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When life feels unpredictable, we reach for security blankets of money, health, and plans that promise safety. Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount by telling us we’re seeking security in the wrong places: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, it’s such a joy to be back here and to be able to talk to you again.
Technology is kind of interesting. Jesus didn’t have to wear that microphone, thankfully. Let’s see, does this work? Okay, there we are. That’s much better.
So, seeing the crowds, he went up the mountain. And when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And you might say, Tim, you’ve been talking about security blankets. What do I attach my security to? I don’t see anything about that in there. He said, blessed are the poor in spirit. What’s that have to do with security? Well, I think as we start to think about the biblical view of poverty, and what Jesus means about being poor in spirit, we start to get a sense of this. Because, now, if you turn to the Gospel of Luke, Luke records a very similar sermon. Jesus probably gave this sermon a number of different times in slightly different ways, in different contexts, as traveling itinerant preachers do. These were important, core, essential things of the kingdom, and Jesus was going to go around and make sure that people heard this. And in Luke’s Gospel, he says simply, blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.
Now, Matthew’s account says, blessed are the poor in spirit. Now, how do we pull those two together? Well, some have said, well, it’s basically just one sermon with slightly different recording of notes. Some have said, well, Jesus had wildly different concerns. You know, in Matthew, he was concerned purely with spiritual things, in Luke, he’s preaching a sermon about those who have actual physical poverty. And, in reality, I think the problem is there is we’re seeing this as this hard division. What Jesus is driving at here is exactly what we still grasp onto today, which is that being poor in spirit and being poor are two things that often go together.
That security is stripped away from us, in a sense, if we’re impoverished. If we don’t know where we’re going to get food the next day or if we can buy food the next day or how we’re going to earn food for the next week, if we don’t know if our family’s going to live or going to die, well, we’re feeling pretty beaten down. We’re not feeling secure. So, part of the challenge that I believe Jesus is saying to us is don’t trust material possessions. Don’t put all your trust in what you can earn because you may not have them. And, in fact, many of the early Christians wouldn’t have them. Many of those following Jesus were the literal poor at the time, and many of them would become poor as persecution broke out. There would be plenty of challenges to the idea of doing well as a Christian.
This whole notion that we see today where you hear a lot of preachers and they’ll preach, if you follow Jesus, Jesus wants you to be wealthy and he wants you to have a good life where you have all the good things of life, and by good things we mean the things that the present world defines as good, that wouldn’t have made any sense to the early disciples. It’s so foreign to their experience and to what Jesus was calling them to.
But it’s more than that. Because here’s the temptation that we can run into. On the one hand, we can over-spiritualize this and turn it into purely, well, these are people who are poor spiritually and we’ll get more into that in a moment. Or we can go the other way and we can say, well, these are people who are just broke. And both of those miss part of the point. And we see that if we look at the view of poverty throughout scripture. For example, in Psalm 40, David says, remember, this is King David. As for me, I am poor and needy. But the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help and my deliverer. Do not delay. Oh my God.
So David, as king, writes this psalm addressing the Lord. He says, I am poor and needy. And he’s writing it for the overall people so that they can sing this psalm together. But David, this is coming out of his heart. And so we need to ask, what was David talking about there? What was David letting go of? What did he feel like he didn’t have that would, in some sense, enrich him that when he comes to the Lord, he says, I am poor and needy. Because he had worldly wealth. He had an impressive amount of wealth. He was a successful king. Now, maybe not, you know, say like one of the kings of England a couple months later that has just enormous, enormous power across the world. But by and large, in the time, David was doing, say, quite well. So what does David mean?
Well, I think he means the same thing that Jesus means as he was addressing his disciples. Because you see, what Jesus was going to challenge his disciples to do was to go out and be fishers of men. We know that’s the commission he gives them. And as he sends them out to preach, he’s telling them, leave those jobs that you have, leave your homes, leave everything you have that gives you security, and follow me. Go preach the gospel. Talk about becoming poor. These were not people that necessarily even had to be poor. These were people who were going to choose a life in which all the security they could cling to would be taken away voluntarily. They were going to follow Jesus.
