Getting back to the first essay on The Mind of the Spirit (Summer 1999 InSearch), we were talking about the mind of the Spirit. The topic arose in connection with remembering that being saved involves more than the forgiveness of our sins. It involves the implanting of a whole new life in us by the Holy Spirit. We noticed that Romans 8:6 identifies two characteristics of the mind set on the Spirit: life and peace. The life that the Spirit gives is the human life of the Lord Jesus implanted in our hearts. With it comes peace, with God, with other humans and the creation, and peace in our own hearts. In this essay we want to begin to identify what that life is like. To do this we can hardly do better than turning to the beatitudes, found in the first great sermon in the Gospel of Matthew.

There are five major sermons found in Matthew:

Mt. 5-7 The Sermon on the Mount The constitution of the kingdom

Mt. 10 Instructions to the twelve The proclamation of the kingdom

Mt. 13 The sermon from the boat The growth of the kingdom

Mt. 18 The sermon on greatness The fellowship of the kingdom

Mt. 24-25 The Olivet Discourse The consummation of the kingdom 

Matthew contains a story section leading up to each of these five sermons, and the whole book is enclosed between the story of Jesus’ birth and that of his death and resurrection. The emphasis on the kingdom is appropriate because the gospel that both John the Baptist and Jesus proclaimed was the good news that God’s kingdom had arrived in the person of His incarnate son. While there is a perspective that says the kingdom was postponed because the Jews rejected Jesus and will come only in the millennium. The clear reference to the kingdom in Colossians 1:13-14 and 2 Peter 1:10-11 provides ample evidence that this is not so.

Salvation includes more than forgiveness. It brings new life into us. The life of the kingdom of God, which is the human life worked out by Jesus in his time on earth and imparted to us by the Holy Spirit. This is what Jesus means when He says in John 7:38-39, "’He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.’ But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom whose who believed in Him were to receive, for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified." What the Spirit imparts to us and implants in us is the humanity of the Lord Jesus, worked out for our benefit in His life in ancient Israel.

However, the old life with which we were born is still in us. Does that mean we now have two selves, the old one and the new one? That is exactly what the New Testament repeatedly makes clear. For instance, Matthew 10:38-39 says, "And he who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who has found his life shall lose it, and he who has lost his life for my sake shall find it." Ephesians 4:22-24 puts it this way, "…that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth." Colossians 3:9-10 reaffirms the concept in this way, "Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and have put on the new self who is being renewed in a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him." Paul says it again in Galatians 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and delivered himself up for me."

The Christian life is thus a two-way street. It involves a "putting off" and a "putting on."

Jesus, because He was sinless, had nothing to put off. We have our old life to put off if we are to manifest His new life in our walk through the world. In Matthew 11:28-29 Jesus uses the metaphor of a young ox being yoked together with an older ox to learn how to live the ox kind of life. "Come unto Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls, for My yoke is easy and My load is light."

What the new life is like is depicted most clearly in the Beatitudes, which introduce the sermon on the constitution of the kingdom. John Stott says this of it, "The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete delineation anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian counter-culture…And this Christian counter-culture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule." (The Sermon on the Mount, p. 19)

Before we begin to look at the Beatitudes, however, it is well to remind ourselves that they do not constitute a new set of laws by obeying which we attempt to offer something of value to God. The only right way to approach them is in grace. Grace means that we have been washed clean in God’s love through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Christ has taken away the guilt of our sinfulness and our sins and has offered Himself to the Father in our stead. Now we are to approach the Beatitudes, not as a set of legal requirements to gain God’s favor, but in loving gratitude for what God has done for us in Jesus. We will not do them perfectly this side of heaven, but we can grow in them day by day as we abide in Christ. Our natural tendency is to think of them as rules to keep to achieve a righteous standing in God’s sight. That’s because our old self is legalistic and Pharisaical to the core. The new self rests in what Christ has already done and seeks to learn of Him

There are eight beatitudes or "blesseds". The eighth alone is passive, dealing with those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Of the first seven, the fourth is a sort of turning point. Those before it deal with our relationship to God; those following with our relationship to people. With regard to the Greek word translated "blessed", Bromiley says in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, "’The special feature in the NT is use of the term for the distinctive joy which comes through participation in the divine kingdom." (p. 548) This reminds us of Jesus’ charge to "seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you." (Matt. 6:33). The reference of "these things" is to what we will eat and drink and be clothed with (vs. 31). It is a convicting thing to realize how deeply we have been invaded by the values of our culture with the result that we are much more likely to think of being happy or blessed with financial security, remunerative employment, a nice house and a recent car than we are to think of it is issuing from membership in God’s kingdom. In what follows I will first quote from a standard version of the Bible, then add the translation of a paraphrase (the

Message, by Eugene Peterson). Often a paraphrase can help us to perceive meaning in a passage to which our long association with the standard version has blinded us.

