I LOVE this from Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost For His Highest":
The Gateway To The Kingdom
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
— Matthew 5:3
Beware of placing Our Lord as a
Teacher first. If Jesus Christ is a Teacher only, then all He can do is to
tantalise me by erecting a standard I cannot attain. What is the use of
presenting me with an ideal I cannot possibly come near? I am happier without
knowing it. What is the good of telling me to be what I never can be — to be
pure in heart, to do more than my duty, to be perfectly devoted to God? I must
know Jesus Christ as Saviour before His teaching has any meaning for me other
than that of an ideal which leads to despair. But when I am born again of the
Spirit of God, I know that Jesus Christ did not come to teach only:
He came to make me what He teaches I should be. The Redemption means
that Jesus Christ can put into any man the disposition that ruled His own life,
and all the standards God gives are based on that disposition.
The teaching of the Sermon on the
Mount produces despair in the natural man — the very thing Jesus means it to
do. As long as we have a self-righteous, conceited notion that we can carry out
Our Lord’s teaching, God will allow us to go on until we break our ignorance
over some obstacle, then we are willing to come to Him as paupers and receive
from Him. “Blessed are the paupers in spirit,” that is the first principle in
the Kingdom of God. The bedrock in Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not
possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility —
“I cannot begin to do it.” Then Jesus says — “Blessed are you.” That is the
entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor! The
knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ
works.
Shalom in Him!
