Heart to heart …….

Praying for Poverty                                                                 Glenn Slater, Administrator

January 20, 2012

As a new year dawns, what are you praying for?  On a large scale you may be praying for our nation or your church. Perhaps you are praying for the health of a loved one or for someone’s salvation.  On a personal level, you might be praying for God to strengthen your faith or perhaps help you with some area of sin in your life. All of these areas of concentration are very worthwhile, but I wonder if any of us has every prayed for poverty.

Praying for poverty? Look at the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. In the very first of the Beatitudes, our Lord said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” What did Jesus mean by this?

The obvious first thought that comes to mind is humility. Being poor in spirit is certainly the opposite of pride or arrogance. It refers to someone who realizes the poverty of his own life without God and the constant need they possess for a savior and a relationship with Christ.

I’ve read this many times and it is easy to just read it and nod my head and be reminded once again about the value of a humble and contrite spirit. But over the holidays, I read some commentaries on this passage and came to the realization that in Jesus’ request for us to be “poor in spirit,” He was admonishing us to consciously accept the fact that we are human.

In our daily walk with God, you would think that we would realize our nature and limitations as humans. However, in reality, understanding and accepting the fact that we are human is actually a real struggle for all of us. When we are tempted by the enemy, we are being lured into thinking that we are not human. Satan wants us to believe we are godlike and thereby immune to sin and punishment.

Consider some of the more notable situations in scripture that illustrate this tactic of the devil. The very first sin comes to mind when the serpent spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden. When the creature coaxed Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit, he told her, “You will not surely die,” and then he went further and said outright to her, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 2:4-5) In that moment, Satan convinced Eve that she was not a mere human subject to God’s law, but rather she had the potential to be a god herself.

The same tactic was used on our Lord Himself while he was in the wilderness. Satan played on the fact that Jesus was indeed God in the flesh and hence he tempted Him to do godlike things. Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread or throw Himself off the temple or take ownership of the whole world. However, Christ resisted all of these lures and instead humbled Himself, refused to use His power and instead accepted His human limitations. 

In doing this, Jesus fulfilled the words of Hebrews 4:15, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin.”  By allowing Himself to feel the human pressure of sin, Christ put Himself in a position to truly relate to us and be a genuine advocate.  How thankful I am that Jesus chose to be human!

One writer expressed it this way, “The temptation in the desert would have Jesus betray humanity in the name of God… Jesus’ “no” to Satan is His “yes” to our poverty. He did not cling to His divinity. He did not simply dip into our existence, wave a magic wand of divine life over us and then hurriedly retreat back to His eternal throne. Nor did He leave us with a tattered dream, letting us brood over the mystery of our existence….  With the full weight of His divinity, He descended into the abyss of human experience, penetrating its darkest depths. He was not spared from the dark mystery of our poverty as human beings.” When we sin, it is a departure from the poverty of being truly human and a step toward striving to be divine, a step which will inevitably fail. 

If you have ever been around someone who is homeless and in a state of material poverty, you find out quickly that these folks don’t try to impose themselves on you. They do not consider themselves in any way superior to others. You find that they are also quite thankful for even the smallest gift or act of kindness. Poor people often willingly accept their circumstances and do not expect any sort of entitlement.  They are truly grateful for such things as a warm bed.

So, what does it mean for us to be poor in spirit? It means that we accept our circumstances before God, do not show any sense of pride, and show the deepest gratitude for all of God’s gifts, no matter how insignificant they may seem.  This state of poverty in our hearts means that we accept our brokenness, our limitations, our flaws, and the simple fact that we are not God and never will be.  But, in such a state of poverty, we find that it forces us to want God more as we realize how much we need Him.

So, with this new year, God has challenged me to pray for my own personal poverty, which means avoiding any tendency to be divine and thereby cling to my humanity.  I pray that all of us will stop trying to get attention, will stop trying to exalt ourselves, will consider no one as beneath us, and seek to no longer be in charge of our lives.  Let us strive to accept our full responsibility of being human and seek to be poor in spirit that will, in turn, drive us to the Almighty God of the universe. 

As Paul pleaded with God to remove a human frailty which he called his “thorn in the flesh,” God simply replied, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (II Corinthians 12:9)  

Please click on the date for a previous Heart to heart for 2010-2011: