Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven belonged to the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3). The poor in spirit are those who are conscious of their human insufficiency and who therefore submit to the will of God completely.

In this sense, Jesus was perpetually poor in spirit. He lived as God intended man to live - in perpetual dependence on God, refusing to exercise the powers of His mind apart from God. Consider His words:

The Son can do nothing of (out from) Himself.... do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak as the Father taught Me.... have not come on My own initiative, but He sent Me.... did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself Who sent Me has given Me commandment, what to say and what to speak.... The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His work (John 5:19, 30; 8:28, 42; 12:49; 14:10).

Jesus never acted merely because He saw a need. He saw the need, was concerned about it, but acted only when His Father told Him to.

He waited at least four thousand years in Heaven, while the world lay desperately in need of a Saviour, and then came to earth when His Father sent Him (John 8:42). "When the right time came, the time God decided on, He sent His Son" (Galatians 4:4 - TLB). God has appointed a right time for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1). God alone knows that time, and so we won't go wrong if we seek the Father's will in everything, as Jesus did.

And when Jesus came to earth, He did not just go around doing whatever He felt was good. Even though His mind was perfectly pure, yet He never acted on any bright idea that came to mind. No. He made His mind a servant of the Holy Spirit.

Although He knew the Scriptures thoroughly by the age of twelve, yet He spent the next eighteen years as a carpenter, staying with His mother, making tables and chairs, etc. He had the very message that dying men around Him needed, and yet He would not go out into the preaching ministry. Why? Because the Father's time had not yet come.

Jesus was not afraid to wait.

He who believes will not be in a hurry (Isaiah 28:16).

And when His Father's time came, He went out of His carpenter's shop and began to preach. Often thereafter, He would say concerning some course of action, "My hour has not yet come" (John 2:4; 7:6). Everything in Jesus' life was regulated by the timing and the will of the Father.

The need of men, by itself, never constituted the call to action for Jesus, for that would have been acting out from Himself - out of His soul. The need of men was to be taken into account, but it was the will of God that was to be done.

Jesus did not do the many good things that His friends suggested, because He knew that if He listened to men and did the apparently good, He would miss the best that His Father had for Him.