Now, if you think about that for a moment, isn’t that striking? When you think about the people that are gathered around Jesus at this point. They said, we want to follow you, Jesus. And some of them were going to follow him all the way to death. Others were trailing behind him, trying to figure out, who is this Jesus? Do I want anything to do with this Jesus? And they wouldn’t ultimately. For example, the story of the rich young ruler. He comes to Jesus and he says, what must I do to be saved? He’s thinking, oh, Jesus is going to say, well, you know, maybe put a little into the coffer for my ministry. Maybe come to some of my times I’m preaching. What does he say? He says, sell everything. Follow me. What are we told? The man leaves sad.
He’s looking at this and he says, but Jesus, you’re calling me to let go of everything that provides me with security. You’re not saying, it’d be really nice if I were one of the top five priorities in your life? Even top three priorities? Okay, how about the top two priorities? What does Jesus say? He says, make me the priority. And we say, but Jesus, that’s so extremist. That’s crazy. That’s what those weird people in the desert do. You want me to put everything before you. What if something goes wrong? What if I decide I don’t really like following you, Jesus? You know, this rich young ruler, maybe if Jesus said, take your income for the next year or take some of your possessions or assign them over to your family and you can come back in a year and take them back, maybe he would have done it. But Jesus said, just get rid of them. He’s not offering an exit strategy. There’s only one path forward. It’s a one-way street to Jesus. And the rich young ruler says, I don’t know about this, Jesus.
We don’t like putting all of our eggs in one basket, do we? I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket. I like backups. And so, you know, like we’ve been having sound issues tonight and Jim was nice enough to bring over this extra mic pack and my mom, who’s running the live streaming, the pulpit mic on, why do we have multiple packs? Why do we have a pulpit mic? Why do we have these things? Well, it’s because I don’t like to put all my eggs in one basket. I don’t want to count on everything working. I’d like to have backup. I’m a big advocate on your computer, backup. You know, upload onto the cloud, upload onto a hard drive that you put someplace else, physically removed from your house. Have redundancy, something might go wrong. Because life’s unpredictable.
But what do we learn no matter what we do? What do we do no matter what? What we’re facing a life that no matter what we do to try to ensure that it’s safe, it isn’t. Take a look at Luke chapter 12. It says, and he told them a parable saying, the land of a rich man produced plentifully. And he thought to himself, what shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops. He said, I will do this. I will tear down my barns and build larger ones and there I will store all my grain and my goods. That sounds like a good plan, doesn’t it? And he goes on and he says, and I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink and be merry. But God said to him, fool, this night your soul is required of you. And things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure for himself is not rich towards God.
That man had plenty of backups. He had all this stuff stored up and he was gonna be safe. That’s where he put his security. He was holding on to that security blanket. This is what’s going to make life good for me. And God says, well, the problem is you spent all your time putting security in that rather than in me. Tonight’s the last night of your life. You didn’t make a wise choice. And really when you think about it, when we look for security in this world, whatever it might be, we don’t make wise choices a lot of times either.
Heard about a wonderful investment plan. I was reading about this the other day. This man was able to return a 50% interest. And he did it in a clever way. No one had thought of this before apparently. You can get these special stamps for international mail and they’re by international treaty set at certain prices. And he realized there was a price differential between buying the stamps in a particular country he wouldn’t reveal, but in some country in Africa that had it locked in at a certain rate and buying the stamps in the United States. And so what you could do is buy the stamps over in Africa, sell them in the United States and return a enormous profit. And people heard about it and they told their friends. And at first he was a little begrudging, you know, I guess I’ll give up my secret on how I did this. And so people started giving him money and soon millions of dollars were pouring into his accounts to provide them with this enormous interest. And most people didn’t cash out because they wanted more of it. So they kept investing in this. It seemed like a great plan. In fact, the Boston Globe wrote a glowing review of this investment strategy. It said he’s giving just enormous profits to average people. They can go and start with virtually nothing and they can live a life of luxury just like he did.
