Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to The Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott and our podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life right here, right now and I'm very excited to be diving in to The Sermon on the Mount with you today, Paul.

Paul Tripp [00:00:18]: Yes, our big topic is how to live a vibrant, hopeful, courageous, confident Christian life in a world that's just gone insane, where you will face sufferings of various kinds, unpredictable things, a culture that does not respect your faith, and excited that we could root that in Christ's lengthiest teaching.

[00:00:48] I want you to think of this teaching as Jesus lovingly giving you a map and lovingly erecting guardrails for you. So why don't you read the beginning. The last episode, we talked about the fact that He prioritizes character, starts with character and we talked about the importance of that, so let's read the Beatitudes, if you would do that.

SA [00:01:18]: Yes, see what He actually says. That was Matthew 5, starting with verse one.

¹ Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.
The Beatitudes
² And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
⁵ “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
⁶ “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
⁷ “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
⁸ “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
⁹ “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
¹⁰ “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
¹¹ “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

[00:02:21] We'll stop there at verse 12.

PT [00:02:24]: Well, I want to say a couple things and then, I want to give the title for these twenty minutes. First thing I want to say is that we're going to spend one episode on each one of these character qualities because we want to have people get the full sense of this portrait.

[00:02:47] This is not a list. This is a portrait. This is a painting by words of what it means to follow Jesus, so it's important that we see it as a portrait because they're interrelated and interconnected, and that's important to understand.

[00:03:12] The second thing that is really important to see is these are blessings. This is not Jesus saying, "Okay, you had better be poor in spirit or you're in trouble." That's not the character of this. In fact, you could actually translate the original word "happy".

[00:03:40] This is happy existence only made possible by grace. If you look through this list, none of these things are natural for us. They're not natural and that's why if you look at them as a legalistic list, they're very defeating. Who wouldn't look at this list if this is what I have to measure up to and not be completely depressed?

SA [00:04:10]: Yes, I'm cooked, yes.

PT [00:04:13]: This is not who I naturally am and so, if you become this person, you have been visited by grace. It's beautiful and Jesus is saying, "I'm going to give you the grace to be this as my children." So that's not the way I thought about this growing up in my Christian family.

SA [00:04:40]: Yes, me neither.

PT [00:04:43]: It was "you better" and it didn't have that beautiful overlay of God's grace. And if you look at the list, there's no way you could work these things up in yourself. Come on, if you could turn yourself into this kind of person, the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus would not have been necessary. Your Bible wouldn't be necessary. Your church wouldn't be necessary.

SA [00:05:19]: Yes, it's real important to know that Jesus is laying down a foundation that is impossible and so, that should lead us to a specific conclusion. We need Jesus in order to be like Jesus.

PT [00:05:34]: The impossibility of God's law is itself a grace.

SA [00:05:39]: Yes, yes, and answer why.

PT [00:05:43]: Because it drives you beyond yourself. It throws you down on your knees and say, "I can't." I think of standing in front of God's holy righteous standard as me standing in the middle of a gymnasium and my job is to jump and touch the ceiling.

[00:06:04] And with delusional confidence, I jump the first time; but ten jumps later, I'm exhausted. Thirty jumps in, I'm totally defeated and laying on the floor of the gym saying, "I can't, I can't, I can't," and so, every law that God gives us is inhabited by His grace because He comes near to us, because He knows these are impossible for us. It's a means of drawing us to self. This is Paul saying, "The good I want to do, I do not do and the evil I don't want to do, that's what I do. Oh, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me?"

SA [00:06:52]: Thanks be to God.

PT [00:06:53]: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, my Lord. Of course, and so, we should approach The Sermon on the Mount in the same way. Well, I would title this episode "It's Important to Be Poor". Now...

SA [00:07:17]: Which can be misunderstood, for sure.

PT [00:07:19]: Well, I just want to say that we live in a culture that does not esteem poverty of any kind. We hate material poverty and we make ridiculous, undeserved heroes out of people who are heroes for no other reason than they have oodles of money. They can be creeps, but they have oodles of money.

SA [00:07:56]: So we respect them.

PT [00:07:57]: And we hold them as heroes. We don't esteem people who have poverty of spirit. We think they're pushovers, they're losers, and we mock what we think of as weakness. So right away, we're greeted with the utter counterintuitiveness of what Jesus will bless His children with. It's just different than what the world would esteem.

[00:08:42] I mean, it's amazing watching children in youth basketball how they make a shot and they run and get in somebody's face. You know, where did they learn that? They learned that from professional athletes because we esteem that behavior. And I'm thinking, "You're four years old. You can barely dribble a basketball. You're shooting a hoop that's six-feet-high."

SA [00:09:16]: Yes, and you're like, "Ohh."

PT [00:09:17]: "You actually have nothing."

SA [00:09:19]: Right, and that's us.

PT [00:09:22]: Of course it is.

SA [00:09:23]: Yes, that's us. It's not just the four-year-old.

PT [00:09:25]: No. So we'll face the counterintuitive nature of what Jesus, the unnatural nature of what Jesus calls for. Now, why is it important, vital, good to be poor? Well, the answer is because you are.

SA [00:09:53]: Whether you realize it or not.

PT [00:09:54]: And He says blessed are the poor in spirit. Okay, Shelby, what does the "in spirit" mean? Why does He put the qualifier there?

