Christ's Poverty Our Riches

Through His Poverty

2Co 8:9  For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.

Through his poverty: What does that mean? That He dispossessed Himself of all heavenly and earthly possessions that the riches of earth and heaven might be ours? That He so took our place, as in our stead to walk in the path of earthly poverty, that we in comfort and ease might enjoy the heavenly riches he has won for us?  
---------------------------------------
Or has that "through his poverty" a deeper meaning, and does it imply that His poverty is the very path or passage that He opened up through which All Must Go who would fully enter into His riches? 

Does it mean that, just as He needed in poverty of spirit and body to die to the world that He might open for us the way to the heavenly treasures, so we need to walk in His footsteps, and can only through His poverty working in us, through fellowship with His poverty, come to the perfect enjoyment of the riches He came to bring? 

In other words, is the poverty of Jesus something for Him alone, or something in which his disciples are to share?

There is scarce a trait in the life and character of Christ in which we do not look to Him as an example.

What are the lessons His Holy Poverty has to teach?

Is the right to possess and enjoy the riches of earth as it is now everywhere practiced in the Church part of what Christ has secured for us? 

Or, is it possible that the lack of faith in the beauty and blessedness of the poor life of Christ Jesus is part of the cause of our spiritual poverty; our lack of Christ's poverty the cause of our lack of His riches? 

Is there not a needs-be that we not only think of the one side, “for your sakes he became poor"; but as much of the other, "For His sake I suffer the loss of all things?"
 
In seeking an answer to these questions, we must first turn and gaze upon our blessed Lord, if maybe the Holy Spirit will unfold somewhat of the glory of this His blessed attribute. 

Unless our heart be fixed upon our Lord in patient and prayerful contemplation, and we wait for the Holy Spirit to give us His illumination, we may indeed have our thoughts about this Divine poverty, but we cannot really behold its glory, or have its power and blessing enter our life. 

May God give us understanding! 

Why Christ had to become poor. 

We must first of all see what the reason, the needs-be was of this earthly poverty of Christ. 

He might have lived on earth possessed of riches, and dispensing them with wise and liberal hand. 

He might have come in the enjoyment of a moderate competency, just enough to keep Him from the dependence and homelessness which was His lot. 

In either case He might have taught His people of all ages such precious and much-needed lessons as to the right use of the things of this world. 

What a sermon His life would have been on the far-reaching words: “They that buy as though they possessed not.”

But no, there was a Divine necessity that His life must be one of entire poverty. 

In seeking for the explanation, we shall find two classes of reasons. 

There are those which have reference to us and His work for us as our Savior. 

There are others which are more closely connected with His own personal life as man, and the work the Father wrought in Him, as He perfected Him through suffering.

Of the reasons referring to His work, the principal ones are easily named.  

Christ's poverty is part of His entire and deep humiliation, a proof of His perfect humility - His willingness to descend to the very lowest depths of human misery, and to share to the full in all the consequences of sin. 

The poor have in all ages been despised, while the rich have been sought and honored: Christ came to be the despised and neglected of men in this, too 

~Andrew Murray~   

                                                

Christ Poverty A Mark Of Separation

Christ's poverty was one of the marks of His entire separation from the world, the proof that He was of another world and another spirit. 

As it was with the fruit good for food and pleasant to the eye, sin entered the world, so the great power of the world over men is in the cares and possessions and enjoyments of this life.

Christ came to conquer the world and cast out its prince, to win the world back to God. He did so by refusing every temptation to accept its gifts or seek its aid.

Of this protest against the worldly spirit, its self-pleasing and its trust in the visible, the poverty of Christ was one of the chief elements. 

He overcame the world first in the temptations by which its prince sought to ensnare Himself, then and through that in its power over us.

The poverty of Christ was thus no mere accident or external circumstance. It was an essential element of His holy, perfect life; one great secret of this power to conquer and to save; His path to the Glory of God. 

~T. Austin Sparks