Please forgive my error! Feb 20 blog was inadvertently posted twice!

February 21

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” Matthew 5:3.

To be ‘poor in spirit’ is not, in actuality, to be poor in any way. Rather, to be poor in spirit is to be unencumbered by the strivings of the world. The man who is poor in spirit is the man who is free of any desire for temporal things; he is the man who is totally free to dedicate himself to the Kingdom of Christ.

The Word of God tells us in Matthew 6:24, “You cannot serve two masters; you cannot serve God and mammon. For you must love the one and hate the other.” Jesus Himself spoke these very profound and telling words and He exemplified the humility of spirit that those who follow after Him must attain.

Here is a definition of poor in spirit from a commentary by Emmet Fox on the Sermon on the Mount: “To be poor in spirit means to have emptied yourself of all desire to exercise personal self-will and what is just as important to have renounced all preconceived opinions [prejudices] in the wholehearted search for God.

“It means to be willing to set aside your present habits of thought, your present views and prejudices, your present way of life, if necessary—to jettison in fact anything and everything that can stand in the way of your finding God.”

So the person who is poor in spirit recognizes his total lack of eternal treasure and is willing to sacrifice anything and everything in order to obtain it.

The person who is poor in spirit recognizes that as Jesus, “…who was in the form of God and equal to God, made Himself of no reputation and took on the form of a man, “ Philippians 2:7, so he must empty himself in order to pursue the treasure Jesus sacrificed all in order to bring to man.

As it was said of Jesus in Philippians 2:8-11, “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him a name that is above every name. And at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The man who is willing to empty himself of everything as Jesus did, the man who is willing to live his life in pursuit of eternal rather than of temporal achievement, will be the man who receives the promise that was given to all who follow after the Christ—he shall “rule and reign with Him,” II Timothy 2:12.