I’m hurting. My spirit is dark and my heart is heavy. I felt like a liar every time I told someone this morning that I was doing fine. If you think missionary wannabes don’t have dark periods, I’m proof they do. The one who steals, kills, and destroys is busy in the lives of those who seek to do Kingdom work! Our Bible study this morning addressed the first of the Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit...” (Matthew 5:3) and I was overwhelmed with a familiar relationship with that description.
The way I relate to it, poverty of spirit is the recognition that, without a Savior, all I have, am, will, or do amounts to precisely NOTHING. It is the “bottom” from which I can look up and say, Lord, lift me up, fill me, and be my everything. It is the point at which, according to Jesus’ first sermon, blessing begins.
In recovery circles, this recognition is Step One to building an arch through which to walk into the sunlight of the Spirit. Some of you know that I am recovering from an eating disorder. Today I recognize again that, while I serve the god of my selfish appetites, I am spiritually bankrupt. Absent a vital connection with Christ and His life-giving Spirit, I am powerless over sin and selfish desires, and my life is unmanageable without God’s influence in it.
The glory of the proclamation of this Beatitude is that the blessing begins here. Though, in my darkness of spirit, I may best relate to Noah in a torrent, Shadrach in a furnace, Daniel in a lion pit, Jonah in the depths, Lazarus in his grave, or David the Psalmist whose waves and breakers had overwhelmed him (Psalm 42), every one of those stories ends in deliverance — a deliverance that is promised to me too when I live in the life-giving grace that God, through Christ Jesus, breathes into us one moment, one breath, one day at a time.
Today, I die again to self, because the idol of self-service is lethal, and I call again to my Creator, “Breathe into me once more Your breath of life, and hold me close in Your grip of grace.” I place myself at His feet in the knowledge that He will gently lift me into His embrace.
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20 NIV)
May the abundant life for which Christ came to deliver to us be yours as well, as we each draw His next breath of life.
References: Genesis 2:7, John 10:10, Matthew 5:3, Psalm 9:13, Romans 16:18, Genesis 7:17, Daniel 3:26, Jonah 1:17, John 11:43-44, Psalm 42:7, 11, Galatians 2:20 (Read all)