then, gains riches. I don't think either that this is just some kind of intellectual game that it's all way, way off in the future, that there's nothing to find here now, that this blessedness, well, that must be heaven, mustn't it? And, well, we'll just have to put up with what we put up with in the meantime till we get there. No, it's telling us These things are now. All the beginnings of them are now. That this isn't remote future. This isn't another day. But no, this includes today. That we are in a blessed state. No, it's a blessed will be the poor and spiritual. Blessed will be those who mourn. But blessed are, present tense, blessed are. Right here, right now, the people then that he first opened his mouth and spoke to with these sayings, but also us who have a Bible open and who have ears to hear what it has to say to us today. And this first one of the Beatitudes, this first blessed are, blessed are the poor in spirit, sets us up for all the rest that will follow. Get this one wrong, you'll get the rest wrong. In fact, you'll get most things wrong if you're trying to understand what this Christian faith is all about. But get this one right, and the rest follows. First heading then is getting off to a good start. Getting off to a good start. Getting an understanding of this, because it's not as if, well, we could have jumbled up the order, and we could have started with blessed are the pure in heart, or we could have started with blessed are those who are meek. But he starts with this one. Because this one in a way is like a key to unlock all the other ones that are going to follow. To get this right, like a foundation, get this right and you're building securely. Wrong. And you'll find that things just aren't fitting. You'll come to fit the doors and it just doesn't fit. This whole thing is wonky. You come to put that up and it's not straight here because the whole thing got off to the wrong start. And what we find, and it's a bit like the Ten Commandments in that we get the first commandment right, about having no other gods beside me, and all the other commandments kind of fall into place more easily in a way. You see, ah, why this and why that? Get the first one wrong, and all the rest are going to be out of kilter as well. So we see here that what is described is an attitude of heart. It's not talking just about how we look, how we say, how we dress, how we speak. It's actually about your heart and my heart, a condition of being, an attitude in the very depths of our being. That attitude here, which is commended, is called being poor in spirit, right? something fundamental hinges upon that attitude, which is actually going to make the other beatitudes fall into place, which is going to make sense of them, and in a way, make them work. But if you get this one right, then the others fall into place more easily. Get them wrong, and all the opposite things will follow. No, no blessednesses, no beatitude there, the opposite, in fact, so negative of that. And so whatever is promised to us here, Joy, reason for rejoicing, peace of heart, confidence, in its best sense here, confidence in God, will be missing. Second heading, poverty of spirit is not self-manufactured. Okay, you're right. That's poverty of spirit, right, I'll go and get that right away. As if, you know, you're told this is the best look at the moment Black Friday's coming up, right. I don't need to be told twice. I'm on my way. I'll get one of those, put this stuff on. And there we are. I've got it. Poverty of spirit, kind of got it, found it, doing it. It's not something we can just sort of self-manufacture. It's not something that is like an affectation. As though if I was to really show you that I might qualify as poor in spirit, that I'd sort of shrink into myself and kind of, you know, sort of almost disappear. behind this platform here. No, it's not something, it's an affected thing, something that we put on and that we sort of almost dress according to it, or our face kind of sinks and we just look miserable. That's what it is. Some people think it is that, that you've got to look miserable. Poor in spirit means look pretty miserable. And so people go around looking pretty miserable. And so you come into church and the thing you should do is be pretty miserable. Actually, you don't look miserable. You must try to be miserable. And it's not saying that at all to us. It's not inviting us there to some sort of act of self-torture, as though that's what it needs. It's sort of like a bit of self-torture that's involved in this here that we kind of attack ourselves and beat ourselves up in that way and make, as it were, as many difficulties for ourselves as possible. and forgo everything and lose everything in that respect there. That's self-manufactured. Neither does it mean being a bit too fault-finding and being a bit over-the-top, judgmental, sort of finding sins everywhere, and if you can't find them, you'll invent a few, you'll manufacture a few extra ones there. So, ah, good, there's a sin I can feel bad about myself because I found one. And Well, that's not what it's saying to us here either. It doesn't mean be invisible. It doesn't mean, never speak, just be as kind of invisible as possible. No, that's not it either. And we can't borrow an idea from the world out there or even sort of some