A Deeper Look at Power through Poverty of Spirit

As we begin the process of reflecting on the Beatitudes as the measuring stick for those who are being qualified to have authority on earth as it is in heaven, the first thing to notice is the order in which they are given. There is a purpose to that order, a progressive encounter with God’s character requirements that must be embraced that we might fulfill that which is His desire for us.

Therefore it is significant that the first requirement for heaven’s authority to be released is poverty of spirit. There is no great mystery to what the words mean. Poverty is a condition of having no resources, of being totally dependent upon the resources of another. One who is poverty-stricken is one who is at the end of their means, who has no hope of changing their circumstance by their own strength. For most of us, living as we do in our affluent culture, poverty is something we see at a distance, something that rarely touches us except in a second-hand way.

However, once in awhile some circumstance emerges that allows us to touch poverty more personally. In the late summer of 2005, a massive hurricane named Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast of the United States, bringing great destruction to a huge region of the nation. We sympathized with those who were forced to leave everything and escape the storm’s fury. We watched with horror as people who had made the decision to stay in their homes rather than evacuate experienced the terrifying reality of nature’s strength. It was a gripping scenario, and for days the nation’s news agencies were riveted on this story.

In the midst of that event, one vignette that captured my attention involved a group of people who had been vacationing in New Orleans. They were people of means, but suddenly their wealth meant nothing as they were completely unable to make arrangements to get out of town. They had paid $25,000 to charter a bus to come into the city to take them away, only to find that the armed forces in the city commandeered the bus before it could get to these folks. In that circumstance, these people had no recourse, and though they eventually found a way out, the anger and frustration that is rooted in fear was obvious in their faces as they told their story.

Poverty of spirit is like that. It is the sometimes shocking awareness that when it comes to living up to the values and expectations of God’s heavenly kingdom, all of us are weighed in the scales and found to be too light. The statement of Paul the Apostle in Romans 3:23 is pointed and powerful: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Poverty of spirit is the realization that nothing I can do will set me straight with God, or produce the kind of powerful life I was created to live in and enjoy. (to be continued!)

Excerpt taken from "Reaching Your Power Potential: Authority on Earth as it is in Heaven"

By Gary & Marie Wiens, available in the Kindle Store, Amazon.com

The Blessing of Being Persecuted for Righteousness’ Sake

The final stage of being qualified to stand in the authority of heaven on earth is that of being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. The first thing to say here is that we must see the persecution come for the sake of righteousness, and not for any other reason. Persecution for the sake of any other issue is not what Jesus is speaking about here. This is not about being political activists, or doctrinal watchdogs, or adopting extreme positions on controversial issues. This is about being people who are consumed with God, passionate that all people and things become what they ought to be according to the design of God, and who have given their lives to that pursuit in the character of humility, meekness, and love.

The fact is that people like this will not be received well by the general population. At the same time that there is a longing and desire to be like Him, there is also a deep ambivalence rooted in our determination to be the god of our own little world. It’s a pathetic posture, really, a position polluted by megalomania. The assumption that we have what it takes to rule our world is so unrealistic and patently untrue. No matter how much we control, there are so many factors beyond our control that any human authority apart from God dangles by the most fragile of threads. History has proven this again and again, and we ignore the truth to our own detriment.

Having said this, it is an immensely unpopular stance to challenge the sovereignty of the individual and ask them to give up the right of self-direction for the sake of submitting to God. Though some people – prepared by the Holy Spirit and wooed by the heart of God – will hear that invitation and respond gladly, many will resist it to the point of persecuting those who stand with Jesus in the purposes of God.

Persecution has been the real experience of Godly people through the ages, and Jesus’ promise is that we will experience it as well. However, it is His desire that we see the real blessing behind the experience, and rejoice that we are numbered with the faithful through the centuries. We will be faced with trouble as we preach, teach, and live these principles. It is the way of the Kingdom of God, and it will be our way as well.

Gary Wiens

The Power of Peacemaking

The New Testament understanding of making peace goes far deeper than merely working for a compromise between two or more parties so that hostilities can diminish. Peacemaking is a costly, self-sacrificing reality that finds its fullest expression in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Then, in His kind desire to share His blessing and authority with us, He invites us into the same kind of sacrificial life. Consider this passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:

For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. (Ephesians 2:14-18, NKJV)

Jesus was the ultimate peacemaker, and therefore sets the definition for what that term can mean. In the first place, He gave Himself as a man to full and complete obedience to the Father, completely and perfectly living out the character of God in the flesh. He is the one man who did it right every time! Because He is the author of life, and all of life is contained in Him,  when He demonstrated His perfection through the course of His days on earth, He was given authority to be the prototype of a whole new race of men. If you can picture this, it is as though He gathered up into Himself all who would believe in Him and brought them to peace, reconciling them to His Father through His life.