Anyone know this story? Story of Charles Ponzi. And if you’ve ever heard of Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme, we refer to it as a Ponzi scheme because of him. You see, he did actually find out about this strategy but whether it could actually be pulled off or not, we don’t know because he didn’t try. While he was saying he was keeping all that information as proprietary information, he was actually just paying out from new investors to old investors if they actually withdrew. And whatever they didn’t withdraw, he lived off. And so at one point he had over $8 million at the beginning of last century invested an enormous amount of money at the time. And then he got into some real estate, he bought banks, he was doing all this stuff until suddenly people started to get scared and they all started to ask for their money and they started to ask for their interest. And then it all came to collapse because they had thought this looks like a sure thing. Even the newspaper reports said sure and so many of the things that we chase after today are sort of like that if you think about it.
You know, we go and we read the newspaper or more likely today we go online, we read some how-tos, we go and read social media, people are sharing things that seem useful and we think, ah, here is the way I’m going to get security. It’s going to be security for my health, it’s gonna be security for my money, it’s gonna be security for my home. I’m gonna do these things and everything is going to be okay. But too often it’s just another Ponzi. And here’s the thing, even the best ones fail, right? There is no sure proof thing and that’s what we see in that parable that Jesus tells because here’s the thing we can’t defeat. We can do everything just right and then tonight’s the night, the last day in our life and what good does it do?
But we love to latch onto those things, we love to latch onto those get-healthy-quick schemes, those get-rich-quick schemes, all those things that claim to somehow offer us the security we crave in life. That’s what they’re really targeting. They’re saying this will make your life secure. And so really we don’t change that much, do we? Maybe we don’t carry around the security blanket any longer but we’re still seeking something that we can blanket ourselves with and feel comfortable. And God’s plan is different. God’s plan is a get-blessed-slow track because it often doesn’t feel like we’re very blessed. You know, we read all these, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, all these attitudes that we’re going to be going through over the next few weeks. We think, but I fit some of those or all of those and I don’t feel very blessed.
God calls us to look elsewhere and that’s the key thing and we see that in Isaiah 61, one. Tells of the coming of the Messiah. It says, the spirit of the Lord God is upon me, referring to the coming Messiah, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. Notice that one line there, to bring good news to the poor. We have that theme again and here again, as we see in the Old Testament time and again, what is really targeting is those who lack security in an earthly sense and it doesn’t necessarily have to only be financial because remember, David feels poor. Now, how do we actually make sense of that? We’ve been thinking about this for a while, but what, okay, so David felt poor. Why? Because he trusted what God said he should do and David didn’t always do this, but when he did, when David was trusting what God said he should do, he didn’t necessarily have all the security of other kings of his stature. You see, if you’re a tyrant as a Near Eastern king in that time and you just kill anyone who’s a threat to you, you have pretty good security, as long as you have a few loyal people and a very sharp ax that takes care of people, you have security and what do you know? This is the tried and true formula. Millennia of people have done this and yet David says, I’m poor and needy because he is seeking to be held accountable to God and we see even when he acts out of accord with God’s will and out of accord with God’s law, what happens after his sin with Bathsheba and all that goes into that including the murder afterwards, Nathan comes and convicts him, the prophet, he comes and convicts David. David doesn’t execute Nathan, David repents.
It’s a very, very different thing and so we look at David and think, boy, look at this awful murder and yeah, look at this awful murder, but all the kings of the time were doing it. David realized he was held to something more. So where was he going to find his security? If his security couldn’t be in his earthly power, where was he going to find his security? He was going to find his security in God and we see that just as what Jesus says in this first beatitude. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
You see, the people that opposed Jesus, they were looking at their earthly kingdom and they could be different things. You can argue that some of the disciples genuinely thought what Jesus was going to do was usher in a new kingdom of Israel. They would no longer be under the thumb of Rome. For the Pharisees and the Sadducees and their associates, what were they doing? Well, they weren’t necessarily trying to get out of the control of Rome, but they were trying to maintain their kingdom under Rome where they had the security that as long as they kept Rome happy, they could do whatever they wanted. And so they were willing to compromise in all kinds of ways as long as they had that security. You see, they weren’t poor in an earthly sense. Many of them were quite well off. They didn’t know how poor they were, though, because they were trusting in something that ultimately they couldn’t receive any kind of guarantees from.
