Just as Moses ascended Mount Sinai, to receive the 10 commandments, Jesus ascended a mountain to give us the principles of the kingdom.
Mat 5:1 and seeing the multitudes, He went up (to ascend) on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. 2 Then He opened His mouth and taught (instruct) them saying; 3 Blessed (a spiritual state of being happy or privileged, possessing the favor of God, that state of being marked by fullness from God, fully satisfied no matter the circumstances) are the poor in spirit (utter helplessness, complete poverty) for (for this reason, because) theirs is (to come into existence, occurring right now) the kingdom of heaven.
For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ-John 1:17
The laws of the kingdom are spiritual laws of being.
Romans 8: 1 There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.
The word law means principle, or power. It also-means something that is parceled out, allotted, what one has in use and possession. We have been given (imparted) a measure of His Spirit in the new birth.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. The will of God is a state of spirit; it is having a right spirit.
The Lord wants to purify our spirits. Our spirit can be defiled. It is only the seed of God in our spirit that cannot sin. We may still have things in our spirits which we know should not be there. Because we want a right spirit we pray, “Lord, renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10). How will we have that right spirit?
The Holy Spirit brings to pass the purification of our spirits. After we turn aside from sin, we must go through a period in which the subconscious mind is reconditioned. New responses will come forth. Ways in which we once responded to circumstances and situations change.
In the Scriptures we see that God used certain men in a mighty way, but things in their spirits kept coming out and they would fail. There was fear in Peter’s spirit in that he denied his Lord.
You see James and John, the sons of thunder: James was the first of the disciples to lay his life down for the Lord as a martyr; John, who lived such a long time that they wondered if he would ever die, was called the apostle of love. These two, James and John, were willing to bring fire down out of heaven to consume a city of the Samaritans. Jesus said, “You know not what spirit you are of” (Luke 9:55).
God wants perfection in our spirits. We cry out to be pure in our spirits before the Lord. The imperfections in our spirits come out and become the occasion of many defeats.
In the end times the lord shall sit as a refiner and purifier of our spirits
Malachi 3: 3 and he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi, and refine them as gold and silver; and they shall offer unto Jehovah offerings in righteousness.
4 Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto Jehovah, as in the days of old, and as in ancient years.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus teaches about the Kingdom. Much of the Sermon on the Mount is talking about the human spirit and its relationship to God: so much, that if you keep that in mind you can meditate on the Sermon on the Mount for a while and find outlined there what you want in your spirit. Jesus was opening up the great secrets of the Kingdom, and this teaching was very necessary and basic to it.
In verses 13 through 16 Jesus used both the illustration of the salt and the light as referring to the human spirit. If the salt loses its savor it is not good for anything. It is cast out and trodden underfoot of men.
In other words, if there is not a right spirit in what you do, you can be as religious as possible, but you are cast out to be trodden underfoot of men. If there is nothing real in your spirit, your whole endeavor is empty. The secret is how much of God is in your spirit when it comes forth.
God said that if the salt has lost its savor, if there is no right spirit in it, let it be stomped underfoot of men. Let men reject it, because phony religion is not an answer for the world. The answer is a light on a lampstand where everyone can see it. When Jesus said, “You are the light of the world,” he was talking about a person’s spirit.
Are you to let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and say, “My, what a great humanitarian! Let’s make a statue to him”? No, glorify the Father.
All your works will glorify yourself unless they are done with a right spirit. If they are done with a right spirit, they glorify the Father. Those who are doing things for credit to themselves are doing them with a wrong spirit.
Because of the Spirit of God that is working within us, He is being glorified in what we do. The things of a right spirit we call “blessed.”
Beatitude means blessed—“Blessed are…” You notice the Beatitudes are not giving you the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt, and thou shalt not,” but they are something different. They bless a person not so much for what they do, but for what is in their spirit.
The truth that God is showing is that you can so live your life that in everything you do your spirit coming through will glorify the Father. Everything that people see in you will give glory to God.
We can have something so pure in our spirits that in every labor, everything we do, God will get the glory. Because of the purity of our spirits, something beautiful can come through, and the Lord will be glorified.
THE POOR IN SPIRIT
Picture yourself in the crowd that day when the Lord sat down on a little hill with the people gathered around, and He taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:3.
The Word is so concentrated. How long do you suppose it took Him to preach that sermon? How did Jesus explain what it is to be poor in spirit? It is a quality of spirit to be poor in spirit.
What is the opposite of being poor in spirit? Being rich in spirit? No, the person who is poor in spirit is also rich in spirit-theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
We have to contrast the poor in spirit with the proud in spirit; they are strong in their own human abilities. The person who is not poor in spirit is one who has an arrogant spirit, perhaps with a facade of phony humility; an arrogant, unteachable spirit; a self-assertive spirit; a ruthless spirit that drives to get what it wants; a sensitive spirit that is easily offended; a dominating, strong spirit; a pushy spirit; an ambitious spirit; a spirit of self-preservation, always looking out for number one; an image-guarding spirit which guards and protects their image before people; a defensive spirit, always on the defensive. All of these are the opposite of the poor in spirit.
To be selfless is to be poor in spirit. There are people who are so lost in God that self is no longer their burden.
The person who is poor in spirit is not seeking their own. In a sense, they are poor in their spirit because they are always giving to the Body. They have no attitude of things being their own, but of everything belonging to the Lord and to the Body of Christ. A person who is poor in spirit is a person who has given their life to enrich their brother and sister, to see their life become an extension of the Body, an extension of Christ, but conversely, theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
They have lost their desire for individual identity. All they want is to be an extension of the Lord. This means that every person in the Body of Christ is an extension of one another and of Christ, and Christ is an extension of them.
