"Lovely Are the Low" Matthew 5:5 Sunday Morning Worship Service

The Sermon on the Mount is the sermon that turned the world upside down.

It captures the countercultural nature of Christianity, perhaps more so than any other single teaching or single proverb or truism in all of the Bible.

Jesus, of course, did turn the world upside down through his preaching and through his ministry.

This is what the disciples were accused of in the book of Acts.

Remember, they were accused by those in Ephesus of coming here to turn the world upside down.

It's a valid accusation.

The goal of the Christian gospel is to subvert the world system.

It is to turn north to south and up to down.

It is to turn the world head over heels.

It is to reorient everything from the direction the world goes to reorient it around the person of Jesus Christ.

That is the true nature of the gospel message.

And it really is confessed in a consolidated way in the Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount, it's not an exaggeration to say the Sermon on the Mount is the sermon that turned the world upside down.

It has had more of a profound effect on the world than any other sermon ever preached, both in the Bible or out of the Bible, of course.

The world teaches you the happiness is found through inner fulfillment for pursuing your desires.

And the Sermon on the Mount teaches that your desires are wicked and corrupt, and if you follow them, you'll go to hell.

The world says that happier the rich.

And Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount by saying, Happy are the poor.

Our schools teach in a very loud voice to our children that you can be whatever you want to be.

You precious little snowflake you.

And Jesus comes along and muffles that by saying, Blessed are you when you mourn over your own inability.

The world remembers victories.

In fact, it is often said that history is the story of the victors.

Jesus comes along and says, If your enemy captures you and makes you walk one mile with him, go ahead and walk a second mile also.

Our entertainment presents love as something you're not in control of.

You know what just happens to you, Cupid's arrow and all that?

And that you are happiest when you fulfill your innermost sexual desires with whoever you want to go for.

That's your thing, and that's your identity, and that's what will make you happy.

And Jesus comes along and says, if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, you better gouge out your eye, because it's better to go through life with one eye than for you to act on your innermost desires and find yourself in hell.

And the sermon concludes with a comparison.

If you follow the way of the world, you're building your house on sand.

Good luck with that.

The Greco-Roman culture or the Israelite culture of Jesus' lifetime.

I mean, there's differences between them, and there's differences between them and our culture, but those differences, I think, can often be overstated.

The Sermon on the Mount cuts both of those cultures and ours equally.

We like them are a self-serving culture.

We like them are materialistic.

We like them think we see God's blessing in our possessions and what we can acquire.

We like them think our children's security and all of that is seen in what we can pass down to them.

And Jesus comes along and calls that all foolishness.

Foolishness.

And says it will lead to a bankrupt and capsized life.

The other religions of the world all have a couple of elements in common, of course.

They're all a form of works righteousness.

They all teach self-fulfillment.

They all teach that you're the captain of your ship, you're the master of your destiny, you'll be judged based on your conduct and this or that.

And if you work hard enough and try hard enough, then you can make it to heaven when you die.

And Jesus obviously turns that upside down and says, you know, you can't, you can't work hard enough, you can't be good enough, you just can't.

Other religions of the world, and here I'm thinking of Islam or Catholicism.

They advance to the world through kingdoms, they advance to the world uh through expanding an empire.

This is obvious with Islam that you know, even in Muhammad's lifetime, they begin the conquest.

It's obvious in Catholicism with the Holy Roman Empire and whatnot.

Other religions in the world expand through government influence and government intervention.

And here I'm thinking of Hinduism that you know is adopted by the state of India and is its protector, and you know, laws guard it and promote it and all of that.

Other religions advance through ethnic identity or shared language or culture, and here I'm thinking of Buddhism or even modern-day Judaism.

Those religions maybe not advanced, but they maintain through that kind of corporate cultural identity.

The gospel, Christianity is not like any of those.

It doesn't expand through kingdom, earthly kingdom influence.

It doesn't expand through government intervention and government protection.

It doesn't expand or maintain through cultural identity and a shared language and whatnot.

Christianity teaches almost the exact opposite of those things.

The Sermon on the Mount teaches you don't advance your agenda through earthly kingdoms.