SA [00:10:06]: Yes, I think it would be easy to think "blessed are the poor monetarily" when it comes to money or possessions or something like that, but "poor in spirit" is really a sense of recognizing who you actually are.

[00:10:23] It's a sense of humility and it's [an] embracing of the neediness that you have in your life to approach God with empty hands. "Poor in spirit" recognizes that I am who I am and God is who He is correctly through the lens of scripture.

PT [00:10:45]: I'm going to say something that will seem radical and then, we can discuss it, but the most beautiful people out there, the people you want close to you, the people you will trust, the people you will esteem and respect are the people that get up in the morning and say, "I have nothing and I deserve nothing, and I only am able to be what I'm supposed to be by divine calling and divine empowering."

[00:11:27] That's it and so, those people are not arrogant. They're not entitled. They're not demanding. They're not critical and judgmental. They know they don't deserve anything and so, they're patient, they're kind, they're humble, they're faithful, they're giving, they're generous. It's beautiful.

SA [00:11:58]: Yes, it really is. It's a different type of lifestyle and it is easy to mock. It is easy to make fun of people who are content in where God has placed them and how that might not line up with what the world says is successful, but "poor in spirit" is what God calls us to because it's about the heart.

PT [00:12:25]: So, let's talk about poverty of spirit and suffering. One of the reasons that suffering is hard is because we think we're rich and deserving. "How dare you do this to me?" And that coming into suffering — even if it's subtle inside of you — coming in with that to suffering will make your suffering so much harder.

SA [00:12:58]: Yes, it'll worsen, yes.

PT [00:13:00]: And when you enter suffering realizing, "I don't actually deserve anything and any good thing in my life is a gorgeous, undeserved gift," you just suffer very differently because your immediate response is not to go at war with God because, "How dare He treat you this way?"

SA [00:13:31]: Yes, Proverbs 29:23 says, "One's pride will bring him low, but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor." That's presented to us right there. If you think that you deserve all these things, that was actually going to be your destruction.

[00:13:52] But if you're lowly in spirit, if you're poor in spirit, if you're willing to admit your neediness, that's where you gain honor. That's where you get... you know, rise up to the level that is actually fulfilling. It's by going down.

PT [00:14:09]: There's an incident recorded in the Gospels that is a real picture of our struggle with being poor in spirit. It's in Mark. Jesus has just laid out that He's going to suffer and die. Now, you think that the disciples would be sad and have all kinds of questions about that and be a bit fearful because they've forsaken everything to follow Jesus.

[00:14:49] Well, they're traveling, they're on the road and Jesus observes that the disciples are in some kind of argument. And so, when they arrive, He says, "Hey, guys, what were you talking about," and they're sort of...

SA [00:15:04]: Which he knew, by the way.

PT [00:15:05]: Yes, they're sort of embarrassed and they admit that they were discussing who's going to be greatest in the kingdom. Now, think about that juxtaposition. Jesus has talked about His suffering and they immediately transition to this conversation "which one of us is going to be the greatest". It's the exact opposite of being poor and so, the rootedness of this character is poverty of spirit is not feigning humility. It's a conscious, humble omission of who you actually are.

SA [00:16:00]: That's difficult to do because praying for humility is something that if you genuinely want it, God's going to give it to you and He probably won't give it to you in the way that you want it. I've been praying for that for several years now and I kind of naively initially thought if I pray for humility and wisdom and faith, He'll kind of just zap me with it and then all of a sudden, I'll be wise. All of a sudden, I'll be humble. All of a sudden, I'll be more faithful, but that's not how it works.

[00:16:33] You have to go through the difficulties of life and so, you might be thinking, "Why me?" It's to your point earlier in the previous episode. It's a means of God's grace that you're going through the things that you're going through. This is Plan A. This is what God is doing in your life, so embrace that and see how that leads you to be lowly in spirit, poor in spirit, needy.

PT [00:16:58]: So, what should your response be to "blessed are the poor in spirit"? Well, I would say pray for eyes to see yourself as you actually are, not to defeat you or depress you, but because it's only when you see yourself as you actually are that you want what only God can give; and that's the best way of living, that in this world, as messed up as it is, there's a pathway of blessing. It begins with confessing who I actually am. That's a blessing. Sightedness is a blessing.

SA [00:17:53]: Reality.

PT [00:17:54]: Living ridiculously blind to who you actually are is a curse. Sightedness is a blessing because the way the gospel works is until you accept the bad news, the good news won't be interesting to you and so many of us are struggling because we are actually entitled and we are actually demanding and we do actually think we're something better than we are.

[00:18:32] And so, we get mad at God and we get mad at the people who are obstacles in our life and that's not a sweet way of living. That's a hard way of living. That brings hardship to your hardship. It's a blessing to be poor and when you're there, you are like a sponge for grace. You just want as much grace as God will pour down on you and you're so busy celebrating grace that you're not giving your mind to complaining about all the things you don't think you deserve.

SA [00:19:15]: Yes, you're living with gratitude. You're living in a way that recognizes that there's more grace in God, that there is sin in me and that just leads you to a lowly place to say, "Thank You, thank You, thank You for all that You've given to me." What a great way to live!

PT [00:19:31]: Yes, if you live well, you got to know it's a sweet thing to be poor.