THE GATEWAY TO THE KINGDOM

For some time now, this verse has been beaming in my head. While most people know it, sometimes I think few people truly understand the depth.

The Kingdom is an Upside Down Kingdom. Whatever it is you know of kings and rulers, governments and how to attain status, toss it. A lot of the times we get caught up in the thrill seeking, the books, the head knowledge, the evangelism, the ministry, the work. May we never forget the first thing needed to enter His kingdom.....bankruptcy...

I leave the rest of my post to Oswald Chambers...

"Blessed are the poor in spirit." Matthew 5:3

Beware of placing Our Lord as a Teacher first. If Jesus Christ is a Teacher only, then all He can do is to tantalize me by erecting a standard I can not attain. What is the use of presenting me with an ideal I cannot possibly come near? I am happier without knowing it. What is the good of telling me to be what I never can be - to be pure in heart, to do more than my duty, to be perfectly devoted to God? I must know Jesus Christ as Saviour before His teaching has any meaning for me other than that of an ideal which leads to despair. But when I am born again of the Spirit of God, I know that Jesus Christ did not come to teach only: He came to make me what He teaches I should be. The Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into any man the disposition that ruled His own life, and all the standards God gives are based on that disposition.

The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the natural man - the very thing Jesus means it to do. As long as we have a self-righteous, conceited notion that we can carry out Our Lord's teaching, God will allow us to go on until we break our ignorance over some obstacle, then we are willing to come to Him as paupers and receive from Him. "Blessed are the paupers in spirit," that is the first principle in the Kingdom of God. The bedrock in Jesus Christ's kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility - I cannot begin to do it. Then Jesus says - Blessed are you. That is the entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor! The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works.
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We are nothing. We came in naked, we go out naked. Everything in between, we have because of Him. Mercy, Grace and Love are what we have and they are manifest in everything we have been blessed with. Because it is by His mercy we haven't died off, it is His grace that allows me to stand before His throne boldy, and it is His love that did all this for me. May we never forget who it is we really are.

Read Isaiah 59 today and see what it is we are without Him and what it is He did for His sake to save us...

Love you all...