The Sermon on the Mount teaches that you don't put yourself forward.

The Sermon on the Mount certainly it presents a culture, but it's not an ethnic culture.

It's not a linguistic culture, it presents a culture of self-denial.

All of those other religions say exert yourself, establish authority, exercise authority to defend this.

And the Sermon on the Mount comes along and says, deny yourself, die to yourself.

This is Jesus' whole ministry, of course.

It's not confined to here.

If you want to follow him, deny yourself, pick up your cross, which is an implement of death, and follow him.

Kill yourself daily.

That's the path of Christianity.

Surrender is the path.

Give up is the path, not try harder.

It's just so radically different than everything else in the world.

Now that's true of the whole gospel, but that is, of course, crystallizing the Sermon on the Mount.

And of all of the Sermon on the Mount, no one verse of it is more upside down than this third Beatitude.

It's hard to say, I mean, the Sermon on the Mount is dense and complex, so it's very hard to say like this one verse captures the whole thing.

However, this one verse doesn't really capture the whole thing, but it definitely captures the upside-down nature of Jesus' teaching.

Happy are the meek, happy are the low.

Happy are those who surrender.

Happy are those that really die to themselves.

Jesus doesn't say join a church to be all you can be.

He says, join a church because you are broken, deficient, and damnable.

And you give up.

You surrender.

This third beatitude, I'll read it verse 5.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Again, so short, so succinct, and yet so life-transforming.

This third beatitude is about meekness.

Meekness is not something that we are really familiar with in our world, as is evident by the fact that you really need the word defined.

It's not a word you use.

You don't use it in normal conversation.

It certainly would not describe anything in our culture or in our world.

You wouldn't describe, you know, a movie star as meek.

You wouldn't describe a politician or even any kind of cultural icon as meek.

It's just not even a word in customary usage.

We might use the word low as a synonym or humble, but even those words aren't often used, except ironically.

But Jesus uses not the word for humble, which is a different Greek word, not the word for low, which is a different Greek word.

Jesus uses the word for meek.

Happy are those who are meek.

To understand this, I'm going to walk you through an outline here.

First, meekness defined.

Meekness defined.

It is a word we don't use, and so we do need it defined.

Lots of people give synonyms for it or idioms of strength under control or uh brokenness or humility or lowness.

My favorite definition comes from Matthew Henry, the Puritan.

He actually begins by defining it with a Latin word.

He says meekness is facilus of spirit.

Thank you, Matthew Henry.

What's the point of a Puritan if he's writing in Latin?

Facilus of spirit.

Facilus, if you speak Spanish, you might recognize how that word carries on today.

Facil is easy.

There's a synonym in Spanish tranquilo, English tranquil.

Facil easy.

Tranquilo, calm, relaxed.

That's what Matthew Henry uses to define meekness.

It's an easiness of spirit.

It's an easiness of spirit.

Matthew Henry goes on to describe it with its opposites, all through nature.

I love it when the Puritans define things by nature.

He says, imagine an ocean with all of its waves churning.

Meekness is the ocean with the waves gone.

Maybe you've gone out to watch the sunrise before at the ocean and you've seen that.

The ocean is just calm.

You see the reflection of all of the clouds and the sunlight coming up on it.

It's just completely at ease.

Matthew Henry says, Imagine a blustery autumn day where the wind is blowing and the leaves are sending everything everywhere.

And now contrast that with another day where you walk up.

It's one of those autumn days that it is calm and brisk.

There is no movement in the air at all.

There is no wind at all.

It is just cool and brisk.

That kind of, you know, we get like four of those days a year in Virginia.

But it's the kind of calmness and stillness outside where you feel like you can hear a squirrel four miles away.

That's meekness, Matthew Henry says.

It's the absence of any kind of turmoil, any kind of waves, any kind of commotion, but it's an internal meekness of the spirit.

That's what is extolled here, a meekness from the inside.

That's a meekness that certainly does not come from circumstances.

You'll never be at a point in your life where the wind has stopped and the waves have stopped in your life.

