How to Inherit God’s Kingdom
Matthew 5:1-3
INTRODUCTION
I suppose since time began people have made a mad pursuit to find happiness. Many have tried money. One such Texas millionaire said; “I thought money could buy happiness. I have been miserably disillusioned.” Actress Sophie Tucker obviously thought differently. When asked about her early struggles for success and whether or not she had found a certain happiness in her years of poverty, she answered, “Listen, I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor. And believe me, rich is better.”
Others have thought happiness came with notoriety. Voltaire, a famous individual in Europe during the 18th century, said to his doctor as he lay dying, “I am abandoned by God and man. I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months’ life.” Still others have looked for happiness in political power. One of the world’s greatest statesmen said to Billy Graham, “I am an old man. Life has lost all meaning. I am ready to take a fateful leap into the unknown.”
True happiness comes when we give up our efforts to find happiness and simply receive it as God’s free gift to us. Happiness comes when we receive forgiveness of our sins, sins that Christ paid for on Calvary. It comes when we study and apply the very practical ways Christ has taught us to find happiness.
As Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount, he gives a series of conditional sayings that we call the Beatitudes. This means a state of happiness or a state of bliss. The intention of Christ in making these statements is that people could be happy. It is God’s desire that his people be happy, not sad. Sadness and unhappiness are not signs of godliness and should not be a constant state in the Christian’s life.
The happiness Jesus says will result from obeying these statements is not just an outward happiness but an inward contentment that can be experienced no matter what the circumstances around us or in our life might be. It is a state of peace we can enjoy no matter how difficult things may be in our life.
The word blessed means happy, fortunate or blissful and in this light is a characteristic of God. The only way we can experience this happiness is to have the nature of God within us. Now we have all been created in the image of God, but that image is now marred in humanity due to our rebellion against God. So the only way we can now achieve happiness is by restoring our relationship with him. No unbeliever can expect to have the kind of happiness Jesus speaks of in these verses.
Not only must we have a relationship with God but we must also be true in our obedience to him. Some of these Beatitudes seem as if they would lead to misery but it is the kind of misery that will in reality lead to happiness.
WE CANNOT INHERIT GOD’S KINGDOM OURSELVES
The first thing Jesus says is that those who would inherit God’s kingdom must be poor in spirit or, as one translation puts it, must realize their need for him. Poor means to shrink cower or cringe.
Our image of poor is probably not what Jesus has in mind here. There are many people in America who are classified as poor but when compared with the poor of other developing countries would be considered rich. A person with an annual income of $12,000 in America is considered poor, but what about the person in another country who only makes $800 annually.
The word poor should bring to mind a beggar; one who does not know where his next meal will come from or his next night’s sleep. The beggars of Jesus’ day would beg for money and cover their faces so that no one would know who they were. So it does not describe one who does not have much but one who has nothing at all.
Matthew’s account of the Beatitudes is important at this point. Luke’s account simply says, “God blesses you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is given to you.” Matthew adds the most important words, “in spirit.” This helps us to know that Jesus is not speaking about poverty in the material realm. If Jesus’ words referred to material poverty then it would be an unchristian thing for Christians to try and alleviate the burdens of the poor, starving and destitute. In doing those things we would be abolishing what brings them closer to God. Jesus is not referring to material poverty.
Neither is Jesus referring to being poor-spirited. A poor-spirited person is one who lacks drive and enthusiasm in life. They have a healthy dose of low self-esteem.
Jesus is talking about spiritual poverty as the verse says. We are to be “poor in spirit.” This spiritual poverty must be genuine not an act or show we put on in front of others as the religious leaders of Jesus’ day tried to do. Jesus saw right through that as well as did many others. To be poor in spirit means to let go of pride. Allowing God to remove pride from our life will also allow him to fill the void with humility, which is a virtue in his sight and highly praised in many places in his Word.
We must come to the place where we realize we are bankrupt when it comes to entering his Kingdom on our own. It is only through his grace that we have any hope at all, but his grace is abundant and freely offered. We have no hope of security or salvation apart from his grace. It is not the idea of, “Come on, old chap, I guess we’ll just have to try harder to pull you up by your bootstraps.”
