I recently spent a while thinking about what it meant to be poor in spirit. It is an important quality, or at least Jesus thought that it was. To make the list of beatitudes it must be of importance. So how do we become poor in spirit, or furthermore what in the world is it? I will begin by saying what it is not. Being poor in spirit does not mean that you are lacking spirit, although sometimes as Christians we certainly look like it. One pastor I heard called it spiritual bankruptcy, which can lead you to the wrong conclusion if not careful.
Although being poor in spirit does not mean lacking spirit it does indicate that there are insufficient funds. With this understanding we can see that spiritual bankruptcy would indicate that we cannot pay our debt, it would further say that we are turning everything over to someone else. This is exactly what we must do in our relationship with Christ we come to the point where we realize we cannot pay our debt and we turn everything over to Christ. This idea of being poor in spirit is not a bad place to be in fact it is freeing. You realize that he is the creator of everything and we owe him everything that we can give.
Christ makes salvation available to us and there is nothing that I wouldn’t give up for him. Poor in spirit, try it on this week, it comes with a great promise. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”