"Was Jesus Poor in Spirit?"

In the small group I am a part of, we spent one night, recently, going through the beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12) in "The Sermon on the Mount."  During the study, the question came up, “Was Jesus poor in spirit?”  I thought it was a great question.  The opinions as to whether He was or wasn't were varied, as one might expect.  Since then, I’ve been doing a little more thinking on this whole question and thought I’d share some of my thoughts with you.  As with everything I post on this site, I am keenly interested in any thoughts you might have.

So...was Jesus poor in spirit?  I think He was.

The life of Jesus is just as instructional as His Words.  Perhaps even more so.

Jesus was not just a practitioner of what He preached; He embodied what He preached.  He spoke from His Heart and from the cutting edge of His Own Life, and that’s what made His Words so powerful.  They were, quite simply, the overflow of the good things already at work within Him.

Jesus preached poverty of spirit.  Was He Himself impoverished?  I believe that He was.  The scriptures teach that, when Jesus came to earth, He emptied Himself and took on the form of a servant.  Reading between the lines in the gospels, one cannot help but notice how Jesus seemed to live from day to day on what His Father gave Him.  Jesus knew that, as a human, He was limited, and that He had needs that could only be met external to Himself.  In recognizing and embracing His human limitations, Jesus freed Himself to receive all that His Father wished to give Him.

In life, Jesus toiled and worked to make His Life the best it could be, but He understood that bread alone could not satisfy the deep hungers that, quite literally, lived inside Him.  More than physical food, human beings need the relational Presence of God.  God’s Life cannot be conjured from within; it must be received from above and can be received only by those who feel their own inner starvation (or poorness) of soul.

I believe that Jesus Personified poorness of spirit.  He subsisted on physical food, yes, but He LIVED on God’s Word.  Food, shelter, and safety result essentially in only one thing:  restful sleep (which, mind you, is NOT a bad thing).  To grow, though, one must commune with God.  Oh that God might use my spiritual hunger pangs to awaken me to the banquet of His Presence.

Bling