It is a paradox, but the Sermon on the Mount is really for those who know they can’t live by what Jesus teaches. The same was true with the Law that God gave in the Old Testament. It was impossible for anyone to live by it. It was designed to so frustrate the individual who was trying to live by it that they would give up and run to God for help. It was given to show people how sinful they were and then to compare that with God’s requirements.
This idea is illustrated well as God was giving Moses the law on Mt. Sinai. While God was giving his commands for the people to Moses, the people were down in the valley doing the very things God had forbidden them to do. Sinful and rebellious people could not live up to the standards God was giving.
Many realized this and availed themselves of the sacrificial system established by God. Others refused to submit to God’s standards and tried to please God by their own self-efforts. They tried to whittle down the standards of God’s law to meet their own level of performance and in the process lowered God’s standards. This missed the whole intent of God’s law.
Jesus faced this same type of hypocrisy during his ministry in the form of the religious leaders. He was confronted time and time again by religious leaders who claimed to obey the law but who missed the very spirit of God’s law.
And so we cannot enter God’s kingdom by our own efforts. We are powerless to live up to the high standards he has established for humanity. Our only hope is to trust in Christ, the only one who truly fulfilled the standards of God. Through him we can live up to God’s requirements for us.
We are reminded of the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector who went to the Temple to pray. As all eyes are focused on him, the Pharisee struts in and makes his way down front. He thanks God he is not like other people. He thanks God that he is not a sinner and that he is not like that tax collector. He boasts of his fasting and of his giving. He boasts of all the good things he has done. He was filled with pride. But then there was the tax collector who stood at the back. He would not even lift his eyes to heaven but beat on his chest and cried out to God recognizing his sinfulness. He realized he could never enter God’s kingdom on his own but only by the grace of God.
Dag Hammarskjold, former secretary-general to the United Nations, said, “Vanity rears its ridiculous little head and holds up the distorting mirror in front of you for a mere instant, but one time is too many. It is at such times that you invite defeat and betray Him whom you serve. No man can do properly what he is called upon to do in this life unless he can learn to forget his ego and act as an instrument of God.”
WE MUST EMPTY OURSELVES
For God to bring true happiness in our life, we must empty ourselves of our efforts to find happiness any other way. We must become spiritually poor before God will richly bless us. This was the way Jesus did it. He enjoyed all the majesty and glory that was part of heaven where he had been with the Father from before the beginning of time. But he emptied himself of all of this to come to the world and die for our sins.
The emptying must come before the filling. Repentance must precede forgiveness. We must recognize our unworthiness before God will accept us.
Augustine, that great early church Father, found this out. He would eventually serve as the Bishop of Hippo, but before his conversion, he was proud of his intellect and knowledge. These things held him back from believing. It was only after he emptied himself of what he trusted in that God could fill him with salvation.
Martin Luther, German leader of the Protestant Reformation, had a similar experience. When he entered the monastery at an early age, his purpose was to earn his salvation by piety and good works, but he experienced failure at his efforts. It was only after he emptied himself of all his attempts to earn salvation that God was able to show him that it was by grace and not his works.
One has written, “But tho’ I cannot sing, or tell, or know The fullness of Thy love, while here below, My empty vessel I may freely bring: O Thou, who are of love the living spring, My vessel fill.”
WE MUST CONFRONT A HOLY GOD
We have said that we must have poverty of spirit or realize our need if we are to enter the kingdom of God. The problem is that this is unnatural for individuals. The only way this can change is through a direct confrontation with a holy God.
Looking at ourselves or at others will never create this poverty of spirit. The Bible teaches that our hearts, our very beings, are corrupt. We are chained in sin and its destructive force. When we look at others for an example in poverty of spirit, it is very possible that we will find someone who is no better or who is worse than we are. Looking at others who have habits worse than ours only makes us feel better about ourselves and this is not the way to attain poverty of spirit.
The only way to find poverty of spirit and to feel how we should about ourselves is to look at God as he revealed himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ. There we find true poverty of spirit. When we do this, we learn to say as the prophet Isaiah did, “Woe is me! For I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” (Isaiah 6:5)
CONCLUSION
To enter God’s kingdom we must realize that we cannot do it in our own power, that we must be empty vessels and that we must confront a holy God.
C. S. Lewis once wrote; “Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good-above all, that we are better than someone else-I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.”