religions that kind of do quite a lot of damage to each other in terms of forgoing this and forgoing that. go on some lengthy pilgrimage and don't eat anything there for ages and certainly don't have a cappuccino as we had yesterday morning, now that's all going to go. Just make it as hard as you can for yourself. So poverty of spirit. is not self-manufactured. Third heading, poverty in spirit, poor in spirit is defined by God. It's defined by God. That's where the definitions come from that are the best definitions. What does he say about the subject? What does man say about the subject? In fact, quite a lot of what follows after this as we come further to the we call the Sermon on the Mount is looking at, well, this is what the teachers say, this is what men say, but I say something completely different, actually something very surprising to the people that were there. God defines it. God defines his commandments and how we to think about them. God actually defines us and how we're to think about this subject and how we are with his help as he shows us to come near to what it means to be poor in spirit. It's God inspired and it only comes actually to people who have beheld something of the glory of God. You can't manufacture this out of your resources or mine. We can't sort of come up with poverty spirits in my kind of, you know, committee meeting and think up ways in which we could perhaps be this. This is something that you have because you've actually been seeing something of the glory of God. You beheld Him. And the difference that it means when you rightly behold Him makes of us as people unmistakably different. We're never, ever the same. again, or at least we shouldn't be. If we are still the same, we're calling ourselves Christians, but actually there's no great difference to what we were before we became Christians and how we think, how we think about ourselves, how we think about the world, how we think about our time. Then we've not beheld what we need to behold, which is the glory of God. We read, didn't we, Isaiah chapter six, and the prophet, hundreds, hundreds of years, 700 years, more than that even, before the Lord Jesus came. And here he was, and it wasn't a time within the nation's life that was going, spiritually speaking, swimmingly well. On the contrary, a lot of people just weren't listening. They weren't following, weren't understanding, didn't want to understand what the Bible was saying to them. And here was Isaiah. called to be a prophet, and he stands in the presence of God, sees him in this vision. And it is a vision that he could never, ever forget again. Now, you and I are not going to have perhaps that experience. We're not going to be suddenly whisked away from what we might call our every way, everyday way of thinking and go into some sort of altered state of consciousness. No, that was for him. a prophet, and that's why it's in the Bible, because this is different. This is something to pay particular attention to. And he saw these seraphim, great angels, particular rank, very highest rank, if you like, of angels. And they are flying and saying, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And with that, well, there's things happen, doors are shaken, the house was filled with smoke. And we see Isaiah's reaction. And it's not a reaction so often, isn't it? Christianity is portrayed as this sort of warm, cuddly thing, and as though God was a sort of warm, cuddly God. Well, that's not what we read here, is it? The effect on Isaiah was pretty dramatic, that he actually says, woe is me, for I am undone, because I'm a man of unclean lips, and I dwelled in the midst of a people of unclean lips. My eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. seen the glory of God, for the way perhaps, then we might hope to see the glory of God in a more kind of visible way than we might expect. But nevertheless, something of that is where it leaves us, poor in spirit. That was him. Woe is me. What? I'm feeling good about this. Nice to be here. Ah, you see, God loves me and that's just sweet and fine. It's no, it's far from it. Who can live in the presence of God? Who can stand before this God? And there was that expedient then for that moment of the seraphim, taking a live coal and touching his lips. Behold, this has touched your lips. Your iniquity is taken away and your sin purged. This was another part of being poor in spirit. So you've seen the glory of God, and lived. You've understood that it is possible. For those who really are completely undone, unclean lips, well, what kinds of things do we say? What kinds of thoughts go through our heads that we might say? And we live amongst people who are exactly the same. Culture that's full of things that just create difficulties for us. You've seen his glory. But we have lived to tell the tale. is something also we have seen and understood of the glory of God. that makes the difference and enables us to actually relate to him, stand in his presence, remain in his presence, and not feel constantly, woe to us, that we are undone, as though that is then to be the kind of rest of our lives, just feeling that particular acute feeling of being unworthy and unfit and unsuited to be in the presence of God. There's more to it still. And all of it, all of it comes under what being poor in spirit actually