The Appeal Letter and the Beatitude

The form is on the kitchen table under the light because the light in the front room is not good enough for the small print.

Section four. Explain how your condition affects your ability to prepare and cook a simple meal. There is a box about the size of a postcard.

He has been at this table since seven. There is a mug he has not drunk. There is a folder his daughter bought him, which was kind, and which is now full of letters that all say the same thing in slightly different orders.

The thing about the form is that every single box asks him to write down what he cannot do. That is the whole architecture of it. Section four, section five, section nine. Describe what you cannot manage. Explain what you have lost. Estimate how far you can walk before you have to stop.

He has filled in eleven pages of what he does not have.

And he goes to church, and he likes it, and they are good to him there. But he has noticed something over about two years and he has never said it. Every time the word blessed gets used from the front, it is followed by something. Blessed, but of course not in a worldly sense. Blessed, though we know that does not mean material things. Blessed, and the real riches are spiritual.

Every time. And every time, he thinks: yes, all right, but you say it in the tone of somebody handing me a smaller thing carefully, and I have noticed that you never do that when somebody in this room gets a job.

He puts the pen down and looks at section four for a while.

If you have ever spent an evening proving your own lack in postcard sized boxes, you know that table. And you know the thought that comes with it: the word gets said over me in a special voice, with a clause, and I would like to hear it once without the clause.

Luke did not put a clause on it

Let me sit at that table and say the plain thing first, because you have never said it and it is entirely reasonable.

You have noticed that the word arrives at you with insulation on it. That is not you being oversensitive. It happens because the people saying it are frightened of prosperity teaching, so they hedge, and the hedging is aimed at a doctrine and it lands on a man.

So here is the sentence with nothing on it, and this is Luke rather than Matthew, and Luke is the one who did not soften it.

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.Luke 6:20

Not blessed are the poor in spirit. Just: blessed be ye poor. Second person, straight at them, and Luke says just before it that Jesus lifted up His eyes on His disciples and said it, which means He was looking at faces.

And blessed there means what it means everywhere. God's favor resting on a person. His face turned toward them. Jesus looked at people who were poor and said God is toward you, and then said the kingdom is yours, present tense.

No clause. No but. No carefully lowered voice.

You are being spoken to directly in that verse, in the second person, with nothing added on the end. Luke 6:20 says blessed be ye poor and stops, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus said had anointed Him to preach good tidings to the poor, which means this is not a consolation given to the poor, it is the errand.

And I am not going to do the thing your church does either, in the other direction. I am not going to tell you that poverty is spiritually superior or that God arranged your circumstances to keep you humble. That is the other lie and it is worse, because it makes a man's hardship into God's teaching method. Luke does not do that. Luke says blessed be ye poor and then, a few verses later, woe unto you that are rich, and neither sentence is a theory about anybody's character.

What the kingdom being yours actually means at this table

Now the second half, and I want to put it right down beside section four.

Yours is the kingdom of God. Present tense, and it is the same present tense Matthew uses. Not shall be. Is.

Think about what a kingdom is. It is not a feeling and it is not a compensation. It is a realm with a king in it, and to say the kingdom is yours is to say you are not a subject on sufferance in it, you belong to it and it belongs to you.

And that is being said to people filling in the ancient equivalent of section four. People who had to prove their need to somebody in order to eat. People who counted, publicly and repeatedly, what they did not have.

You have the kingdom of God in the present tense while the form is still on the table, and the form has no jurisdiction over that sentence. Luke 6:20 puts the possession in the present on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of the inheritance, a deposit already paid, which means what you hold is not a promise about a better year.

And here is the part that matters most about the boxes. Eleven pages of what you cannot do is a true document and it is not a description of you. It is a description of what a system needs to know in order to do one specific thing. It has no opinion about your worth and it was never designed to have one, and the reason it feels like a verdict is that nothing else in your week is asking you the opposite question.

You are more than the eleven pages, and the eleven pages were never trying to be about you. Scripture measures a person by whose face is turned toward them rather than by what they can carry upstairs, and it is His Spirit who bears witness with your spirit about who you are, which is a second opinion from a much better source.

About the tone from the front

Now the church, because it is worth being fair to them and also honest.

The people adding the clause are not sneering at you. They are trying to protect a room from a teaching that has genuinely damaged people, where blessing gets tied to money and the ones without it are told to look at their own faith. They are right to fight that. They are just fighting it in a way that puts a small careful cushion under the word every time it goes near a poor man.

You do not have to correct them. You are tired and it is not your job.

What you can do is hear the verse without their edit, because Luke wrote it without one. When somebody says blessed with a clause on the end, you can let the clause go past you and keep the word, because the word was said to you directly by somebody looking at your face.

You are hearing it now with nothing on the end of it, and there was never anything on the end of it. The written word records Jesus lifting His eyes on His disciples and saying it plain, and it is the Holy Spirit who can hand a man the same sentence twice, once with a cushion and once without.

I do not know what happens with the appeal. I am not going to guess and I would be doing you a disservice if I did. Get the help with the form if there is any going, from a real adviser, and take somebody with you if there is a hearing, because that is what a person does and it has nothing to do with faith.