Because we have been reconciled to the Father, we can now truly come into our own identity and destiny by His grace instead of by our energies. As we live in communion with God, we hear our Father’s voice telling us over and over who we are, how much we are loved, what our task is, and the destiny to which He has invited us. His love and power assure our hearts that these things will be fulfilled, and therefore we can be at rest, at peace. When we live at peace with God, we can come to peace with ourselves and our own journey toward the fullness of our destiny. And when we are at peace in those two arenas, we can come to peace with one another.

Those who make peace stand in the direct flow of the ministry of Jesus. We are called to live in Jesus’ dynamic of intimate obedience to God and His ways. As we do this, the Father reveals Himself through our lives in ways similar to how He revealed Himself through the life of Jesus. People are drawn to Him through us as they were through Jesus, and the opportunity presents itself to establish peace between those individuals and God as their Father. As the reality of peace with God is absorbed into their lives, it becomes possible to bring them to peace with others whose lives they touch.
Because this effect stands in such harmony with the ministry of Jesus, the reward that comes to peacemakers is at the level of fundamental identity: they are called “the sons of God.”

Gary Wiens

Purity of Heart and the Knowledge of God

Apart from Jesus Himself, King David was a man who understood authority perhaps as well as any man ever has. He ruled the nation of Israel during its ascent to the pinnacle of power among earthly kingdoms, and he gave much energy to contemplating authority and what is required of those who will exercise it. In Psalm 24 David gives us insight into the authority structure of heaven, and the requisites for receiving that heavenly authority here on the earth. Consider these words:

The earth is the LORD’S, and all its fullness,

The world and those who dwell therein. 

For He has founded it upon the seas,

And established it upon the waters. 

Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD?

Or who may stand in His holy place? 

He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol,

Nor sworn deceitfully. 

He shall receive blessing from the LORD,

And righteousness from the God of his salvation.

(Psalm 24:1-5, NKJV)

David’s first acknowledgement here is that all the fullness of the earth belongs to the Lord God. He is the supreme authority by right of creation and redemption, and all who dwell on the earth belong to Him. But then the Psalm gets focused on who will be qualified to share in the Lord’s authority. “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who may stand in His holy place?” In other words, who is the one who can stand before the Lord in confidence to share in His authority?

The answer is concise and pointed: “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully.” David takes the issue of qualification right past the question of behavior to the deeper matter – the condition of the heart. The one who may confidently stand in God’s presence is the one with a pure heart, who has no falseness or deceit in the foundations of their personality. Because the heart of God is absolutely pure, with no hint of improper motives or deceitful agendas, He is able to exercise His authority in such a way that brings maximum grace and fulfillment to all who come to Him. He doesn’t use people for His own glory at their expense. Rather, He shares His identity and authority with them that they may be exalted and glorified, thereby bringing even greater honor to Himself.

Therefore, those who will share His authority must be those who are conformed to His character. They will be the same on the inside as they are on the outside, those who know that God desires us to have “truth in the inward parts.”  But the greater reward that comes to those with pure hearts is that they will see God. As we grow in conformity to His character, there is a greater and greater revelation that comes to us. God allows us to see Himself. We can hardly imagine the depth of this reward. King David, in the context of his own magnificent earthly kingdom, said that his greatest desire was to be in the House of the Lord, gazing upon the beauty of God, and inquiring in His temple.  David knew that God’s self-revelation was the ultimate prize, worthy of the total focus of his own heart.

Becoming People of Mercy

As we begin to be conformed to the image of Jesus in our search for power, we also begin to realize how He exercised the authority that was given to Him. We begin to see things as He sees them, and to respond to people and situations with the mercy and compassion that characterizes the heart of God in His dealings with us. In another section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs us that as we give mercy to those around us, particularly those who are undeserving of it, we begin to demonstrate our intimate relationship with God as our Father, who is merciful and kind to those who are wicked and ungrateful.

Being merciful to evil and unthankful people does not seem like the way to greatness, at least to those who are accustomed to living in the me-first, cut-throat world of contemporary culture. But we must be reminded that mercy is the way of God, and He is the one who defines all things. It is He who gives power to those who wait upon Him and are conformed to His ways. His promise to those who become merciful is that they will receive mercy, both for their own situations, and as a resource to give away to those who need it.

The reason that mercy is such an essential dynamic in God’s Kingdom is that it provides a context in which people can truly be transparent about the condition of their hearts and lives. In the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, the writer provides a profound understanding for the context of mercy established by God on our behalf.  Citing the temptations that Jesus faced as a man on the earth, we are told that these pressures made Jesus to be compassionate and merciful toward the rest of us when we face such things. Because Jesus is sympathetic due to His own experience of testing, we can come into the presence of God in the confidence of full self-disclosure knowing that the first thing that awaits us is mercy, not condemnation. Therefore, as we experience mercy as the first result of encountering God, we become those who give mercy to those we encounter, thereby opening a way for them to be transparent about the things that concern them. The freedom to be real and transparent in a non-defensive way is integral to spiritual growth and lasting change, and the extending of mercy as the first response sets the context for that growth.

