Pastor John Wright

At the center of Wesley's Standard Sermons are a series of sermons on the Sermon on the Mount. Wesley here picks up a medieval catholic practice of the moral foundation for believers. Wesley reads the Sermon on the Mount, as you will see below, as describing the way of salvation, an ascending moral transformation that arises out of faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sins.

Wesley here captures a central paradox of Christian life -- those who are most authentically holy are so made by recognizing the depth of their own sinfulness -- outward and inward. By recognizing one's sinfulness, one thereby recognizes the depth of God's love in Christ for each and every one of us. This recognition allows us to participate in God by the Spirit -- to have the love of God shed abroad in our heart by faith. For Wesley, as throughout the catholic Christian tradition, the Christian life is a journey that begins in poverty of spirit -- a recognition of our dependence on Christ for the forgiveness of sins in all that we are and do.

The last sentences of this section express this paradox as well as any time that I know of in the Christian tradition. May the Spirit move so in us to experience the real depths of the poverty of Spirit so that we might experience the fulness of God's love for us in Christ.

I. 1. Some have supposed that he designed in these to point out the several stages of the Christian course; the steps which a Christian successively takes in his journey to the promised land; -- others, that all the particulars here set down belong at all times to every Christian. And why may we not allow both the one and the other? What inconsistency is there between them? It is undoubtedly true, that both poverty of spirit, and every other temper which is here mentioned, are at all times found, in a greater or less degree, in every real Christian. And it is equally true, that real Christianity always begins in poverty of spirit, and goes on in the order here set down, till the "man of God is made perfect." We begin at the lowest of these gifts of God, yet so as not to relinquish this, when we are called of God to come up higher: But "whereunto we have already attained, we hold fast," while we press on to what is yet before, to the highest blessings of God in Christ Jesus.

2. The foundation of all is poverty of spirit: Here, therefore, our Lord begins: "Blessed," saith he, "are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

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4. Who then are "the poor in spirit?" Without question, the humble; they who know themselves; who are convinced of sin; those to whom God hath given that first repentance, which is previous to faith in Christ.

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7. Poverty of spirit then, as it implies the first step we take in running the race which is set before us, is a just sense of our inward and outward sins, and of our guilt and helplessness.

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I. 13. Then you learn of him to be "lowly of heart." And this is the true, genuine, Christian humility, which flows from a sense of the love of God, reconciled to us in Christ Jesus. Poverty of spirit, in this meaning of the word, begins where a sense of guilt and of the wrath of God ends; and is a continual sense of our total dependence on him for every good thought, or word, or work; of our utter inability to all good, unless he "water us every moment;" and an abhorrence of the praise of men, knowing that all praise is due unto God only. With this is joined a loving shame, a tender humiliation before God, even for the sins which we know he hath forgiven us, and for the sin which still remaineth in our hearts, although we know it is not imputed to our condemnation. Nevertheless, the conviction we feel of inbred sin is deeper and deeper every day. The more we grow in grace, the more do we see of the desperate wickedness of our heart. The more we advance in the knowledge and love of God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, (as great a mystery as this may appear to those who know not the power of God unto salvation,) the more do we discern of our alienation from God, of the enmity that is in our carnal mind, and the necessity of our being entirely renewed in righteousness and true holiness.