Matthew Beatitudes: Blessed are the Meek

So we are working our way through the Beatitudes this summer.

Nine weeks, nine Sundays, and as well, nine Beatitudes, so it works out perfectly for us.

So that's our verse for this morning.

So we're going to dig into that.

Blessed are the meek.

So right away, I immediately as I started in on this verse this week.

My first thought is like, really?

Because it doesn't seem this way, right?

It just doesn't quite seem this way.

It seems like a little bit of a contradiction for our culture and our age because the people that I'm seeing be blessed are looking like people who build a really good platform, who have a lot of followers on social media, who have a network, a really great network to network through, who are the most noticed, those tend to be the ones who seem to me to be the ones prospering and making things happen and getting opportunities.

So right away I'm kind of going, okay, so what does this mean?

What's going on here?

What does blessed mean?

What does meek mean?

And what does it mean to inherit the earth?

We've got to define all these things.

So this is in your bulletin as well, in the handout in the New York Times.

I read this this week, an older article, but I read it this week.

Tony Schwartz is a writer and a CEO.

He was writing toward leaders, but I think it applies to all of us.

You can follow along in your bulletin.

So when we identify with a particular strength, the opposite we're avoiding is almost always a negative.

For confidence, it's insecurity or self-doubt.

But what happens when we overuse confidence?

It turns into arrogance, hubris, or even grandiosity.

Any strength overused eventually becomes toxic.

Excessive honesty becomes cruelty, tenacity congeals into rigidity, bias for action can overwhelm thoughtful reflection.

This is where positive opposites serve as a balancing or humanizing role.

Humility comes from the Latin word humilus, which literally means low.

It resides just a stone's throw away from humiliation.

Sure enough, excessive humility eventually softens into obuscuousness.

That's a tough word for me.

I'm sure you can't pronounce it either.

And self-subjugation.

False humility is even worse, a conscious manipulation covertly aimed at winning praise, often to compensate for unacknowledged feelings of inadequacy.

But genuine humility is a reflection of neither weakness nor insecurity.

Instead, it implies respectful appreciation of the strengths of others, a lack of personal pretension, and more relaxed sense of confidence that doesn't require external recognition.

When leaders openly accept the whole of who they are, for better and for worse, they no longer have to defend their value so diligently.

I make missteps and mistakes as a leader, and they're often a reflection of the same overused strengths and blind spots I've been struggling with my whole life.

I don't need to say out loud that I value confidence and strength.

I do need to demonstrate that I also value humility and vulnerability to embrace these opposites.

In the end, the less time we spend protecting our own value, the more time we can spend creating value in the world.

Alright, so that's Tony Schwartz, the CEO, writing to leaders in the New York Times, wherever you lie on the spectrum of belief, you read that and you go, yeah, I've seen a good bit of that.

Like that, some of that resonates with me.

In the business world, he's saying, I've seen this.

I've seen so much waste and exhaustion when anybody, when any of us attempt to defend and protect our own value.

Anybody ever do that?

Anybody ever been on that path?

You can feel yourself when you go into it.

That's the opposite of meekness.

So Jesus comes in and he speaks in Matthew 5, 5, blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

So meekness, meek is this mildness of disposition.

It's a gentleness of spirit.

So if you remember two weeks ago, spirit is this idea of your pneuma.

It's the core principle of who you are.

It's the inner drive, the inner self of who you are, and it's sort of, it fuels like how you feel and how you react and decisions you make.

And meekness is saying that part of you is poor, is low, is gentle.

That place is low, and because it's low, that place is poor, and because of that it's gentle, and because of that it's mild.

That part of you has no concern, and this is what Tony Schwartz is saying, that part of you has no concern to defend or protect or prove yourself.

That's meekness.

So years ago, we were out of town, our family, and our now five-year-old has been a couple years ago.

Uh she must have been three or so, and she wake, she woke up and she had hives all over her body.

I mean, all over her body.

We're going, like, what is this?

And how we, you know, are we gonna take her to the hospital?

Did she eat something?

We're like reviewing the day before, like, okay, no, like she ate all normal foods, it's probably not a food thing.

I mean, what could this be?

And so we narrow it down to like, oh, it it must be like the harsh, the harsh chemicals in the commercial cleaners in the sheets.

Like it's the only thing we figured because it was like dur after sleeping, so it went food and it was after sleep, so it must be the harshness of the chemical cleaners on the sheets.