You're never going to get up in the morning and think, oh, everything is just as it should be in my life, so I can finally be meek.

It's an internal attitude, independent of circumstances, of easiness, of calmness.

But it's even more than that.

That's Matthew Henry's definition.

But if you look at Greek dictionaries or Latin dictionaries of which I have looked at a lot this week, there's another component to meekness that's kind of missing from that, and it's this idea that you get there by being broken.

One Latin dictionary says an idiom often used for meekness in the Latin language is translated into English as familiar with the hand.

Do you get that expression?

Familiar with the hand?

You got broken by being hit repeatedly.

So your spirit has been crushed.

So you're low.

That's the non-Christian concept of meekness.

You have been broken down.

You've been beaten down, so you don't speak up anymore.

That's the that's the connotation of this word.

Many dictionaries give it as an antonym to leadership.

Strong leaders are decisive, they're authoritative, they tell you their vision, they tell you where they're gonna take you, they tell you to get in line, and they take you there.

And they tell you where they took you.

That's strong leadership.

Meekness is the opposite of that.

Meekness doesn't tell you where they're gonna take you.

The meek person is calm and tranquil where he's at.

The leader puts himself forward.

The meek person doesn't just put himself back but puts himself down.

The leader says, follow me, and the meek person says, I don't want anybody following me.

Yikes.

That's meekness.

The leader says, this is what's wrong, and I'm gonna fix it.

The meek person looks at everything wrong in the world and says, I need to be able to be at ease with it.

Not just okay with it, but at ease with it.

Do you see why this is countercultural?

I mean, that kind of stuff is not okay to say.

You're not supposed to say, oh, you look at injustice in the world and you look at things that are wrong with the world, and you need to be okay with it.

That's you're not allowed to say that.

But Jesus doesn't just say it, he says, you will be happier when you're that way.

Stop trying to fix everything.

Don't just be okay with it.

Be at ease with it.

You submit yourself to it.

It's like rubbing a cat backwards, like this does not feel right.

It's a word that's used all over the Bible, by the way.

1 Peter 3.

It says, Wives, be subject to your own husbands, but then goes on a few verses, Peter does.

It says, Don't let your adorning be external, but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of meekness.

Some translations render it gentle, but it's the word for meekness.

So notice Peter's language there.

Wives be submissive to your husband.

So you're under authority, you're low, you're not putting yourself forward, you're submissive.

And then he connects it to how you're dressed.

And I want you to really embrace his logic because I've never preached in 1 Peter.

We don't talk about this verse very often, but really embrace Peter's logic here.

The person who is adorned on the external is putting on, you know, clothing and an appearance in order to influence, to make an impact in the people.

You're in a room of people, and the eyes go to you.

That's the person who's putting themselves forward with adornment.

So notice the contrast is putting yourself forward with the external appearance, is contrasted with the internal meekness, the at ease of being where and who you are.

It's not particularly feminine, although obviously in 1 Peter 3 it's connected to wives in the concept of submission and marriage, but it is not uniquely feminine.

You see it commanded elsewhere.

For example, in 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 18, Peter commands slaves to be meek in how they relate to their masters.

1 Peter 2:18

And then he says, even the unjust masters.

Nor is it uniquely about submission, although you see it most in submission, certainly in terms of wives, and then the example of slaves there, but then in elder qualifications, 1 Timothy 3, that same word is used as an elder qualification.

So again, it is not about wives only, it's not about slaves only, it's not about elders only.

As you start to put the pieces together, you realize wives, slaves, elders, hello, Christians.

Paul tells the Colossians, adorn yourselves with meekness, you who follow the Lord.

So that's what meekness is.

It's this internal attitude that recedes into the background and surrenders.

The most common way it's explained in dictionaries, both Greek and Latin dictionaries, the most common way it's explained is the example of a wild animal.

Wild animal is independent.

One Greek dictionary I read had a long description of a stallion, like a Roman stallion.

It's it's you know, it's escaped and it's developed its own independent attitude.

It's running in the wild and it's gonna be recaptured.

And to recapture it, you have to bring it back in, you have to deprive it of food.

