Stoop to Enter (Beatitudes Part 1)
Devotional by Jamie Osborne
Nick and I had the privilege of visiting Bethlehem in Palestine. Of course, the key reason to visit Bethlehem is because it claims to host the VERY place Jesus was born. (No really: they had a golden star on the floor to indicate the exact spot of Jesus’ birth!).
When we arrived at the Church of the Nativity to see this place, there were no grand doors inviting entry. Instead, we were forced to stoop to enter through a nondescript waist-high doorway. This was very strange.
Inside, we stepped into a ridiculously ornate cathedral dripping with gold, marble and art. Our guide explained to us that this tiny doorway is intentional. It’s meant to remind pilgrims that entry into the grand kingdom of God requires both an initial and a daily lowering of oneself before God. In other words, we must be poor in spirit, like the first Beatitude notes in Matthew 5:3. Poverty of spirit has nothing to do with your material possessions or lack thereof. Rather, it refers to standing before God humbly acknowledging we have nothing and need everything.
The day I entered into the kingdom of God, it was easy to lower myself before him. My life was in shambles and I very clearly had nothing of value to offer God, except my heart, which was all he wanted anyway. It’s easy to be poor in spirit at the start of one’s faith journey. It’s much harder to maintain a desperation for God when you can rely on your own strengths, talents, wealth, and knowledge. This is dangerous. George Leo Hayduck states that we may “pray and fast, we may be possessed of mercy, chastity or any virtues, but if humility does not accompany them, they will be like the virtue of the Pharisees, without foundation, without fruit."
Without poverty of spirit, a humility that relies on God over yourself, we simply become modern-day Pharisees: Christians with shallow inner lives.
When we believe that we’ve "made it" and need not stoop, it’s prudent to remember Jesus. As Paul writes:
"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
~ Philippians 2:5-7
His poverty of spirit continued to the end, through his steadfast journey to the cross, where “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8). If Jesus, who was everything, could lower himself, so too can we. Daily, we must dethrone ourselves to stand before God as poor in spirit people with “empty hands and empty pockets” (to use Darrell Johnson's phrase), remembering that all we have is from God and without him, we are nothing.
PAUSE and REFLECT:
Where is God inviting you to stoop in order to come before him poor in spirit today?