And so we rush out, we buy some all, which by the way, on all it says gentle for sensitive skin.

So this is our situation.

And we rewash these sheets with all, put them back on, and she's fine.

Right?

I mean, and you know soaps like this, they say gentle for this and mild for this.

I actually took a stroll through the aisle this week because that's I get all my sermon illustrations in the grocery store.

Um, Dove, gentle exfoliating.

Anybody use Dove?

Maybe.

Okay.

We also uh now the opposite of Dove, and I just bought this one because it was funny, is this soap, lava.

It's named Lava.

And it's made by WD40, which basic there's a safety number on the back, very large, which I'm pretty sure just means it just burns off the top layer of your skin.

It's the opposite.

It's the opposite of gentle exfoliating, it's just complete annihilation.

Uh this is a a dial uh hand soap.

Um that it's it's gentle on your on your skin.

Uh this was just in our house.

We use this um honest shampoo body wash.

Anyone use honest company?

They got in trouble a few weeks ago.

Did y'all hear about that?

They weren't honest about a few things, which is ironic.

But uh this it this, perfectly gentle.

Perfectly gentle.

You know, gent gentle, you know, Dove was gentle.

You know, they had to kind of you know step it up.

Perfectly gentle, right?

I mean, you know these soaps, right?

You've been down the aisles, you've shopped, and you're eating.

I mean, it is a lot of gentle and a lot of mild over and over and over again.

They're all communicating the aims, the same thing.

It's all the same thing.

It does not easily provoke, it's not gonna cause hives.

Right?

It's tender toward the thing around it.

It's tender toward the thing it comes in contact with.

Here's my point.

Soap's just a way to do it, right?

Uh the commercial detergent's harsh and provokes.

Uh, the more natural does not provoke.

Meekness is a quality that does not easily provoke because it's not so consumed with protecting its own value, defending its own value, and proving its own value.

In that way, it's a it's a poverty, it's a it's it's poor, it's low.

Meaning, meaning this.

Here's the good news you don't have to be so defensive, right?

I mean, this is the freedom of blessed are the meek.

I mean, Jesus is coming along and saying to you, like, you don't have to be so defensive.

You don't have to be so offensive and trying to form your own value or identity.

You don't have to do that.

You the guard can come down.

You don't have to prove yourself.

And because of that, you can be gentle.

And maybe you're here and you think gentle is weak.

Gentle is not weak.

Gentle is secure.

That's what gentleness is.

Gentle listens and it cares and it doesn't want to provoke.

Gentleness confesses when it needs to, it apologizes when it needs to, and it's fine too, because it's not busy trying to prove and defend and protect.

So, two points.

Number one, meekness is a life of receiving and responding, not a life of proving and defending.

Sort of what I've already said.

So, this is what it means.

We're unburdened by the pursuit of self-justification that shows itself in proving and defending, right?

We love to prove and we love to defend our value.

When we do that, we're not gentle, we're not low, we're not meek.

But in meekness, there's no comparison, there's no competition, so it frees you to be, you are already secure.

That's why you don't have to compare, and you don't have to compete, and you don't have to prove, you don't have to defend, because you're already secure.

And so you can love people, you can serve people, you can listen, you can apologize, you can confess.

I mean, can you feel the ease of meekness?

Right?

The meek just attend the meeting.

They don't have to go into a meeting to like try to be more or to be the top guy.

They can just go to the meeting, they can just love people.

They probably they probably fish more than the rest of us because they're not busy using like work or you know, really being addicted to work to try to prove their value.

So they could they can go fishing and they're okay with it.

When they're fishing, they're not thinking about work.

And I think meet people probably when they're planting flowers in their yard, they enjoy their flowers and they're not looking at their neighbor's yard, like wishing and looking at their neighbor's flowers, going, man, if I could only have flowers like their flowers.

They're just okay.

Maybe you know these feelings because you're constantly trying to prove yourself and defend yourself, and maybe it comes out verbally, or maybe it's just like a passive-aggressive thing, and maybe everybody else sees it, but you don't see it yet.

Maybe you'll see it today, that would be great.

Maybe you do it in a realm of ways we can do this.

And maybe you know this as exhaustion.

Maybe you know it because you're harsh with people, you're you're harsh with words.

I mean, the idea of being gentle, the idea of being kind.