Then you introduce a person to it, and that person becomes its food source, they become comfortable with each other, and then eventually the stallion realizes he's only gonna get food from that food source from that person, and then eventually the stallion gets what we call in English broken.

The stallion is broken when he submits his will to the authority of the person who's now his master.

And that's the English idiom, by the way.

We refer to that as breaking a horse.

The biblical word for that is meekness.

Someone who's been broken and submits his will to somebody else.

He surrenders it.

That's meekness.

That's meekness defined.

This is meekness, meekness distributed.

Where does meekness come from?

It's not natural.

People don't pursue meekness, people don't cultivate meekness, people in the world don't esteem it, can't buy it anywhere.

Meekness has one source.

Biblical meekness has one source, and it's the agency of the Holy Spirit who comes and he gives meekness.

He gives you meekness, he implants it in your heart.

It comes with salvation, and this is how it functions in the Beatitude.

These beatitudes are not random.

There's an order to them, there's a progression, there's a logical and sequential progression.

There is most definitely a sequence to these beatitudes.

So please don't picture them as haphazard, they're not fortune cookies, you know, you get one and the other person gets another, and it could have been the other way around.

There's an order defined by our Lord to this.

So first you're broken.

You have the poverty to you.

You're broken really over your poverty.

That's where the beatitudes begin.

You go looking for your spiritual checkbook and you don't have one.

You are impoverished spiritually.

You know you're gonna die and stand before God for judgment.

You have no righteousness of your own.

There's nothing spiritually good to commend you before God.

You are poor.

And remember a few weeks ago when we looked at that beatitude, the word for poor was not the Greek word for just a beggar.

There's a specific Greek word for a beggar who won't even make eye contact with you.

They're so ashamed of their position in life, they look away while they beg.

That's this word that's used here.

In other words, you come to the understanding that spiritually speaking, you are destitute and you go down.

You become a beggar for righteousness which you don't have and you are poor.

Then that produces mourning.

You grieve over your poorness.

It's not just sufficient to know that you're spiritually destitute, but you go beyond that to realize that you are culpable for that.

And it grieves you.

You've sinned against God because of your lack of spiritual capital, you've sinned against God, and that crushes you.

You are mourning over it, you're broken by it.

Now, not everybody who understands their spiritual poverty is a Christian.

Lots of people understand their spiritual poverty and they don't get saved.

They understand that they're spiritually bankrupt, and yet they determine to try harder.

They determine to do something different, or they determine not to think about it.

So it's very easy to have a spiritually bankrupt person that is not regenerate or not following Christ.

That's why the second beatitude kicks in.

Blessed are those who mourn.

So you're spiritually bankrupt and you mourn over it.

It actually grieves you.

But if you remember, we looked at this last week, not all those who mourn over their spiritual deficiency are saved.

You can be spiritually poor and not a Christian.

You can be spiritually poor and mourning and not a Christian.

The example of this I think of all the time is in Judges chapter 2.

Judges 2 · chapter mention

The Israelites have just been led into the promised land.

They had clear commands from God, and yet they are disobeying God.

They're compromising left and right.

And so they are rebuked by God.

And I mean, God basically says, I'll kill you all in the promised land.

I killed the last generation in the wilderness.

You'll all die here.

And do you remember the Israelites?

They are broken by that and they weep and they weep and they weep.

They weep so much they named the place the Valley of Bookim, which means tears in Hebrew.

In other words, they were so cut to the heart by God's rebuke, they cried a river of tears.

But they didn't repent.

And the book of Judges carries on.

Everybody does what's right in their own eyes.

They cried about it, but they kept doing it.

That's not true for everybody, though.

Some people see their Spiritual poverty, they mourn, and it causes them to surrender to the Lord.

They look to the Lord and they give up.

They surrender and they throw themselves at the Lord's feet.

That's spiritual meekness.

You recognize your inability to gain a righteousness of your own, so you submit yourself to God.

James 1, verse 21 captures this very well.

James 1:21

You receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your soul.

Every word in that verse is critical.

You receive, in other words, it happens to you, it comes to you, the implanted word.

Notice that language, the implanted word.

