Poverty of Spirit
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Philippians 2:5-11
Back at you
Back at you
“He made himself nothing.”
The little rascal in me is tempted to toy with this sentence a little. Like Dory taking issue with Marlin saying to Nemo his son: “I won’t let anything happen to you!” Dory says, “Well, if you won’t let anything happen to him, nothing will E-ver happen to him.”
Dory is a kid. You know what they say about kids: “Kids say the darndest things.” Two Wednesdays ago, I was seated across the dinner table from Dax Whitson. At the Wallaces. Invited us over for dinner.
“Hey Dax, wanna read the sermon scripture again this Sabbath?” I had asked him once or twice before, you know. But it’s been months since the last one.
Dax says, “Finally! You haven’t asked me like fow-evow!”
Kid’s got the gift of gab, what can I say.
“O yeah? Well, you got it, buddy! And it’s a long one, too. Think you can handle a long scripture reading?” I look him in the eye thinking, “Back at you.”
And he quietly says, “Yeah.” And keeps eating like nothing’s ever happened.
<Pause>
He emptied himself of himself
He emptied himself of himself
Maybe this sentence needs a preposition. Let me see. Gotta be careful with these preposterous prepositions. I can never seem to get them to behave. Let me see… Hmmm… How about into? Would into work, Lorelie? Lorelie teaches high school English at our school over there.
“He made himself into nothing.”
Into what? You mean “into something,” right? Like into a frog. Into a prince charming. Or into a toad? How do you turn yourself into nothing.?
Alakazam, Alakazoo! Puff! I have made myself into nothing. What’s nothing? It’s gotta mean something.
His Majesty King James walks in and says, “Let me help you out of your conúndrum. Here’s what nothing means.”
He “made himself of no reputation”.
"He took all the diploma, the awards—everything—down from the office wall. He divested himself of all his titles and put on one—servant.”
Now that’s clear enough.
“But is this all, your Majesty? I mean, don’t get me wrong. This is serious stuff. From God to human slave. Serious stuff, too big for my simple mind to understand. But I have a feeling, your Royal Highness—please don’t chop my head off—that it goes further.”
But I have a feeling, your Royal Majesty—please don’t take offense—that it does not go deep enough.
“Hey?” says King James. “Do you have a better idea, my simple subject?”
“Well, your Majesty, I think it means...”
“He emptied himself of himself.”
King James strokes his beard and looks up as if to think deeply, and says, “Now, now, my simple-minded subject! There is a big difference between going too deep and going crazy!”
“No, your Majesty. Jesus emptied himself of himself so he can be totally filled by someone else. That’s what my simple mind is thinking, your Majesty.”
“And who might that someone else be?”
“He emptied himself of himself so God the Father Himself can fill him, lead him, and empower him, your Majesty. So that Jesus does not need to rely on himself, your Majesty. So he can live—and die—totally for God, your Majesty.”
“But why?”
“Maybe s
“Ah, but it’s too simplistic, my simple-minded friend.”
“Maybe, your Majesty, but wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?”
“Yes, yes, it would definitely be—if it were true.”
“So is it, your Majesty? Is it true?”
<Pause>
And so it is
And so it is
And so it is.
And so it is. What we have just come across is poverty of spirit at its best. That inner attitude of complete and utter surrender to the ways of God, so counter-cultural, so other-worldly, so uncompromising, so thorough that it caused him to die in the hands of those who are rich in spirit—rich, that is, in their own eyes.
Scripture says,
ἀλλ᾽ but ἑαυτὸν HIMSELF ἐκένωσεν he emptied
Or quite simply,
“He emptied (divested) himself”
The placement of the reflexive pronoun “himself” ahead of the subject and verb in the original Greek is for emphasis and cues us in to how far Jesus divested himself.
ἀλλʼ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν
Jesus didn’t simply empty himself of status or reputation—like someone emptying his pockets of coins, wallet, keys, cell phone, marbles (what are these marbles doing here?)—everything.
“Here’s everything I have in my pocket. I give it all up. Oh, and here’s all the diploma I have. And here’s my ordination certificate, too. Here, you can have it all. I give it all up. I am emptying myself of everything. Don’t call me pastor anymore. I’m just plain Mel.”
Jesus emptied himself of HIMSELF!
And so it is. What we have just come across is poverty of spirit. It is an inner attitude.
“Pastor, you’re spending too much time in your study. Why don’t you take the week off. Take a walk. Take a lot of walks. Have you been down to the American River just below the tall bridge? There’a a trail to and from Lake Clementine. Lovely walk. Stay away from Greek for a while. You know what your blessed holy huddle will say, ‘It’s all Greek to me!”
What we have just come across is poverty of spirit. It is an inner attitude.
Is it a stretch to read from this phrase what I read in it? Was Jesus merely shocking us of his draconian divestiture so that we would be sufficiently impressed to give our own life for him and follow him? If so, then we would be no different than a fan.
“Yo, I’m a big fan of Jesus, man!”
“What do you mean? You read the Bible? You go to church?”
“Nope, just a big fan!”
No, no, no!
What we have here
But if Jesus emptied himself of himself, then by his life and death, Jesus was showing you what real life is—or at least, what it ought to be according to God who created us. By emptying himself of himself, Jesus demonstrated what the blessed life is—a complete divesting of one’s self from one’s self allowing God to have complete reign in one’s life.
But what does it mean to empty yourself of yourself? It’s all so nebulous, so foo-foo, so mushy. It means exactly as it says. In the case of Jesus’ own divestiture, he did it for two reasons.
