ONE Jesus’ Spiritual Laws: “Blessed are the poor in spirit ... ”

were listening to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5), actual poverty was never far away. So Jesus’ implication that poverty was a desired virtue was no doubt jarring and unpleasant. The poor people of that day thought that if only their material needs were met, then they could turn their energies to other things of value and better follow Jesus.

But they were encumbered, tied up with subsistence living in a poor economy, as are many people today. To some of Jesus’ listeners, his admonition to seek the things of the Spirit might have sounded frivolous in the face of grueling labor to survive.

But Jesus calls attention to the “blessedness” of something they could understand—and so can we. This promise means more than the Old Testament concept that God will protect the weak and provide for their care—though that too is a promise (see Matt. 6:30-34). If God cares for the birds of the air and the grass of the field, does that care not extend even more fully to us as humans?

Yet in order to experience this care, we must trust in God’s provision and not worry.

How are we ever to experience blessedness in such a state of depend­ence, poverty, and even, at times, helplessness?

The answer is that this “law” calls us to be poor in a spiritual sense: we are to value the poverty of spirit that is an openness to what God will pro­vide—not just what we ourselves can produce and “have” on our own.