I mean, these things are so far from the way maybe your personality is wired, or or just your disposition.

But listen, if you're exhausted, that means you're really close to being broken.

And if you're broken, you're you're really close to being on the path where meekness is not something that you're trying to become, but it's a quality that you become just because you're tired of the other the other path.

You're tired of trying to work your way out of shame, trying to, you're tired of trying to work your way into favor of God, you're tired of self-justification in general, and so you begin on a different path, which is the path of receiving and responding to God's love toward you in the person of Christ, that you are sufficient.

You are for your forgiveness is sealed, your security with God is secured, secured.

I mean, you as a person and identity, you are learning your identity is in Him, and so you don't have to protect and prove and defend, which means you're on a path where a quality of meekness starts to come around you.

That's point number one.

Point number two, a life of receiving and responding, which is what what produces meekness is a life of inheriting the earth.

And what does this mean?

So, how do the meek inherit the earth?

And what does that even mean?

Well, it's a bit of a mystery.

I hope you're okay with this.

There's a little debate here.

Uh, some people think this word earth is better put land, and Jesus seems to be quoting Psalm 37, verse 11.

Psalms 37:11

But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace, which that verse would have been written and spoken to Jewish people.

But now Jesus is speaking this, quoting, probably quoting that, but now he's speaking it in the context of the new covenant to Christians.

So a little theology here, what it could mean is it could mean, maybe you don't care about this stuff, but I'll mention it for those who do, it could mean Jesus is replacing Israel as the recipients of the promise with the Christian church.

That would be known as replacement theology.

It could mean that.

Or it could mean it's still a promise for the Jewish people, and God still has concern for them and the actual land of Israel.

Now, some people get fired up about these things.

Maybe you are you know more about this than I do.

That's about all I know, really, about this.

Maybe you get fired up, maybe you don't, maybe you don't care.

Here's what I tend to think.

I tend to think while the Jewish people still don't recognize Jesus as Savior, I'm not willing to say God's done with them.

And so I think personally this verse has something to do with them, and it has something to do with us as Christians.

And Canaan, this land, I mean, throughout the scriptures, we know, especially in the Old Testament, it begins to be this huge, beautiful metaphor of peace, of coming into peace.

And Jesus says, people of meekness will know this land, will know this peace.

So whatever you believe about replacement theology, if you care at all, it still has to do for us about coming into a place of peace.

In college, I always loved finding a place in between classes, if you had like an hour break, to find a place to go and knock out some studying, and I would prefer to be outside than inside.

And so I always try to find a quiet place.

And so my roommate had found, and a friend of his had told him, uh, we were in the business school at Georgia, and he's in this one particular building, he said, I mean, if you go to the bottom floor, I think it was Caldwell Hall, I think is what it was called.

And the bottom floor, it was all the offices were.

Nobody went down there, it's just all professor offices.

There's one, there's like two doors, there's two doors, one on one side, one on the other, and it went into a garden.

I mean, this courtyard garden inside of the building was surrounded by building on all four sides.

Nobody knew about this, at least when I was there.

There's about five people that I figured out knew about this garden.

It was like when you walked in and you suit you saw one of the other ones, there's this acknowledgement, like, we don't tell anybody about this place.

There's a thousand people on the quad, like sitting, and we are in this secret little garden.

And there is a patio table on one side and a patio table on the other, and there's crepe myrtles, and there's all these perennials and ivy.

It was beautiful, it was perfect, it was perfectly quiet.

I've gone down there every single day.

There's only one way in.

The bottom.

Only one way.

And for me, it's a it's a good metaphor, it's a good picture because the only way in to having any measure of characteristic of meekness or and or also leading to inheriting the earth or peace is the bottom floor.

When you're just finished, you're so exhausted with trying to prove yourself and protect yourself and defend yourself and create your own righteousness outside of Jesus and create your own, work yourself into favor with God or keep yourself in favor with God.

And you're just so over all of this, you're at the bottom floor.

It's the only way in.

You have to be broken to all the ways you depend on your righteousness and your justification and receive God's provision for you in Jesus, where you're just done.

You're done working, you're done using the secular world and you're done using the religious world for this.

And thus you're made low.

And you're not even trying to be meek.

You don't even know if you are meek.

You might not even care, but you're just low.

You don't have anything left.

So you inherit the earth and you know some peace.

Now we hear all of that.

And no, we know we are not perfectly, sustainably meek.