To be poor in spirit means that you lose your fear of man, and consequently you lose the fear of consequences. If you lose the fear of man, you are no longer afraid of people; you are bold.
The person who is poor in spirit reacts differently in any situation. Watch how a person who is proud in spirit receives offenses. “How dare that boss of mine speak to me like that!” Fuming, proud in spirit, he paces the floor. “No one can do that to me!”
How do they respond to trials? The person who is proud in spirit does not bend with the stresses. The tree that stands in the storm is the tree that bends with the wind. The person who comes through the pressure is the person who is poor in spirit. When the winds and the storms beat against them, they bow with them, and yet they are immovable.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, because you can never impoverish them; they are always rich. Blessed are the poor in spirit, because they have the important things that no one can take from them.
THEY THAT MOURN
In Matthew 5 is a Beatitude speaking about mourning, a quality of spirit the Lord has laid before us which is a key of the Kingdom. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Matthew 5:4.
In the preceding chapter we are told, 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 4:23. When He came up on the mountain, He saw the multitudes and taught them principles of the Kingdom.
The Kingdom of God involves something more than we have known. It is something more than the rules and regulations of Mount Sinai or even the morality of the Christian Church: it involves something wrought in our spirit by God Himself. Consequently, when the Lord gave the Beatitudes He was speaking about the human spirit.
We read in Luke 17:21, …the kingdom of God is within you. All the external things are illusions, and that which is within us is reality. The illusions will pass away and change, but God within us and what He does in our spirits and becomes in our spirits is that which is eternal. Jesus was talking about the human spirit when He said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
What does it mean to mourn? To mourn is to have a grieving of your spirit. It is synonymous with having an overwhelming yearning for God. Why do we mourn? Is Jesus speaking about those who bury a loved one, and then go home to look across an empty room and mourn and weep? No, for God and time itself give comforting and healing.
The mourning Jesus spoke of is that overwhelming quality in our spirit that God wants to be there. It is a grieving of spirit, an overwhelming yearning for God. It is a different mourning which is deep in the human spirit.
There is a joy and a rejoicing and a faith with which God is pleased, yet when He anticipates so much that is to come forth in us, He does not look upon our inadequacy, but our mourning over it. He sees us mourning because of our limitations of knowing Him and walking with Him. We know there could be something better. We yearn to know Him, to walk with Him more completely. We come into that deep, deep mourning over our limitations. He looks upon our hearts and sees us mourn because we are so limited in the way we have believed Him and appropriated His promises. We mourn because we are limited in the flow of love and the ministry that we can give to people. We yearn to see something far beyond what we have been able to give.
Sometimes we mourn in the spirit for our slowness of heart to believe all that God has said and because of the slowness and the delay to our perfection. We are like those of the eighth chapter of Romans: …even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit the redemption of our body—knowing that all creation is groaning and in travail, waiting for us, waiting for that manifestation of the sons of God so that it can be loosed from its vanity and futility.
We mourn deeply when we see a brother’s or a sister’s hostility and those invisible walls that shut out the blessing of the Lord from them. We mourn for those that have no ears to hear. We feel the word of God with its burning fire within our bones, and we speak it, and for those who have no ears to hear it we mourn. We mourn for our sin, and even more we mourn for our fears that we cannot trust Him more. We mourn for those times when we have looked to ourselves and found our inadequacy instead of looking to Him to help us.
The Word of God tells us something so important: Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. This mourning is a reaction of a beautiful spirit toward God, but when resentment comes up, hostility and a judging spirit, that is not the spirit the Lord is talking about. He is speaking of the mourning of that spirit which is filled with love. …it thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. I Corinthians 13:5, 6.
When it hears that a brother has been overtaken in a trespass, it does not gloat or judge, it mourns. I am not as concerned about what sin a member falls into as I am concerned about what Paul said over the brother who had sinned: “Ye have not rather mourned” (I Corinthians 5). Oh, to think that this brother had to be set outside of Christ for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus! It was so unnecessary, if there had only been a church to mourn for him.
A new day is opening up to move forward, to come into a tremendous experience, not of soul searching, but of spirit purifying. The remnant will go through a baptism of spiritual fire. God will sit and judge, refining all the sons of Levi as silver is refined in the fire, and then shall they offer unto the Lord a pure offering as in the days of old (Malachi 3:3, 4).
For our worship to be pure, our spirits have to be refined and made pure. Is it in your spirit to cry unto the Lord, “O Lord, purify me; take the things out of my spirit that are wrong. Then you will be comforted.
Within us is a deep grieving of spirit, a silent mourning of heart, and if we could only voice it, a loud wail and a shriek would fill the whole earth and go up to heaven itself, saying, “O God, loose Your servants. Comfort those of us who mourn. For the prophecy was written in Isaiah 61 that God would comfort all those that mourn in Zion and give us beauty for ashes.” Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Set yourself to pray and seek the Lord if you want this quality of mourning in your spirit. It will keep you from the failures, mistakes, and limitations. For the seed of every failure is in the human spirit, not in the flesh. It is the flesh that gives it an occasion, but if it were not in your spirit, you could not fall.
Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. II Corinthians 7:1. That perfect deliverance is ours.
God is going to help us come into the purifying of our spirit. Cry unto the Lord to be poor in spirit, and mourn, until we come into a purity of spirit.
God grant that this word will be effective in your life from this moment, whether it be just a little grieving of heart or the depth of mourning before the Lord. Let it be a reality in your spirit, because we are coming to Mount Zion and to the spirits of just men made perfect.