The first beatitude reads, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (New American Standard Version) "You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule" (The Message).

The addition of the two words, "in spirit", makes it clear that the reference is not to physical or financial poverty, but to a poverty of the heart. Poverty can be a spiritual problem as well as wealth can, though the Bible makes it clear that rich people are likely to have a specially hard time realizing their need for salvation. The reference in this passage is to spiritual poverty.

The story in Luke 18:9-14 is a good one to illustrate poverty in spirit. Jesus tells there of two men, a Pharisee and a publican, who went to the temple to pray. The Pharisee "stood and was praying thus to himself, ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get’" The tax-gatherer, on the other hand, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating on his breast and saying (not to himself, obviously, but to God), "God be merciful to me, the sinner." Jesus concluded with the remark that it was the latter rather than the former who "went down to his house justified."

The point here is that poverty of heart is not only a matter of recognizing specific sins we have committed. It goes deeper, to the independence from God and the consequent idolatry, which lie at the root of our particular misdeeds. That is where our problem really is. The Pharisees were not, humanly speaking, bad people. We would probably have thought of them as outstanding citizens. They were sensitive to specific sins and quick to deal with them. But they were deeply unaware of their basic independence from God. Their confidence in the Torah, or the revealed law, and in their interpretation of it, had blinded them to their heart-distance from the Giver of the Law. That is why Jesus was so often and so deeply critical of them.

There is a lesson here for us who are evangelicals. We are proud to have what we conceive to be correct doctrine and are quickly critical of anyone who doesn’t hold the doctrines we think are central in the Scriptures. Our basic independence from God, however, is much harder to us to recognize. Our lack of love, often even for each other, is a telling evidence of our failure to recognize what is really going on in our lives. We need very much to have the humility of the tax-gatherer.

One of the most telling appeals of our Lord Jesus deals with this very point. It is the one in Matthew 11 mentioned above. This is God the Son, God incarnate, speaking. He uses the metaphor of a yoke of oxen, linked by their common yoke so that the older ox can teach the younger one what useful oxen do. The message here is astonishing, to say the least. God Himself is offering to come down into our lives, yoke Himself to us, and teach us how to live the right way. This, in itself, is almost too good to be possible. That God should be interested in entering into the details of my daily life to show me how to live them—which is almost too much to believe.

However, the story isn’t finished yet. What He says He will teach us is gentleness and humility of heart. Here is One who has no broken sinfulness in Him, but is completely dependent on the Holy Spirit of God to produce the kind of life God desires for His human creatures. He is working out, in the cluttered, sinful culture of first century Palestine, the humanity that the Holy Spirit will later instill in those who. through faith, are born again. (John 7:37-39).

When Jesus was here in person, his disciples continually misunderstood what he was doing. They looked for the establishment of an earthly kingdom with the dominion and power of the kingdoms they knew. They certainly did not perceive the cross as a step in the direction of His kingdom, and they looked for positions of power and prominence for themselves in the kingdom they had in mind. It took the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and years of struggling for them to begin to see that what Jesus had in view was quite different, and that for them, too, the apparent defeat of the cross was the way for the accomplishment of God’s plan for them and for His restored program in creation.

Thus heart-poverty is the first step in developing the mind of the Spirit. We must learn how deep is our self-centered independence from God and how much we need, like the tax-gatherer, to plead for God’s mercy if we hope to go down to our house justified. The gospel road to God’s goal for His people is radically different from the world’s concept of the path to success. But it comes to us, who are weary and heavy-laden, with Jesus’ sure promise of rest to our souls.

Let us, then, in gratitude for God’s undeserved grace in Christ, seek to cultivate the humility of which poverty in spirit speaks. This isn’t easy, but it is blessed, for it brings with it the kingdom and the kingship of God. To even begin to appreciate the riches of that kingdom will take a major shift of perspective for us, steeped as we are in the ideas of success and accomplishment characteristic of this lost and broken culture. But it will be infinitely worthwhile.

This is enough for this essay. We will continue to look at the other beatitudes, God-willing, in the next one.