You may have heard the modern worship anthem Jesus is Better by Austin Stone Worship in which Aaron Ivey, the lead worshiper, boldly declares "Glory! Glory! We have no other king but Jesus Lord of All! Raise the anthem, our loudest praises ring ... We crown Him Lord of All!" The song relates all the benefits we have as a result of the gospel and it's redemption of our souls then ends with a series of comparisons beginning with "In all my sorrows, Jesus is better ... make my heart believe" before proceeding to "in every victory, Jesus is better ... make my heart believe" and then on to "more than any comfort, Jesus is better ... make my heart believe" then rising to a crescendo with "more than all riches, Jesus is better ... make my heart believe" finally then climaxing with "our souls declaring ... Jesus is better ... make my heart believe! Our song eternal ... Jesus is better ... MAKE MY HEART BELIEVE!" It is truly both a beautiful yet a haunting song ... a large group of people pouring out their very hearts before their eternal king while at the same time imploring their divided hearts to believe the very words they are singing at the very moment they are singing it. How can this even be possible? Can the human heart really be that fickle? Sadly yes! And much more so.
The reasons for this paradox vary, but the chief reason is the self-idolatry in our hearts. Left to our own affections we will always prefer lesser satisfactions to the satisfaction of Christ, because the lesser ones appeal to the god of self -- a ravenous, insatiable, fickle idol indeed -- while true satisfaction in Christ requires that we assassinate that god. Most of us will never know what it means for the joy of the Lord to be our strength until we've had our endemic idolatry pulled out from underneath us and all our other crutches kicked away. For many of us, Jesus won't be our absolute treasure until we are all out of other options.
God wants us broken so that any power in us can be undeniably attributed to Him. If self-reliance could reliably and ultimately contribute to our success and fulfillment then God's glory would be diminished having to share precious space with our lesser glory. But we are not glorious, even in our self-made victories. The apostle Paul put it this way in 2 Corinthians 4:7-10: But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.
God has made us frail, breakable, so that He will get the glory, so that the fame of our fortunes will belong to Him. But look at the promises Paul also makes on God's behalf ... in all this affliction we are promised to be kept secure. Perplexed, but not despairing. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed. Even if we die, we will live. What a gospel this is! The believer cannot be stopped, even if you were to kill him.
Yet we are prone to doubt. The cynic in us wonders why God's glory requires our brokenness. Yet God knows our hearts ... far better than we do ourselves actually. He knows the sin in us; deceiving us into trusting ourselves and doubting Him. He also knows that refinement requires fire. He actually designed it that way. And God does not deal in our brokenness to keep us lowly and ineffective. He does it for our own joy, knowing that our hearts will never find the heights of happiness it seeks in anything other than the glory of God. He does it so that we may be conformed to the image of Christ, who Himself became conformed to the image of broken, frail humanity. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it, Jesus tells us [Matthew 16:25]. Brokenness makes us more like our crucified Savior, and if we share in the suffering of our Savior, we will share in his resurrection and glorification as well [Roman 8:17 and Philippians 3:10-11]. Seemingly, God must raze us before He raises us.
Yet when our heavenly Father looks upon the broken messes that are our lives, He doesn't snicker or even sigh. He just ministers to us a sweeter comfort than any temporary or worldly comfort than we'd sought before. We are told by the psalmist, The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise [Psalm 51:17]. God doesn't despise us in our brokenness; He comforts us in it. The greater the brokenness, the greater our impulse to trust Him. The greater the trust in Him, the greater the joy of our salvation. So, then, the further to the end of ourselves we go, the more of Christ we will enjoy.
What then does it mean to find Christ at the end of ourselves? Just as the prodigal son "came to himself" [Luke 15:17], it means coming to your spiritual senses, realizing the void inside and inability to help yourself, and then confessing these realities in an act of repentant trust in God. When our idols come crashing down upon us, we give up the artifice of self-reliance and open up to the wonders of what Jared Wilson calls "gospel wakefulness." The way to this blessed state of affairs is always brokenness, always the despair of self. To honestly proclaim the greatness of Christ requires honestly confessing the bankruptcy of our own souls.
As Jesus began His earthly ministry, He read from the scrolls of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.
In Luke 4:18 Jesus applied this prophecy to Himself, in effect announcing that the year of the Lord's favor begins in and through Himself. This is why Jesus, and John the Baptist before him, preached the kingdom was not some far-off event one could study in charts and diagrams but was actually an event breaking into human history in those very days!
And as He began this announcement, He unfurled the great proclamation of the kingdom that we call the Sermon on the Mount, which itself began with a preamble of sorts, which we call the Beatitudes, which leads off with a promise: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven [Matthew 5:3]. This paradoxical announcement of the kingdom tells us that, surprisingly, it is not for the rich, the powerful or the well-connected but rather for those who are spiritually poor. Jesus would later say that it is not the healthy who need a doctor but rather the sick [Matthew 9:12]. The underlying truth of the human condition, in reality, is that we are all spiritually poor/sick, it is just that few of us ever actually "see" the depth of our depravity and need. And who goes to the doctor if he thinks he is well? As a result then, even the true perception of our spiritual condition ends up being a gift from God Himself.
Thus shockingly and maybe even painfully, we must admit that our steps into the kingdom requires us to embrace both God's sovereignty and our own personal spiritual poverty all at the same time. And the extent of our joy upon entering the kingdom is typically proportional to extent to which we actually feel our own poorness of spirit. We can either acknowledge both sincerely and intellectually, "I am a sinner and so I need the Lord's forgiveness," or we can cry out from the depths of our very souls, "God have mercy upon me, a sinner!" as the tax collector did in Luke 18:13. The atoning work of Christ will cover all degrees of what is genuine faith, but Wilson says "the actual joy of 'gospel wakefulness' requires a depth of felt brokenness in which the phrase 'poor in spirit' makes much more sense than intellectual sense."
And the blessing the poor in spirit actually receive is nothing less than the very kingdom of heaven itself, with all the abundant life and eternal riches it holds. The kingdom itself is a treasure, which is often hidden from our spiritual senses while we are seeking earthly satisfactions everywhere else, but once it has been dug up and discovered in the rocky soil of our sin and suffering, we will with great joy sell all we have to claim it. We finally become like the singers of the song Jesus is Better, which could literally be the anthem of those whose souls have become truly gospel-aware, and we begin to behold the glorious vision of the gospel of God's grace and we start to see the soul-stirring inheritance that is ours in Christ. When we have felt deeply the spiritual poverty of self-rule, we begin to be prepared for the riches of the King, which are immeasurable, unsearchable, glorious and full.