This is not something you picked up and carried around.

No, God planted his word in your heart.

Salvation is something God does to you, He puts it in you.

This is regeneration.

I mean, how does God implant his word in your heart?

It's the Holy Spirit who causes your dead soul through faith in Christ to come alive and to blossom and the love of Christ to be evident in you because God planted it there.

It's the seed that he puts in your heart.

And when that happens, it comes through the word of God.

The word is implanted to you.

It's the word.

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the words about Christ.

And so God doesn't merely save you by the external gospel call, the call that goes to the whole world, wherever the sun goes, there's a gospel call to the whole world.

That's not how God saves you.

God saves you by particular words from the Word of God about Jesus Christ that He plants in your heart.

And He plants them not in every heart, He plants them in the heart that is meek.

You receive the gospel through the meekness and quietness of your own inability.

And then James 121 ends with, when that happens, oh man.

The implanted word, remember James's words, is able to save your soul.

That's salvation.

That's salvation.

That's why Jesus can say, happier the meek.

Thirdly, meekness defined, meekness distributed through salvation.

Thirdly, meekness displayed.

What does meekness look like?

And here I'm talking particularly about providence.

The meek person comes to terms with the way things are in the world and surrenders themselves to it because you're surrendering yourself to God.

You give yourself over to what?

To God's providence in your life.

You recognize you're not just surrendering to the existence of the world.

You're surrendering to a God who is sovereign over the world.

It's a descriptor of a person who is broken and who is obedient to God.

And this is why Colossians 3.12 says, put on then, as God's chosen one, compassion, kindness, humility, and patience.

The word humility there, the ESV renders, is the word for meekness.

So notice the progression in Colossians 3, how Christians live.

You're putting on in your Christian life.

So we're not talking about salvation, we're talking about your Christian life here now.

You go in through the narrow gate and you're walking on the narrow path.

That narrow path looks like compassion.

You're hurting over other people's sorrows.

Kindness, you respond to your compassion through acts of kindness.

And you act that way because of meekness.

You're low, and so you see other people who are low and you have sorrow for them and you reach out to help them.

That's spiritual meekness.

And that, of course, produces patience towards each other.

If you're meek, you're going to be patient, right?

I mean, the impatient person is putting their way forward.

The impatient person has their own timetable to keep.

The meek person is, of course, Paul says Colossians 3.12, patient.

What does that look like in practice?

You forgive each other of sins.

Meekness is tied to forgiveness in the Bible.

Because, hey, you're spiritually bankrupt, they're spiritually bankrupt.

If the two of you don't have anything, it's a very record keeping between you is very easy, you know?

If you have no money in your checking account, you don't need to balance your checkbook.

You know what I'm talking about?

If you don't have cash, you don't need to carry, you don't have to work out all the decimal points.

You don't have anything.

So meekness is tied to forgiveness.

And Paul says that in Colossians 3, he goes on to say, forgiving one another as the Lord forgave you.

If you're meek, you forgive each other.

Or Galatians 6, verse 1.

Galatians 6:1

If you see your brother or sister caught in a trespass, caught in a sin, you who are spiritual restore them.

And that language of restorers, reach down, pull them up out of the mud they're stuck in.

But do so with a spirit of meekness.

So not like, aha, you're in sin.

But more like, oh, we're we're in the mud together, brother.

Of course I'm gonna help you out.

Because we're both down here.

You know, if somebody comes to you and says, Would you forgive me because I sinned against you?

What are you gonna say?

How dare you?

How dare you do that to me?

Don't you know who I am?

I don't deserve this, frankly.

That's the way in our flesh we want to respond.

But the meek person recognizes, you know, why wouldn't you have sinned against me?

We're all down here together.

Of course I forgive you.

The Lord forgave me when I was spiritually bankrupt, so I'm gonna forgive you.

It affects your evangelism, even in non-believers, forgiveness towards believers, but non-believers.

Back in 1 Peter 3, the same passage where Paul commands wives to be submissive to their husband in a spirit of meekness.

That's not the only time he uses that word in that passage.