First, to revive God’s original vision of real life and prove that it is not only realistic but attainable
Second, to show that poverty of spirit is the only thing that gets you this life
And what is it to really be a well-adjusted human being? It means to empty yourself of yourself so God can fill you with himself, and so you can walk completely surrendered to God.
What we have just come across is poverty of spirit. It is an inner attitude.
Notice what poverty of spirit means:
What then is this poverty of spirit? It is total surrender. It is dying to one’s self. And it involves the following:
What Jesus emptied himself of
What Jesus emptied himself of
Jesus’ poverty of spirit the same as yours. The only difference is that his poverty of spirit as a human being was to demonstrate what it means to be fully human in God’s eyes. This is what it means to be truly human. And since no other human being seems to get it, Jesus did it to demonstrate what poverty of spirit is. And how to achieve it. One achieves it by faith. When you say, “I accept that what God says I am is the truest statement about me.” I am nothing. And the soonest I accept this, the soonest I can get on with real life. For just as
Dying
Just what do I mean when I say that Jesus emptied himself of himself?
He emptied himself of everything he had and everything he was.
As it were, he died to self so that God can live in him. And his physical death at the end of such emptying, is but the natural result of the prior death—the death to self.
(NASB)
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
This is the foundational spirit—the most basic inner attitude, that makes life with God possible at every stage—at the entrance and inside door.
Jesus says, “I give up every desire to support myself with my own power. I let go of me and let God take care of me.”
The point of Jesus’ draconian divestiture was not he becomes a superhero in your eyes. So you can throng around him and be part of his fan club. This is not the point.
The point is that he became the kind of human being that you ought to be—fully dependent on and surrendered to God from beginning to end.
One must die
One must die
Why did Jesus do this? Because he got bored? No— so humanity can find its truest self. And what is the most true statement there is in God’s universe about you?
Being brought back to life
And Jesus followed this path of Poverty of Spirit all the way to his death. In a sense, his death was inevitable. If one lives in stark contrast to how the world lives—apart from God, the world will either force you to live for yourself or, if it cannot, it will seek to kill you. I mean physically kill you. This is precisely the point so of real living:
One must die if one wants to really live!
(NASB95) —
Why did Jesus do this? Because eternity is so long, he got board and needed to do something so draconian it is bound to attract interest? No, so humanity can find its truest self.
This is what Jesus did when he emptied himself of himself.
All you need to do is acknowledge that it is so, make a 180-degree turn,
“Jesus died two deaths,” we hear the wise say. But they misplace one of these “deaths”. They say he died the physical death. Then he died the second death—total separation from God. Perhaps.
But there is a prior death than both. It is the death of an inner attitude—the inner attitude that says, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”, which made the subsequent deaths possible.
He died to self FIRST—even if he had no earthly reason to do so. And this inner decision to empty himself of himself—to die to himself, as it were—made it possible to die for God, and die for all.
But there is a another death. Yours! But it a mirroring death. It is not original.
Spare yourself the need to be original: “Let me live my way.” Or even, “Let me die my way.” No need for originality. Someone has already demonstrated what it is like to both live and die for God. In place of originality is surrender to God’s provision for your true humanity.
Now you are ready to receive
Simply accept his life and toss out your own, and simply follow him in his death, and God will bring you back to life—new, abundant, and everlasting—just as he brought Jesus back to life.
Jesus died two deaths. He died to self—even if he had no earthly reason to do so. This is what his emptying means first and foremost. Then he died a substitutionary death, as an inevitable conclusion to a life totally lived in surrender to God.
But there is a third death. Yours!
“I am the captain of my fate, I am the master of my soul” says another.
I hope all my 5th-6th grade baptismal class students were all here today. Some are. I see…Charile, Katie, Merrick, Nathan, Zach, Cam, Kellen, Kaitlyn.
But Jesus says,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
He did it for you—so you can find your true self. So you can find everlasting life—life that is propped up, supported, guided, empowered by God Himself.
By emptying himself of himself, Jesus became the quintessential human being—human being as God meant human beings to be—tally poor and powerless before God.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Living a new life
“I did it my way,” someone says.
I hope all my 5th-6th grade baptismal class students were all here today. Some are. I see…Charile, Katie, Merrick, Nathan, Zach, Cam, Kellen, __________.
For what I have just given you is lesson two of our baptismal class. Lesson one is in the back of your sermon handout. Remember?
“I am the captain of my fate, I am the master of my soul” says another.
They’re thinking of dying with Jesus so they can be brought back to life with Jesus.
Baptism incapsulates poverty of spirit at the entrance door to God’s kingdom. What it looks like inside the kingdom is for you to discover. But without this most basic of all virtues, the Beatitudes will crumble and fall.
What is then? It is this:
It takes poverty of spirit to get into the kingdom. It takes poverty of spirit to remain in the kingdom.
But Jesus says,
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Anyone else here impoverished enough they want to die, too?
Matthew 5:3
Questions for Reflection/Discussion:
Questions for Reflection/Discussion:
What areas of my current life could use a dose of the spirit of poverty? What happens if I don’t measure up to Jesus’ example of poverty of spirit?
Prayer
Prayer
“Where is God my Maker, who gives me songs in the night?”
“Where is God my Maker, who gives me songs in the night?”
Empower your people to keep discovering what it means to be poor in spirit . When they cry out, “Where is God my Maker, who gives me songs in the night?”
Your people cries out, Lord: “Abide with me fast falls the even tide, the darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide...”
Your people craves for Son’s spirit of poverty. Grant it to them, Lord.
“
Sing to them your sweet songs in the night. Your gentle lullabies:
“Abide with me fast falls the even tide. The darkness deepens, child with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee. Hush, hush, my sweet little child. I will always abide with thee.”
Amen.
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