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PROGRAM D-7731
It’s Christmas time. I didn’t have to tell you that, did I? The stores have been decorated since Halloween, and the merchants are busy trying to get our money, as we hurry to buy things. In the midst of all this focus on things, I’d like to talk about the biblical principal of possessing nothing.
Seems to me that Christmas is a good time for each of us to remember the danger of being possessed by possessions. Everything around you these days is telling you that you need to buy and own things. A. W. Tozer wrote, “There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets ‘things’ with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns ‘my’ and ‘mine’…express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease.”
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). What does that mean? I believe it means that those who in their spirit see themselves as possessionless are those who are blessed and happy. When a person possesses Jesus Christ and eternal life in heaven, they are the richest of all people. Nothing else can really make us rich except these heavenly possessions.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians that as a servant of God he was “poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” What do you possess? Things? If that is what you count as your possessions, you are indeed poor. But if you understand that things are simply tools to be used, resources from God, and you truly do not possess them, even if you are in charge of them, then you are poor in spirit. But you are rich because you have everything in Christ.
It is not easy in this possession-mad world to be poor in spirit. People will not admire you for it. You will not be confirmed by the world for maintaining an attitude of possessionlessness. The world evaluates people based on what they own. It’s swimming upstream to be poor in spirit.
And yet, those who are, Jesus says, are the ones who are happy. They are not possessed by their possessions, because those things are not important to them. Do you think it’s actually possible for a Christian today to live in this possession-mad world and truly have an attitude of being poor in spirit? Do you even want to?