'Blessed are the poor in spirit...'

'Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven' Matthew 5:3

I have to be honest here, when I came to this verse despite the number of years I read this I actually TOTALLY didn't understand what it meant..."Poor in spirit?what, the Holy Spirit??surely not-we are blessed with the Holy Spirit-how can we be poor in spirit??Does it mean people who don't have the Holy Spirit but then how are they called blessed?" So what on earth does it mean?? From what I've been listening and reading (in particular reading 'The culture of The Kingdom' by Billy Humphries-you may be hearing a lot from that) I've realised it's much more about your realisation of being poor. In John 15:5 Jesus says,

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

Without Jesus we are spiritually bankrupt. In our flesh we are in spiritual poverty, we are nothing without God.
But Jesus says that this is a blessed place to be...what??I'm thinking, 'are you serious Jesus?' Working as a debt counsellor I spend all my time telling people that they need to get out of poverty and now I've been told to embrace poverty...

But as I have prayed and spent more time with God I have begun to discover how spiritually poor I actually am without my Saviour. To be spiritually poor is to truly be blessed because you realise how much you need God than anything else in your life.

We see again how upside down this kingdom actually is to what our world has become...the more we receive of God and His Spirit, the more we see how spiritually poor we are. The deeper into spiritual poverty we sink...the more blessed we become...

Blessed are the poor in spirit...