The Christ-like attitude, meekness, is very widely misunderstood, both in the culture in general and among believers, but profoundly important to cultivate, if we would be like Jesus. Here is a list of just some passages of Scripture that highlight the importance of meekness.
- From Isaiah 29:19, The meek shall increase their joy.
- In Psalm 37, meekness is what we need to overcome selfish anger and to defeat worry.
- Psalm 25:9 associates meekness with discerning God’s leading: The meek will he guide in judgment. The meek will he teach his way.
- James tells us that meekness is a characteristic of those who are wise.
- Paul tells Timothy that meekness is required for a position of church leadership
- Peter tells us that meekness is a prerequisite for effectively influencing the lost with the gospel.
- To the Galatians, Paul said that meekness was one of the true marks of the Holy Spirit working in you.
What Meekness is NOT.
A. Meekness is NOT weakness. Perhaps because meek rhymes with weak, many people associate meekness with being spineless, weak kneed, ineffective, basically being a wimp. But Jesus calls himself meek, and you cannot see Jesus cleansing the temple, whip in his hand, fire in his eyes, turning over tables—the money changers stumbling all over themselves to escape Jesus fury—and think that meekness is spinelessness! It is not.
B. Meekness is not timidity. Jesus was not timid. I was delivered from this heresy many years ago by my Young Life leader who handed me a book, by H S Vigeno, entitled, Jesus the Revolutionary. Vigeno writes:
We have had enough of the emaciated Christ. the pale, anemic, namby-pamby Jesus, the “gentle Jesus meek and mild.” Perhaps we have had too much of it. Let us see the Christ of the gospels, striding up and down the dusty miles of Palestine, sun-tanned, bronzed, fearless. Clean the canvas, Get back to the original. Not this religious weakling of our imagination. Not this affected emotionalist of our pretty pictures. But the Christ commanding in His manner, challenging in His message, conquering in His manhood, compelling in His mission—the revolutionary Jesus.
C. Meekness is not what psychologist’s call co-dependency like the wife of the drunk who just takes his physical abuse refusing to confront her husband with his problem—or the man who refuses to stand up to his boss. Codependency is accepting abusive treatment because you are too insecure to demand that it stop. It is true that Jesus allowed himself to be abused. But it was not because he was too weak to stop it. Jesus said, No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord (John 10:18).
Codependent people need to be liked so much that they refuse to confront others. Exactly how does that square with Jesus’ treatment of the Pharisees, to whom he said, things like,
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves… “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. (from Matt 23)
So, we’ve seen three things that meekness is NOT. What is meekness? Fortunately, we have a wonderful word picture for the NT Greek word for meekness that gives us a great idea of what this attitude really is all about. The word is PRAUTES. The word describes a horse that is no longer wild but has been trained to respond to the control of the rider. PRAUTES describes a magnificent, powerful, spirited animal, that has learned to answer to the reins—to accept control. The restless, wild, carless nature of the horse has been brought into submission. The horse has learned to accept control. It no longer resists or fights its rider, but quietly submits.
Meekness is power under the King’s control. It is making all of our power, and strength, and passion, and energy responsive to the touch of the Master to whom we have given the reins of our lives. Meekness is not being passive; it is ruling and shaping our lives, but we do that FOR Christ. Our calling is to exercise dominion over every sphere of our lives FOR Christ. Following Christ’s agenda requires surrendering the reins of our lives moment by moment to our Master.
Let’s observe meekness being lived out by our Lord Jesus Christ. In Mark 14, we read:
And they went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (vs 32-36).
Here we see the finest example of meekness in all of Scripture. We see the humanness of Jesus’ struggle. His struggle is so intense that he literally sweats blood. Matthew’s account makes clear that Jesus asked the Father to take the cup from him three times, but each time also said, “Not what I will, but what you will.” Meekness is surrendering the reins to the Father. I want to suggest to you that Jesus’ meekness grew out of his perspective, at three points: 1) his view of God the Father, 2) his view of himself, 3) his view of his rights. We saw last week that your attitude is always shaped by your perspective.
Three Parts to Jesus' Perspective that Produce Meekness
1. Jesus’ meekness resulted from his view of the Father as trustworthy. Jesus could not have said, “Not my will but yours be done” unless he trusted the Father. Jesus calls The Father, “Abba,” the word of a dependent, trusting child for his father. I believe one of the huge differences between Jesus’ response to The Father’s will and our typical response was that Jesus knew The Father could be trusted. Do you know the one thing that Jesus seemed to marvel most about when he was on planet earth? Unbelief. Jesus never seemed to be able to understand how we could doubt God’s love. He would constantly say to his disciples, “O you of little faith.” Why was doubt about God’s love so foreign to him? Because he knew The Father. John’s gospel tells us that God The Son, dwelt face to face with God The Father. Jesus knows the Father, intimately, and that he is worthy of our trust. A healthy person cannot surrender the reins of his life to one he does not trust.