Later on in 1 Peter 3, he says, be ready to give an answer for your faith for whoever asks you, and answer them with meekness.

Man, Peter would not make a good podcast host right there.

He would not have his own show on Fox News.

And the people on TV, they're very good at answering their opponents.

You know?

This host destroys his opponents.

20 seconds shows how silly they are.

So different than Peter, who tells his readers, answer your opponents with meekness.

Not in a way that puts you forward, but in a way that puts Christ forward and you down.

Down, down, down.

But those are all focused externally on other people who are sinning against you, on non-believers who have questions for you.

The main way you see meekness, and listen listen to me carefully here.

The main way you see meekness in your Christian life is in your inward spirit towards providence.

Towards whatever God has brought to pass in this world, you have an ease of attitude towards it.

You recognize that all things work for God's glory and for your good.

And so you throw yourself at the feet of providence.

It's not that you necessarily appreciate everything that's happening in the world, but it's that you realize you're not sovereign over this world.

God is, and so you're just you're just along for the ride.

You may as well enjoy it.

When you think of meekness, the example you think of is probably Moses, for most people.

Moses.

Because Moses was the meekest person on the face of the earth.

And if you don't believe me, if you don't believe me, you can just ask him.

Numbers 12, verse 3.

Numbers 12:3

Moses was the meekest person on the face of the earth.

He wrote it himself, so you have to believe it.

What's going on in Numbers 12?

Some of you may remember the story.

Numbers 12?

That's where Moses says he's the meekest person in the world.

What happened there?

Well, he married a Cushite, and his older sister Miriam was not cool with that.

Aaron was upset about it.

And so Aaron and Miriam are going after Moses and Moses' wife.

Aaron and Miriam are haranguing Moses and abusing Moses and mocking him.

We don't know all the details, but it was serious.

It was undercutting Moses' leadership.

It wasn't just a passing expression of, like, I don't like your Cushite wife.

It was this repeated hounding on them to the point where Moses' leadership was beginning to be compromised in Israel.

And what's so interesting is in numbers 12, Moses never defends himself.

Instead, he writes he was the meekest person on the earth.

Because ask yourself, how would you have responded if somebody went after your wife?

Who's in charge?

Is Moses in charge or Aaron in charge?

Who saw God in the burning bush?

Was that Miriam or was that Moses?

It was Moses.

God didn't call Miriam.

God called Moses.

Moses, by the way, stood up for the Israelite who was being abused, ended up having to spend 40 years shepherding sheep by himself out in the wilderness.

That was his humility, and he was okay with it.

He surrendered himself to God's will.

God, you want me to tend sheep for 40 years?

I'll go do it.

And just wanders in the wilderness.

He didn't know he was going to be called back.

He's 80, he comes back.

The plagues, the Red Sea crossing into the wilderness again.

He's okay with that.

Now he's leading the Israelites for 40 years.

God speaks to Moses, not to Aaron, not to Miriam.

Moses went up the mountain.

Aaron and Miriam pushed him up the mountain, if you recall.

Moses goes up there.

God speaks to Moses, not to them.

Moses comes back down and is trying to lead everybody.

He's the one God called.

He's the one God revealed himself to.

And now these two are saying, Did God only reveal himself to Moses?

And also we don't like his wife.

Again, how would you respond?

And listen, how would our culture say you should respond?

I get that most of you would understand somebody's mean to you in the grocery store.

You like turn the other sheek and walk away, okay?

But what if somebody's mean to your wife?

What if somebody makes fun of your wife?

How would you you would say, you can't talk to my wife like that?

That's how you would respond.

Probably.

And our culture even esteems that.

How dare you talk to her like that?

Moses didn't do that.

Instead, he says he was meek.

He submitted himself to providence.

The only time Moses speaks in Numbers chapter 12, God comes in, rebukes Aaron, hits Miriam with leprosy.

Numbers 12 · chapter mention

The only words Moses says in the whole chapter, he prays for Miriam's healing.

That's meekness.

He surrendered himself to the will of the Lord.

There are so many other examples of this in the Bible.

Think of Abraham and Lot and their conflict.

Who received the promise?

