Matthew 5:3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The Gospel of grace without works or grace alone or Christ alone is the only Gospel that can possibly come from the God of Scripture and of all creation. The Gospel is not for those who think they can work their way to heaven or that they can fulfill a condition in their own strength that God sets out for them to do before He saves them. The Gospel if for poor sinners with hearts that are broken from their own strength and from all help that self can do. The Gospel is all of grace from the moment of the Gospel coming to the sinner, hearing it, and the heart being opened to it. The Gospel is all of grace from the first conviction of sin to the breaking of the heart from self and pride. The Gospel is all of grace in the hearing of it and of the new heart that a sinner must have to believe.
While some may look at Matthew 5:3 as something other than the Gospel of grace alone, in fact it is quite a display of the Gospel in its own way. Who are the blessed? The blessed ones are those who are poor in spirit. These are the only ones that are blessed. But what does it mean to be poor in spirit? It means for a person to be utterly impoverished and having no ability to lift self from that utter impoverishment of spirit. Those that the Lord has kindly broken their hearts and now they see and understand that they are utterly impoverished with a complete inability to help themselves, these are the ones that prize grace above all things. To the degree that a person things that he has some spiritual ability in self or that he has some ability to lift himself up, to that degree a person is not ready for grace alone.
It is this broken person who is ready to hear of a Gospel where God saves by grace alone and He does so for His glory alone. It is this broken-hearted person who loves to hear of a Savior that saves from all sin and all wrath so that all the glory is His and His alone. It is the spiritually impoverished (in self) person that beholds the cross of Jesus Christ and knows that apart from the cross s/he deserves nothing but the infinite wrath of God. It is only the spiritually impoverished person that looks to the imputed righteousness of Christ and wants nothing to do with trying to earn his own righteousness. Oh how blessed this person truly is when God opens his or her eyes to see the truth about self and then the truth about Christ. Those who don’t see how impoverished they are can have the truth in the form of a creed or the truth of this in their brain, but they don’t trust Christ alone from the depths of their souls. They trust in themselves to trust in Christ or they trust something about themselves. These are unbroken men and when they enter the pulpit to preach such things, it sounds hollow and shallow because it is not what has happened to them but instead they just know about these things from head knowledge.
Those who are poor in spirit are those who don’t live the reign and rule of self, but instead they live by the reign and rule of the kingdom of heaven which is the reign of Christ and of grace. Those who are under the reign of self are in the hands of fools, but those who are poor in spirit have been broken from that reign and they are now under the reign of love and of perfect wisdom. That is a great blessing. While indeed man longs to rule self and make his own decisions from what he thinks is a free-will, which is nothing but the means by which the evil one rules him. Those things are the very hand of the devil in keeping the soul under his bondage. It is ironic in some ways that the devil preaches freedom to those he has enslaved while Christ teaches sinners that they must become His slaves in order to have true freedom. But only the truly poor in spirit are broken from self and pride and so are broken from the slavery and bondage of self and the evil one. Thus they are the only ones that are truly blessed.
The Gospel of grace alone stands firmly against all the pride of men, the righteousness of men, and of the things of self. Until men are delivered from those things, they are not ready to have grace alone save them and they are not ready to have Christ as King and as Lord. Until the life of self has been broken or until they have died to self, people are not ready to have Christ as their very life. The Gospel of grace alone will not have any pretenders to the throne and will not have any works to have a voice in order to boast, but instead the Gospel of grace alone clears the way in the human heart for grace to reign in, through, and by Christ alone. In this the poor in spirit have nothing to boast of regarding self and everything to boast of regarding Christ and His cross. What a glorious Gospel of grace alone that we have, but man has to learn by the work of the Spirit to quit trying to share in the work. It is truly grace alone.
God Loves... Himself 
Leave a comment