A few decades after Jesus’s ministry, some, not those people who had been putting their trust in Rome, but some others would rise up against Rome and try to take their security into their own hands. And when they did, all of them lost it. Those who trusted in Rome lost it. Those who thought they could somehow overpower Rome lost it. All of them lost it because they were putting their trust not in God and not in what God was doing, but what they could do with their own hands. And in that, I think we understand a bit of something we find in Proverbs 30 from a man named Agur. He says to the Lord, two things I ask of you, deny them not to me before I die. Remove far from me falsehood and lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me. Lest I be full and deny you. And say, who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.
I think he helps us to understand truly what that security that we hold on to is. He says, don’t let me be rich or poor. Kind of interesting prayer. I don’t think most of us say, God, would you give me enough that I survive? Why do we pray that? Well, he realizes there’s two challenges. If you’re impoverished in an earthly sense, and you don’t have any material wealth, you could turn to the Lord, but he says what he’ll probably do instead, he fears, is that if he doesn’t have anything, he’s gonna curse God. He’s going to look at God and say, God, here I am, why aren’t you blessing me? He says, on the other hand, if I’m wealthy, what am I going to do? I’m gonna look at everything I have. I’m gonna think, God, aren’t I great? Or more likely, I didn’t say God anything. I don’t need to. I have it all under control. I’ll come back to you, God, someday if I have a problem. He says, don’t give me either of those. I don’t want those. I want my security to be in you, Lord.
Because see, here’s the thing. When we’re cursing God and we’re saying, God, why aren’t you giving me these earthly things? What are we doing? We’re saying, I want earthly security. Yeah, I’m praying to you, God. I am angry at you, God, because you haven’t given it to me, but what do I want? I want earthly security. And when we have that earthly security, what do we say? Look at what I’ve done. Either way, that’s what we’re trusting in, earthly security. What Agur is asking is, Lord, put me in a place where I’m not focused on earthly security at all. Put me in a place where I’m focused on you and I recognize that you’re the one that’s working in my life and everything that I have.
When Jesus says, blessed are the poor in spirit, in Matthew, or the poor in Luke, I believe he’s addressing that same thing, because here’s the thing. Jesus didn’t tell everyone to follow the example of the rich young ruler and give up everything. Even some of the disciples probably had wealth someplace of some sort, not maybe huge amounts of wealth, but they had possessions. And many of the followers that later on follow in the New Testament, we see in Acts, we see wealthy people following Jesus. Here’s the key thing, though, and I believe this is why he goes that route with the rich young ruler. He looked at that man and he knew that man, as long as he had possessions, would trust the possessions and not in the one who gave him the possessions. And so he challenges him, let go of it. And for us, that may not be the challenge. But for each of us, there is that security that we’re holding onto that God is challenging us. Let go of that, experience what it is to be blessed in me instead.
So often, as a church, we hold onto those things. And that’s a convicting thing as we’re starting this little church plant. What’s going to make me feel secure? Well, if it’s really full in here, if we’re having to move because we had to knock down a wall and people are standing out the door and we have speakers outside, yeah, that would make me feel really secure. And this is an interesting challenge in ministry because you read all these books on church growth and here’s the 10 steps that you need to do to make your church grow. You know the funny thing about those books? They always list a bunch of things that you can do to make your church grow. You can do, I can do. What does Jesus say that the church should do? He says they should trust in God. That’s scary. I want that security blanket, Jesus. I want to cling on to something that just says, if I do these steps and I follow these marketing techniques, everything’s going to be great. He says, don’t hope in those things, hope in the kingdom. Hope in what God’s doing. And that’s what we need to ask ourselves. Is the kingdom really my hope? Is the kingdom your hope? Or is it that stuff that provides comfort? Whatever it might be.