Abraham or Lot?

Well, Abraham did.

But Abraham says, Lot, if you want to go that way, I'll go that way.

You want to go that way, I'll go that way.

I don't care.

You choose, and Abraham surrendered himself to providence.

The promised land was right, not left.

But he told Lot, you choose, Lot.

I give up.

I'm surrendering myself to God.

There's so many examples of that in the Bible.

David, we gotta talk about David real quick.

He's being hounded by Saul, repeatedly handed by Saul, chased down by Saul.

Saul's trying to kill him.

Well, who was the rightful king?

David was.

But David didn't take vengeance on Saul.

David trusted himself to the Lord's providence.

So much so that when Saul wandered into the cave where David was to relieve himself, David could have killed Saul then.

David could have said, Hey, I trusted myself to God to Providence, and providentially, look at this.

No, he let him go.

Later, he sneaks up on Saul's corner, David, up on a cliff.

David can't escape.

He waits till Saul's asleep and sneaks down, grabs Saul's nalgine bottle and runs away, then shouts really loud and wakes up Abner and says, You know, I thought you were watching the king.

And Abner's like, I'm the best watch guard ever.

And David says, Where's his water bottle?

He could have killed him, you know.

That's David.

That is meekness.

He would have been well within his rights.

Instead, he's meek.

He's meek.

What makes you meek is knowing the Lord is in control.

That's what makes you meek.

The fear of the Lord is the foundation of wisdom.

James 3, verse 13 says that wisdom makes you meek.

James 3:13

That's James 3, verse 13.

James 3:13

Wisdom makes you meek.

You know the Lord, you fear the Lord, you cover your mouth.

Isaiah 29, verse 19 says the meek will obtain a joy from the Lord when the Lord comes to judge the wicked.

Isaiah 29:19

So meekness is not just apathy towards injustice.

Rather, meekness is saying, I'm surrendering myself to what God is doing providentially, knowing that this life is not all that counts, that there is a second life.

God's going to come, he's going to judge the unjust, he's going to cast them into hell, and he's going to establish his kingdom on the earth, and at that moment all will be well.

And so meekness has a long-term window, which leads to my fourth point.

Meekness delivers.

Meekness is defined, it's distributed, it's displayed, but in the future, meekness delivers.

This is the rest of the Beatitude.

The meek shall inherit the earth.

God will deliver the earth to the meek.

We think if I don't stick up for myself, who will?

If I don't fight back, who's going to fight for me and my family?

And the answer to that is the Lord will.

Somebody who says, if I don't stick up for myself, nobody else will, is not a Christian.

At least they're not thinking in a Christian manner.

A Christian says, if I don't stick up for myself, I know one who will.

The Lord.

And the Lord may not vindicate you in this life.

We'll get to that later in the Sermon on the Mount.

You may go to your earthly grave without being vindicated, but your earthly grave is not the end of the story.

There's another chapter to be written.

There's another world.

The Lord will establish his kingdom on earth.

And you'll be there.

That was their first.

That's why I wanted to read Psalm 37 for a scripture reading.

I hope you heard not just the refrain that the wicked fret, the righteous don't, but also the refrain that the meek inherit the earth.

The wicked, they are the fretting ones.

The meek, they don't fret.

Because that's remember the word ease, tranquility.

The meek don't fret, they submit, but they get the earth at the end.

The wicked are doing all this stuff to try to secure the earth for themselves.

They'll lose.

The middle of Psalm 37, the Lord laughs.

Psalm 2.

The Lord laughs.

Man, those people are doing a lot of work to overthrow God's king.

That's a lot of wasted work right there.

The meek, on the other hand, they're not doing any work.

But they will inherit the earth.

They'll inherit the earth.

Think of Gideon.

All of his soldiers.

And the Lord tells Gideon, You've got too many soldiers.

Only choose the ones that drink on their hands and knees like a dog.

Them I can work with.

So the army goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down.

That's meekness, where Gideon says, I alright, I don't know what's going to happen here, but I don't want too many people that people think I'm working.