is. And so you see, God defines it and it's here in his word. That's what it's going to look like. That's what it's going to feel like if we use that word there. Now, a non-Christian would say, well, I don't feel that. I don't feel woe. I think about God and whatever God has thought about in this culture. No big deal. Don't need to worry. Quite a few people don't think he even exists. So what's the big thing about that? And so we don't feel there's much to be done here. Don't have to treat it so seriously. And whatever rules and thoughts we might have about what we think Christianity is, we're inclined to think, well, I'm not undone here. I reckon I can do this stuff. I can get near to this. And so we back ourselves in that. And that is actually really where we come unstuck. We haven't seen the glory of God. We haven't actually understood as Isaiah understood when he was there. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. We haven't understood that, that actually we are unholy. That's what Isaiah understood. I'm undone. I don't belong here. I can't stand in the presence of this great being. Why these morals he has and expectations and just who he is. And it isn't as if there have to be particular things that he says, well, these are things I love and these are things I hate. You just know. You're in his presence and you just know what is right and what is wrong. It's all undone. That's where he is. And the secrets of Isaiah's heart come pouring out there. And he feels himself to be most not belonging here. How can I be here? I don't belong in this, I belong in the world where it's so unclean, it's so wrong, it's so out of kilter with who God is. How can I stand here? Well, non-Christian thinks, well, actually, I can. Or if God's even there, I can stand through this. And we may even think that death itself, we've got a handle on that. well, we'll postpone thinking about it and keep postponing thinking about it and allow ourselves the luxury of living in a kind of God-free environment in the meantime. Well, somewhere, and it's happened to Isaiah, there's not been a death blow to our pride. Somewhere within this, that has not happened. To be poor in spirit is to receive a death blow to your pride. Well, we learn in Genesis there of the Lord Jesus Christ coming and bruising the Satan's head. The devil, destroyer, destroyer of lives. Well, he's come to destroy him and he's come to destroy all his effects in us. Well, bruising us the serpent's head, we'll be singing that in our Christmas carol service there in just over a month's time or so. Yes, that death blow. to our pride, the death blow to all that asserts itself against the glory of God and says, no, I'm not woe to me, I'm fine, or I'm not unclean, I can survive this. And as long as we're still saying that, we're not poor in spirit. We're actually there. All that's happening is we're going through a dreadful contortion within ourselves and our affections because of sin are all sent in the wrong direction. Our minds are weak. We can't grasp these things. We're all over the place and would accept any kind of insanity really, other than to believe in God and our will. And even if at times we might sort think there's something here, rise towards it, yet we feel so crippled within, so maimed within. And that's where our pride would keep us. Don't kill us, friends. That's where our pride will keep us. Stay still. Don't say what Isaiah said. Don't look to that God of the Bible there. Do not. Too scary. Too serious. Drop that. Leave it. Because actually, friends, no, we can't leave it. If we want to be poor in spirit and enjoy the blessedness that theirs is the kingdom of heaven, we've got to see a bit of this. Okay, we're not going to quite see as much as Isaiah saw, but we need to see something of this. And for there to have been for us a death blow to our pride, a death blow to our self-centeredness and self-righteousness and any thoughts that on our own, independent of God, that we're okay. Any thoughts that God's too, too involved here, let's not give him too much, inconvenience of it, and what you have to do on a Sunday, and oh dear, this is too much, too much. There has to be a death blow to that, and we have to be humbled in our hearts, that's it, humbled. That's the death blow to pride, is to be humbled. And we're left, aren't we there, in a sense, the beginning point of being poor in spirit, Self is in ruins and we're empty and we realise we're busted, we just can't match this, we can't live in his presence, this is too too much for us and we know that and we appreciate actually how far from God we are, not how near we are, because we've beheld something of his glory and as we beheld him, he is defining our situation for us, he is giving us the thoughts to think, he He's directing what we need to conclude about ourselves in order to truly come near to him and to have belonging in the kingdom of heaven. And it goes on for the Christian that we're always having to be defined by this and never having to rediscover something well Isaiah saw there and to dismiss pride when it rises up again with it. and tries to assert self over and against God. And that is a constant and daily battle to have that right attitude, that basic condition right at the centre of our heart. That's us as defined by God. Pride has no place