When God finds people who are becoming merciful, He extends even greater mercy to them. One of the great dynamics of the Kingdom of God is that whatever one gives away is returned to them in greater measure. In Luke 6:38, just a few lines after Jesus instructs us about mercy, He further teaches that what we give will be returned to us, compressed and increased in proportion to how we gave it. Though we have mostly applied that principle to the giving of finances, He is talking primarily there about mercy and forgiveness. As we become conformed to the character of His Kingdom, we become recipients of the graces of His Kingdom. We give mercy to those who need it, setting in motion the release of additional mercies to us, both in our areas of need and as a resource to share with others.

Gary Wiens

Hunger and Thirst for God’s Perfect Design

Our hope is that the reader is beginning to grasp the natural and necessary flow of the Beatitudes. Awareness of our poverty leads us to mourn our condition. As we grieve over what has been lost and over the impact our brokenness has on God’s heart and ours, He comes to comfort us. Part of that comfort is the further revelation of who we really are in His heart, and of His commitment to bring us to that fullness if we will trust Him and embrace His ways.

The more we see of what God has for us, the more we begin to desire it. The more we are frustrated in our own attempts to produce by strength what He would give us by grace, the more we cast ourselves on Him in utter dependence. As He speaks to our hearts concerning His plans for our lives, the deeper our hunger grows to have these things established in our lives. The more we consider the person of Jesus and open our hearts to fall in love with Him, the more He touches us with His own desires for our fullness. He tenderly comforts us in our pain by awakening our hearts to deeply desire what He deeply desires. In other words, He answers our longings by giving us greater longings, taking us to the place where we are famished and parched for want of His reality.

You see, that is what righteousness is. It is the fullness of God’s design being realized in practical reality, all things being conformed to His desire and design. We have mistakenly thought that righteousness is merely the patterns of our external behavior, when in fact righteousness refers to conformity to God’s nature and design. Righteousness is first of all an internal conformity to God’s character that gets expressed in behavior that arises out of the internal reality. Righteousness is everything operating as it was designed to, in line at every level with God’s pattern and purpose.

When Jesus declares that He is looking for those who hunger and thirst for the reality of righteousness, He is telling us that He desires people whose greatest longing is to think, feel and act like He does. His promise to that group is that they will be satisfied, satiated with righteousness to a degree greater than they can fathom.

This matter of hungering and thirsting for righteousness is central to the purposes of God being realized on the earth. We believe that this fourth Beatitude is the pivot point in the list of character traits that Jesus outlines in Matthew 5. The first three Beatitudes lead up to it, and the final four proceed from it. From this point on, they begin to move into the positive expressions of Christ’s character, and so as the satisfaction of this hunger and thirst begins to come, other qualities begin to emerge as a natural result of that desire.

Gary Wiens

Standing In Meekness

Meekness is a fascinating term, perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts in our vocabulary. Originally, it is defined as “gentle,” in the sense that describes a wild and powerful horse that has been trained to respond to its master, and therefore has become useful. Meekness is strength under discipline, and has several key components that must be understood.

To stand in meekness implies that we recognize that the lordship of our lives belongs to someone other than oneself. There is One who created me for His own pleasure, and who redeemed me from the clutches of Satan, and so by the dual right of creation and redemption my life belongs to Him. Since God is the one who “thought me up” in the first place, it is only He who can define me. Only He can tell me who I truly am, and only He can impart the grace to me to become that which He sees.

Meekness is the quality of steadiness, peace, and patience that emerges out of accepting what God says about me, and standing in that definition regardless of the situations and contrary reports that we encounter. The constant effort of Satan is to convince us that we cannot trust God to give us what He has promised, and what we desire. The enemy does not care if we come to despair over this issue and simply give up in hopelessness and shame, or if we take the other extreme and set our wills to achieve our destiny by the strength of our own resources. Either extreme keeps us from the grace of God that produces in us what He requires. Satan’s greatest fear is that there will be a group of people whose hearts embrace what God has declared concerning them, who will receive God’s definition of their lives, and by grace through faith appropriate His power to step into that definition in the reality of daily existence.

The promise of God to those who are meek is that they will inherit the earth. Once again, the things we crave at the deepest levels are promised to those who will acknowledge their need for God and live life by His power according to His definitions and parameters. The inheritance that comes from God is not given to those who seize the day by dint of will and force of personality, who strategize the best or are the most creative in marketing.  Though they may seem to have the edge for a season, the fact is that the meek will inherit the earth, and the wisdom of their choices will be vindicated and demonstrated when the Kingdom of God is established here on this planet.

Gary Wiens