The Approach of the Spirit

As I shared in my last blog (“Attitude of the Heart”), this is the second blog in a four-part series on our Attitude, Approach, Posture, and Presence with God. Let’s begin with prayer as we did in the previous blog.

Begin by taking deep breaths, calming your spirit, and praying the following prayer: “God, be with me; Jesus, fill me; Holy Spirit, come!”

Remember, this prayer is not to be understood as a request for a far-off God to come and be with you. He already is! This prayer is a prayer of availability and awareness. It is a prayer asking God to give you the grace to become available to Him and aware of His ever-abiding presence. 

Now, before you go any further, pull out your Bible and (re)read through and pray over Luke 18:9–14.

Approach of the Spirit

As I noted last time, this parable can teach us a lot of things. But for now, we want to look at how it speaks to our approach to God. What is the approach of our spirit?

Look at the approach of the Pharisee and that of the tax collector. The Pharisee is standing up close for all to see. Most likely, his head is raised and so are his hands (a common posture and approach of the religious). With this approach, he comes to God with his own agenda and for his praise and recognition (remember the “I’s,” spoken or intended).

But the tax collector, the sinner, is standing far off. He is beating his chest with his head down. He can’t even look up to God. He is what we call “poor in spirit.” He has neither pomp nor pride. He simply lays himself bare before God with the full recognition that he is human. I probably need to explain that last statement more

Jesus taught us in the Sermon on the Mount about a certain poverty of spirit: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). But what is poverty of spirit? The poor in spirit are those who recognize they desperately need God’s help. They know they cannot take one step without God. They are spiritually bankrupt unless God fills them. The kingdom of God belongs ONLY to those who are poor in spirit—those who know what it means to be human.

You see, Jesus didn’t become human only so that He could take on our sins and redeem us (obviously, though, that is HUGE). He also took on human form to teach us how to be human! Why did He need to do that? Don’t we know how to be human? The problem we have always struggled with is not that we are human—it is that we don’t really want to be human. 

Instead, since the garden we have wanted to grasp divinity rather than embrace our humanity. Interestingly, we are humans always trying to become God, while Jesus is God who chooses to become human. I think we forget that God created us human, and that it was good! But we are not satisfied with that. We are constantly trying to give up our nature in order to take on God’s. But that is impossible!

Jesus came to teach us how to embrace who we truly are before God: that we are human. He gave up His divinity to become fully human. Not part human, fully human. Paul says:

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. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:5-8)

Jesus obediently embraced our impoverished state as humans (to the point of death on the cross)! In 2 Cor. 8:9 it says, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” This was poverty of spirit: taking our true nature on and showing us how to live it as we approach God.

When God gave us His only Son, He wanted to show us our true nature, our humanness. Through His Son, He demonstrated the proper spirit to have in embracing our humanity and in approaching Him. The tax collector understood poverty of spirit, but the Pharisee did not. The sinner understood, not the religious person. If we want to come near to God, we must become what He created us to be: human. Poor in spirit. 

Johannes Baptist Metz wrote a book called Poverty of Spirit. In it he says:

To become human means to become ‘poor,’ to have nothing that one might brag about before God. To become human means to have no support and no power, save the enthusiasm and commitment of one's own heart. Becoming human involves proclaiming the poverty of the human spirit in the face of the total claims of a transcendent God. [1]

In other words, I’m not sufficient unto myself. Without God, I am nothing! We only find ourselves when we lose ourselves. We will never be content in ourselves. John the Baptist understood this fully. He embraced his humanity in poverty of spirit when he said, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’… He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:27–31).

I AM NOT THE CHRIST! I don’t have even one single thing unless it has been given to me by God. I must decrease and become the human I was created to be. He is God, I am not. That was the approach of the tax collector, not the Pharisee. Which one are you? As you close, spend a moment in prayer. If you want, put your hand over your chest and simply pray (as many times as you need to), “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Stay tuned for Posture…

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[1] Johannes Baptist Metz, Poverty of Spirit (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1968), Kindle edition, locations 55-57.