here. It's not self-denial per se. It's not as though we We have to just sort of give up anything we ever enjoyed or just deny ourselves every pleasure we have and just feel guilty about all and everything of our existence. Because there's more to it than that, more to it than that. And pride again, would keep us from the blessing of that final heading, poor yet rich, poor yet rich. Because if we behold properly the glory of God. It doesn't leave us dead. It doesn't leave us just feeling undone and nothing more than that, a wretchedness that we just then carry with us. It doesn't just leave us with a kind of description of who we are, fallen short of the glory of God, hopeless cases, can't rescue ourselves. What news that is good is there in any of that? But when we know that this God forgives iniquities, wrongness of our hearts, all its perversity, all its pride, all its justification, all its uncleanness and desire and covetousness and idolatry, all the lusts of the heart, When we realize that we can be forgiven, that that high and mighty and holy being who just could leave us in a state of wretchedness and say, well, stay as you are, be undone, live with that condemnation hanging over you. And it gets worse because when you meet me in eternity, you are condemned forever. But he's not saying that. And he's saying to those who can be humbled for their sin, Have hope. Have hope. I am here for such people, and for such who can own that they are sinners in my sight, and can own my definition of them. And I can do so, so much for such people. Why? I can save them from their sin. And I can save them from their uncleanness. And I can do something about them living in a culture of uncleanness. And I can meet with them. I can help them because when they trust in me and particularly when they trust in my son and they trust in the one who loved people so much that he came from heaven, lived shockingly humble life for one so elevated and glorious, and endured such hardship, such poverty to himself, such injury to his great honor, and then died on a cross, which shocked people there to the core, shocked his own friends to the core, that he had to do that, and they tried to stop him doing it. They said, you're too good for this. He said, no, he had to do this. Because if he's gonna save anybody, if he's gonna enable any of us to stand in the presence of God, to behold his glory and live, and to be able to remain there, to relate to that God, know him as our father, then our sin, for all that stood between us, all the uncleanness that makes us to be in God's sight there so wretched, has to be forgiven. And we can't forgive ourselves, and we can't do anything to earn his forgiveness. But his son can die in the place of such people. And when we believe in him and what he's done and he's shed blood, then there's forgiveness. And that's forgiveness. That's deep forgiveness. That's the biggest forgiveness. It's great when we can forgive each other. When this fellow human being to fellow human being, we forgive each other. That is a great moment. Oh, when the God whose standards and laws and commandments so beyond us there, holy, holy, holy, when he says, and I forgive you. Sinful man, sinful woman, I forgive you. You trust in my son, I forgive you. And then I say to you, stay with me. Speak to me, ask of me. You can now come to me and call me your heavenly father. With all the smoke and all the glory, yes, with all of that. You need not fear now. you when you come into this company will just say I'm undone I have no place here because my son has answered on your behalf he who came into the world and knew no sin and and lived so spectacularly holy and perfectly in the midst of a world of unclean lips but never infected him He has died in the place of what the sinner deserves. Why is his death in fact? But he has borne that, paid that price. And when you see that, well that doesn't actually make you proud. Not of yourself. Can't do, can it really? Because we've just seen that's the death blow to pride. it's telling us you can't save yourself, you have no ability, you have no powers and resources to be able to come before me in your own right and entitled to be there. You have to rely upon my son and he's glorious, he's wonderful actually, he's excellent and he loves and he gives and he forgives and he carries on forgiving, and he will be so, so much for you. He'll be your elder brother. He'll be your carer. He'll be your guide. He'll be your friend. And you will rely on him and find in him all that you could ever want. We sung something like that, didn't we, in the hymn that we sung just a moment or two back. And that's to be rich. We can give it some theological terms. That's to be justified, actually. That's to have God declare, I see no sin here, no grounds for offense in my sight. totally acquitted, free, that's good, and adopted, my child now, you must stay with me, not go away from me, not fear me, not think of me now as so remote another and far, far away, but no, you must come to me, and you must pour out your heart to me, and whatever troubles you, you must tell me about, and I will hear it, and I answer prayer. That keeps us poor in spirit. It doesn't make us proud, but it does make us happy. There's the blessedness, that does make us happy. That does do something. If you've seen