2. Second, Jesus is able to demonstrate meekness because he viewed himself as a servant. Jesus said, I came into the world not to be served but to serve and give my life as a ransom for many (Matt 20:28). In Philippians 2, We read that Jesus took the form of a slave—the word is DOULOS. The word is profoundly important for understanding meekness. A DOULOS was owned by his master. At the core of the godly attitude of meekness is the issue of ownership. Meekness is seeing myself and all that is mine as belonging to God. The Apostle Paul wrote, “You are not your own. You were bought with a price.” That price was the shed blood of Christ.
Meekness is transferring the ownership of ourselves to God. The deed to my life is transferred to him. Meekness is renouncing self-interest and choosing to become a slave to Christ—to entrust myself to him. One of the best pictures of meekness comes from a custom in Israel given by God through Moses. If a slave loved his master and wanted to voluntarily serve him the rest of his days, the master was to bring the slave to a doorpost where the master was to pierce the slave’s ear with an awl. To follow Christ is to let him pierce your ear. You belong to him as his doulos while trusting him to take care of your needs and wants. And make no mistake about it. Our Lord takes good care of what belongs to him.
Tremendous inner freedom—the freedom of meekness—results from seeing ourselves as belonging to our Lord. It is his job to provide for me, which brings tremendous freedom from financial worries. It is his job to provide the friends I need; so I don’t need to worry about being accepted. It is his job to protect my reputation, so I don’t need be lash back at those who criticize me. Marin Lloyd Jones in his classic work, The Sermon on the Mount defines meekness as “leaving everything in the hands of God.”
3. The third key to Jesus’ meekness was the way he viewed his personal rights. Meekness transfers these rights to God. A DOULOS has no rights: He was viewed as a piece of property. When we lay aside our rights and surrender totally to God’s will, we are following the example of Christ. Paul challenged the Phillipians:
Let Christ himself be your example as to what your attitude should be. For he, who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his prerogatives as God’s equal, but stripped himself of all privilege by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born as mortal man: (Phil 2:5-7).
Human anger is often the result of having our rights violated:
- the right to be treated fairly
- the right to be treated with respect
- the right to receive what I was promised including sex with my wife
- the right to be told the truth
- the right to a little “me time.”
One who is meek is able to endure the violation of his rights, not because he is too weak to defend them, or too timid to claim them, but because he has entrusted himself and his rights to his Master. Like Jesus who, when falsely accused, committed himself to the one who judges justly (1Peter 2:23), we can endure being wronged because we’ve given our rights to God—and he will take care of them! We see this godly perspective in the diary of Jonathan Edwards,
I claim no right to myself—no right to this understanding, this will, these affections that are in me. Neither do I have any right to these hands these feet, these ears, these eyes. I have given myself clear away and not retained anything of my own. I’ve spoken to God this morning and told him I have given myself wholly to him…Henceforth I am not to act in any respect as my own.
Meekness is waiting on the Lord for his blessing, rather than demanding my right to satisfy my yearning right now and often in a sinful way. That is why it is power under control. It is putting every aspect of my life on the altar and trusting him to bring fulfillment in the area in his way and in his timing—instead of being driven by all kinds of self-centered desires. What is the reward of the meek who put themselves and their rights on the altar? Jesus tells us. They shall inherit the earth. They are the ones who enjoy the pleasures, the blessings, the joys of this earth, received as an inheritance from our heavenly father instead of demanded by our anger or resentment. In Mark 10 we read,
Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life (vs 30).
We can expect our faith to be tested. There will be persecution. But we can also expect boatloads of earthly blessings. We see the reward of meekness throughout Scripture.
Hannah who had been barren has a son Samuel. She dedicated him to God and sent him to live with Eli, the priest—she gave him up. Imagine giving up the son you had so longed and prayed would one day come to brighten your home. What was God’s response to Hannah’s meekness? We read, And the Lord visited Hannah and she conceived and gave birth to 3 sons and 2 daughters (1 Sam 2:21).
On Mount Moriah, Abraham in obedience to God, offered to God the most priceless thing in the world, his son Isaac on the altar. We know that the angel of the Lord cried out “stop” and Abraham offered the ram in the bushes instead. But many people do not remember the angel speaking a second time on the mountain, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore" (Gen 22:16-17).
As we saw earlier in Philippian 2, Jesus emptied himself of all privileges and rights, taking the form of a slave; but that is not how the story ends. We read, Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:9-11).
Meekness is 1) trusting my right to justice, fulfillment, pleasure, heart satisfaction, success, and respect to our Master, 2) enduring the way that God will test whether we really have surrendered these rights 3) then watching our master satisfy the desires in this life that we put on the altar. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
For Further Thought:
1. Examine what you get angry, worried, or tense about. Link these to the areas of your life you need to put on the altar in a fresh way.
2. How does your anger towards others reveal that you are failing at meekness?
3. Think back over your life at the way God has blessed you when you have put aspects of your life on the altar. Celebrate the fact that after a time of testing, God cannot help but bless those who yield themselves and their rights to him.