It's the Lord who's working, he'll have victory, and the Lord gives them victory, ultimately, not even in this world, ultimately in the next, where the meek inherit the earth.

And then finally, meekness demonstrated.

Meekness demonstrated.

Moses was the meekest person on the face of the earth at the writing of Deuteronomy.

But Jesus, of course, is our ultimate model for meekness.

Jesus came from high to low.

It's 2 Corinthians 9.

He was exalted in heaven.

He took on the poverty of earth.

He came from angels to dirt.

He came from wealth to rags.

That was the transition of Jesus.

He had no place to lay his head.

He came poor.

He came alone.

He wasn't married.

Had no children, had disciples who abandoned him.

He came humble.

He didn't insist on his own way.

He didn't demand his own way.

He could have called angels to vindicate himself, angels to rescue him.

Remember when he was arrested in the garden?

Peter's going to go fight.

Put away your sword.

I have angels that could fight, and I'm not calling them.

He submitted himself to the will of the Lord.

He had prayed that earlier.

Nevertheless, not my will but your will be done.

That's a meek prayer.

God, I surrender my will to yours, your will do its thing.

He's put on this mock trial where these false accusations and lies are said about him.

He didn't even defend himself.

That was about what he said in his defense.

Pilate says, Why are you answering me like that?

Don't you know I could kill you?

And Jesus says, You can't do anything except my father allows it.

That's a meek response right there.

Somebody lies about you and gives you false accusations, and your response is, God must be allowing this.

That's meekness.

He was mocked.

He entered Jerusalem as Passover week on a donkey.

And I know I've heard people try to explain that away with like, oh no, it's a peacetime animal, and you know, shows the confidence and boldness of him.

No.

It's humility.

It's low.

He's down.

And that was used against him in the court of law, too.

They mentioned that.

How low he was.

He's not a real Messiah.

This is why when Paul, when Paul was being falsely accused by the Corinthians, Paul is in a tough place.

He wants to defend himself because he doesn't want the church to be bought into disrepute, but he doesn't want to defend himself because he's meek.

And so remember, he tells the Corinthians, 2 Corinthians chapter 10, he says, I implore you, by the meekness of Christ, think about what you're doing.

2 Corinthians 10 · chapter mention

Paul won't even defend himself.

He says, I want you to think long and hard about how meek Jesus was before you give another false accusation about me.

That's meekness.

And so when Jesus says happy are the meek, he's not saying something that he himself is not living out.

He submitted himself to the will of the Father as well.

I know the Bible has a lot more to say about how to interact with injustice.

The Bible has a lot more to say about what a Christian life should be like and leadership in the church, other than meekness, that's one thing.

There's lots of other sermons on all of those things.

But here it's just this verse meekness.

What if that's not you?

What if you look at your life, and your life is fretting?

You fret.

You worry.

You try to acquire for yourself things for your family and your children, thinking that their security is about what you can give them.

You try to build up righteousness for yourself, you try to be autonomous, you try to be self-sufficient, you worry about things, you are not meek, you are fretting.

I hope you hear the words of Jesus.

Jesus says that if you are carrying a yoke that is too strong for you, take it off.

You don't have to worry about those things.

You can take that yoke off.

Put on instead, Matthew 11, 29, all of you take up my yoke and learn from me, Jesus says, because I am meek and lowly in heart.

It's not just a platitude.

Do you remember how that verse ends?

Put on my yoke, I am meek, I am lowly in heart, and your soul will find rest.

God, we're grateful for the meekness of Christ.

The Lord of the universe, he did not came, he did not come to be served, but to serve.

And he gave his life as a ransom for many.

He did not come to exalt himself, but he came to lower himself and to wash the feet of the disciples, to befriend the sinners and the tax collectors.

He came down.

And yet through his humiliation, he finds exaltation.

You don't snap the bruised reed, you don't extinguish the smoldering flick, the smoldering wick.

You instead fan the flames in our hearts and cause love for Christ to grow.

I pray for anyone here today who's never given you their life.

I pray that today they would surrender their will to yours.

That today they would stop their striving, stop their fighting, submit themselves to you, and find the rest that you promise us through Christ.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.