I saw on Twitter this week it was going viral. Someone had gone through and entered in all the physical descriptions of the characters of the Harry Potter series into an AI program that creates faces to see what they really look like. Kind of an interesting exercise. And of course, there’s a hugely successful movie series that goes along with the book series and many people see the movies first. It was interesting. Most of them look suspiciously like the movie characters. I wondered if the person was entering it, was she being influenced by that? But it started me thinking in general about when I read a book that I really love. And you read this book and there’s nothing in this book about what the person looks like as far as like a photograph. It’s purely the description of the book. And I get a picture in my head. Or sometimes it’s a series of books and it doesn’t really describe what the person looks like and I get to the second book and it’s kind of jarring. But I have this picture in my head and then the book is made into a movie. And I go and I see the movie and I think, that’s not right, that character doesn’t look right. Everyone knows that’s not what that character looks like. This is not right, it’s jarring. It should look like what’s in my head.
Here’s the problem for us that think it’s Christian. There’s an awful lot of times we look more like the movie. You know, we have a picture of what church looks like. We have a picture of what the Christian life looks like. And unfortunately, a lot of times, it’s not influenced by the descriptions in the book. It’s influenced by our world. It’s influenced by what does the world look like right now in value. You pick up the book and you start to read about the characters. And you get to this description. Here’s what it looks like to be someone who’s a follower of Jesus. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. We should be jarring to the world. People should see us and say, they don’t look like people normally in society. They look like people, yeah, I think they might be a little bit crazy. They’re trusting in this Bible, they’re trusting in God. I don’t know about this. But one thing I can say about them is they certainly seem to actually trust. That’s what God challenges us to do. What he’s doing in our lives. Because we may start out more like the movie characters. And it’s jarring and we’re not much like the book. But may our prayer be every day that we let go a little bit more of that security blanket, whatever it is for you. We’re each gonna have different ones. May we let go a little bit more of it so that as Jesus refines us and his spirit’s working in us, we start to look more like the book. And as we do and we look not to the kingdom of this world, but we look to the kingdom of heaven, we’re jarring to the world rather than to those reading the book. And it offers transformation.
That’s my prayer for us tonight. But it’s hard. It’s hard, right? I mean, it’s really nice to say these things and yet I’m going to go and I’m going to fret and I’m going to worry and I’m gonna cling to my security blankets this week I know just as much as anybody. What’s Jesus challenging me to do? Well, what he isn’t challenging me to do is say, okay, now I’m gonna trust in myself that I can overcome these security blankets. And what he’s saying is, come to me. That’s what he says when we come to the Lord’s supper. Just a little piece of bread, a little cup of juice. But what is it that’s behind it? Well, on the very night that he was going to be betrayed and the earthly ministry of Jesus, the security blanket for the disciples who had up to that point seemingly got along with the program, they’d set everything aside. They were following Jesus. It was gonna be ripped out from under them too. Because he wasn’t gonna be with them physically any longer. He’d be crucified. He would be resurrected and come back to them briefly, but he’s never going to be without them. But on that night he was betrayed, he reminds them even more to look towards the kingdom. He says that this bread that I’m breaking, me, this cup that’s poured out, that’s me.
What are you carrying this week? What are you feeling insecure about? Well, okay, you’ve been talking about all this. Maybe I shouldn’t come to this table. Jesus invites you when we realize we have this. Anyone who’s a baptized believer in Jesus, anyone who says, I want the kingdom to be my focus, I believe that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, shouldn’t say, well, then go trust in yourself for a while and get it all fixed. He says, come and trust in me. Eat and drink of me. Nourish by me because you can’t do it on your own. I can’t do it on my own. We can do it with him. So it wasn’t the night that he was betrayed. He took the bread and he broke it and he gave it to them. He said, this is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In a like manner, after supper, he took the cup and he poured it and he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for you into the remission of sin. Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance of me. So it is that every time we eat this bread and we drink this cup, we proclaim his death until he comes again. We receive that true blessing of that kingdom secured.
Let’s pray. Lord, we pray that you would be with us this night. And as we turn to your table, Father, would you give us the strength to trust? We don’t have the strength, but we know that you do. We pray that you would nourish us through these elements, that through the power of your Holy Spirit, you might apply the benefit of the body and blood of your son to our hearts, that we might be fed and prepared to be those who look kingdomward and not in a world-focused direction. Pray this in Jesus’ name.
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