that, you've seen something. If you've seen how excellent is the Lord Jesus Christ, dear friend, you've seen something. You've seen something that'll never leave you the same again. Change you, change me. And so to be overpowered by him, overwhelmed by him, overwhelmed by his mercy and his love and his forgiveness, overwhelmed that he could actually care and bother about you and me from such heights of glory, where what do we contribute to God's sum happiness? Nothing at all. Yet God prefers and desires that we should be with him, that we should enjoy his companionship and friendship, that our minds might be change. We behold a world differently and behold ourselves differently. It's creative and it's productive and we can do things and we can see how we can change. And he gives us his Holy Spirit so there's actually power to change. And that means that we are in the kingdom of heaven. This is God's kingdom. The poor in spirit have seen something of this and learned to love him. Learn to see how excellent is his name, where theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And as citizens now of this new, new kingdom, this place where we are, what we enjoy, what good things that he pours out into us, and all our particular woes and griefs and uncleannesses and troubles that we live in a generation of unclean people with unclean lips. because there's help and we can change. And some of the things we'll read later about being, say, pure in heart, well, from that basic foundational condition of being poor in spirit, having discarded ourselves, our pride, who we are, and received instead a new identity from him, my child, my son, my daughter. loved of me, which is you, lover of my soul, that identity, then you can grow and you can change. And it's not to mean by that that you therefore disappear down a rabbit hole or look to have some sort of cloak of invisibility. I've ended up here standing in front of congregations preaching. We go out into the streets and we preach there. Oh, we make ourselves very, very visible and very, very loud and audible. We behave ourselves, but there we are, we're out there and we're telling people this glorious message. It doesn't mean we have nothing to say or We want to be invisible. No, we actually want to be more visible because we want to speak about Christ. We want to say what he's done for my soul. He's done so much. That's the poor in spirit. It's not about me. It's all about him. I'll tell you about that. And any of us there that know him would say, I'll tell you about that. I'll tell you how he changed me. I'll tell you how, how he loves me. I'll tell you how, how I deserved wrath. I didn't deserve any place in any of this. I didn't deserve to open a Bible and understand what this means. I pray and he answers my prayers. I deserve none of it. But that's what he's given me because I've now got the kingdom of heaven. I'm now a citizen there. I move around this new country and I have a new king and I relate to him and I just find it's a different, different world. All of a sudden, or however quickly or slowly it dawns upon us. It doesn't mean that we have to be perfectly poor in spirit to have got this. Who among us could say, yes, I've beheld so clearly and exactly and yes, I see Jesus Christ and I know I've got no righteousness of my own and never again do I doubt that. Well, I'm afraid we doubt that. Even as Christians, we question the things we shouldn't question and we pick up things which are actually sealed and sorted and all finished and all arranged, but we poke around and we mess around bring greater unhappiness to our soul by doing it. So we're still looking to become absolutely, perfectly poor in spirit. But we can qualify for the kingdom of heaven by seeing something of what I've been describing to you this morning here. And as I've said, the benefits, and I hope I've made that clear, the benefits are not, oh, a remote future. Oh, sure, there are benefits to come. When we get to heaven, we will wonder that we ever, ever doubted, never questioned. We will wonder that we ever thought that somehow we've got to get it all right, all here right now. But we will find that here now, there's help, change, there is mercy. There are discoveries of the goodness of God that just await each and every one of us out there to find. And that's, yes, it's blessed now. There is a happiness now. There is a joy and a peace and a hope right here, right now. Not just when we meet here in this place and here's the Bible and we're singing great hymns or whatever, but Monday morning out there, there's still a blessedness for the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So we begin with this foundational first beatitude, Get that one wrong and the rest fall as well. We'll miss the mark. We'll miss what it's saying to us. We'll be looking for something within ourselves, some power from here that we've got to do this or we've got to make this happen. But it's actually these things happen when this basic condition, this poverty of spirit, which actually makes us rich, is clearer and clearer and clearer in our thinking. then we can live more fully in the good of what these statements that our Lord famously made are offering to us, the promises that are open up to us, the invitations that have been given to you and to me to enjoy here now.