Right?

I mean, we know it.

We know we don't experience perfect and sustainable peace.

We know that, right?

We know it.

We become offended and we lash back, or we become offended and then we passively over time make the person pay us back in different weird ways.

Or we're misunderstood and we erupt on some somebody.

We just need them to understand our point, right?

Like if they could just understand our point.

We have to have the last word, or we come into a meeting, or you know, a conversation, we have to prove ourselves.

I know nothing about, nothing about this.

Of course.

Never happens, never ever happens.

I mean, I when it it happens all the time, but when it happens, I just go, wow, like that's still in me.

That's still in me.

I became a Christian when I was 13, I'm 37.

24 years.

I'm still just immature.

I mean, immature in these things.

Here's the good news.

And here's why I don't walk around freaking out and I'm not counting all the ways I'm not meek and feeling bad about myself today, is because in the grace of God, I, you, are saved by the one who is perfectly meek for you.

Jesus was that for you.

He died the death for you, and he lived the life for you, right?

This is that imputation we talk about all the time.

On the cross, your sin is put upon him, and his righteousness is put on you.

So his perfect meekness comes onto you.

All that arrogance and that pride and that proving and that defending, all of that was put on him.

That's why you're secure.

That's where your security is.

As long as we hold our poor hearts in our own hands and try to use our merit and implement five ways to become meek this week.

I mean, all we're helpless.

We're helpless.

It's more proving, it's more defending.

Our only hope is that bottom level.

That's the only hope.

Is we just see the fact that we're not getting anywhere.

We're just done.

We're just we're just exhausted by it.

Our only hope for rest and change is to live in the appropriation of what God has already done for you, that you begin to receive it and respond to it.

And this is what you preach to yourself every day.

Not Sundays, every day you preach it to yourself over and over again that you are wonderfully not meek.

But Jesus was so wonderfully meek for you.

And God didn't even see you as not meek.

And then it maybe he sees you as meek because of Jesus.

That's why you're so secure.

And we understand ourselves as his child, and we don't have to keep defending ourselves and proving ourselves and protecting ourselves because we're already loved.

This week I read a great quote by Henry Nowen, who's a renowned uh theological professor.

Uh he was a spiritual writer.

He he taught at Ivy League schools, and then he left and he became a chaplain at a uh place, a community for the disabled.

And he tells of a time when a lady in their group uh came up to him within a group session, and he came up to him and said, Hey, will you bless me?

And it's it wasn't like um he's some spiritual guru with magical powers.

She was just saying, I need to hear it.

I need to hear it.

And then one by one, everybody else said, I need I need to hear that too.

I need to hear that too.

And and he went around and he held every person in the room in his arms.

And he would just say, You are a joy to us.

I know you have had a rough life.

And you are God's beloved.

And he just went one by one by one.

And in his book, Life of the Beloved, then he writes this when we are thrown up and down by the little waves on the surface of our existence, we become easy victims of our manipulative world.

But when we continue to hear the deep, gentle voice that blesses us, we can walk through life with a stable sense of well-being and true belonging.

The feeling of being blessed is not, it seems to me, the feeling that we generally have about ourselves.

Still, I say to you, as the beloved Son of God or child of God, you are blessed.

Good words are being spoken to you and about you, words that tell the truth.

The curses, noisy, boisterous, loud-mouthed as they may be, do not tell the truth.

They are lies, lies easy to believe, but lies nonetheless.

The problem in modern living is not that we are too is that we are too busy looking for affirmation in the wrong places to notice that we are being blessed.

Blessed are the meek, fortunate, lucky, so fortunate.

So, my brothers and sisters, receive the blessing.

Jesus is perfectly meek for you, toward you.

He is gentle and he is mild.

So may we grow in a simple heart that breaks to the bottom level to receive and respond.

And may we live in the security of Christ's sufficient blood for us.

Your sins are forgiven.

You are secure with God.

May you live in the peace that God gives us.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that we do not have to work our way into meekness.

Thank you that you do not see us as arrogant as we are, as manipulative which we are, as uh insecure as we are, but that you see us as perfectly meek through your humble sacrifice to us and your love and grace to us.

Would you help us to find our identity in you in a greater way?

That meekness might begin to be a quality that comes around us.

Would you help our Numa to be poor in spirit, low, at that bottom level, that we might inherit the earth.

In Jesus' name we trust and pray.

Amen.