Help Me Lord
“Bow down Thine ear O LORD, hear me: for I am poor and needy.” Psalm 86:1
In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), He began with what we call the “Beatitudes”. The first one was “Blessed are they that are poor in spirit”. To be “poor in spirit” means to be totally stripped of ourselves and recognize that we are nothing without Jesus Christ. As we acknowledge our spiritual poverty, we become humbly submissive to Him and depend on Him “for in Him we live and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28a). However, pride hinders our recognition of our own spiritual emptiness.
The Apostle Paul, before he came to know Jesus Christ, was proud of his Jewish heritage. He thought he was doing God a favor by persecuting Christians. When he met Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-9), he realized all his work was worthless, that he had been fighting against God, and that without Christ, he was spiritually impoverished without hope (Philippians 4:9). Even though King David lived around a 1,000 years before the time of Christ, he was another one of God’s chosen people who came to understand what it meant to be poor in spirit. He had accomplished much for the LORD in his life, but he had also failed miserably in his personal life.
It could be that, and this is only speculation, the victories that he had attained as king and warrior over Israel’s enemies had made him a little overconfident in his personal life. His overconfidence led him to make some bad decisions which caused him to lose some of the joy that he had experienced as God’s man. However, the distance that his bad judgments had put between him and the LORD began to eat away at him like a cancer. Upon facing the truth about himself, he realized his only hope of restoration was in humble repentance and surrender to the LORD. He acknowledged that his spirit was bankrupt before a holy and righteous God, and that his only hope was to place himself at God’s mercy as one who was in desperate need of forgiveness.
Thanks be to God that acknowledgement of our inadequacy brings sweet relief to despair because it is then that God bestows His grace, His unmerited favor, upon us needy creatures. When we come to Him with nothing to offer but our lives, we give Him something with which to work and mold and shape. He won’t do much with a prideful, self-righteous man or woman but, oh, how He can pour out His grace on those who are humble and who admit their need for Him. And that’s what it means to be poor in spirit.