"That ye through His poverty might become rich." HIS POVERTY, not only as an object of our faith, but as a matter of experience and fellowship is the passage through which the fullest entrance is gained into his riches. Let us present together some of the aspects we have already pointed out of the blessedness Christ's poverty and its voluntary fellowship brings.
What an aid to the spiritual life! It helps to throw the soul on God and the unseen; to realize the absoluteness of His presence and care in the least things of daily life; and is to make trust in God the actual moving spring of every temporal as well as spiritual interest. And because it is not possible to claim God's interposition for every day's food if a man is not consciously walking in tender and full obedience, it links the soul to God's will and way by the closest of ties. The hourly needs of the body, which are so often our greatest hindrance, become wonderful helps in lifting our entire life into communion with God, and in bringing God down into everything. It elevates the spirit above the temporal, and teaches us in every state always to be content, always to rejoice and to praise.
What a protest against the spirit of this world. There is nothing the Christian life suffers more from than _the subtle and indescribable worldliness_ that comes from the cares or the possessions of this life. Through it the God of this world exercises his hidden but terrible power. This is the Delilah in whose lap the God-separated Nazarite becomes impotent and sleeps. To waken and shake out of this sleep more than preaching is needed, more than the ordinary Christian liberality, which quite comports with the full enjoyment of all that abundance can supply: there is needed the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that God enables men, and makes it to them an indescribable blessedness, like their Lord, to give up everything of the earth that they may more fully possess, and prove, and proclaim, the sufficiency of the heavenly riches and the satisfaction they give. The protest against the spirit of this world will become the mightiest proclamation of the kingdom of heaven, the self-evidencing revelation of how heaven can even now take possession.
What entrance it will give into the image and likeness of Jesus. We adore our Lord in the form of a servant, and worship Him in it as the most perfect possible manifestation of a Godlike Humility and Love. His poverty was _an integral and essential part_ of that form of a servant in which He dwelt. In all ages the love of some has given them no rest in the desire to attain the closest possible conformity to the blessed Lord. In Him the outer and inner were in such living harmony that the connection was not accidental; the one was the only perfect and fit expression of the other. In the body of Christ there are great diversities of gifts; the whole body is not eye, or ear, or tongue. So there are some who have the calling and gift to manifest this trait of His image, and for the sake of their brethren and the world, keep alive the memory of this too much neglected part of the ever blessed Incarnation. Blessed they whom His Holy Spirit makes the representatives of this His wondrous grace that, though He was rich, He became poor.
What a power then this poverty of Christ becomes to make others rich. It is through His poverty we become rich. _His poverty in His people brings the same blessing._ In the church, many who do not feel the calling, or who in God's providence are not allowed to follow their desire for it, will be stirred and strengthened by the sight. When some witness testifies to the blessedness of entire conformity, others who are not called to this path will feel urged, in the midst of the property they possess and retain, to seek for as near an approach in spirit as is allowed them. Christian giving will not only be more liberal in amount, but more liberal in spirit, in the readiness and cheerfulness in the forethought and the actual self-sacrifice by which it will be animated. Through their poverty, too, through Christ's poverty in them, many shall be made rich. Just as a specialist devotes himself to some limited branch of (say) medical science, and all profit by the exclusiveness of his researches, so through these, too, who love and live in and make manifest the poverty of our Lord, the church becomes all the richer. Through them the poverty of Christ gets a place in many hearts where it was not known, and it is seen how this was part of His overcoming the world, and how it may be a part of our victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.