Many years ago, when I was working in the corporate world, I had the task of administering a “Core Values Assessment Test” for all my employees. If you are not familiar with a Core Values Assessment, it is a test that helps you understand and identify the values in your life that you value most. If you have never taken one of these and are curious what yours are, instead of spending hundreds of dollars to take a test, I’ll give you some advice. I had an older gentleman tell me during one of these training classes. He said, “The company didn’t need to spend all this money on these tests. This is easy. Just think about what upsets you most and there you have your core values”. He was right. The test said my highest core values were honesty and integrity and my biggest pet peeves are liars and thieves. Companies invest heavily in training like this because it’s been proven that it’s vital for employees to understand their own core values. When people operate from those values (their true strengths) they become more effective and efficient in their work, rather than simply following generic, one‑size‑fits-all rules that may have worked for someone else in the past.
This type of training has been very effective in a corporate setting and has gotten very popular over the last few decades. However this idea isn’t something new at all. The Bible has been teaching this for thousands of years. This is the same principle that God has set up for His church to operate in. They have all been given the same mission and that is to carry out the Great Commission and be His witnesses of grace in the world. How followers of Jesus can go about accomplishing this will vary widely because we were all created differently. God has given us all different passions, different natural abilities, and when we trust in Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we are all given different spiritual gifts. When we operate in our core giftedness we will see that carrying out God's mission is much easier than if we try to mimic others who are using their own unique gifting to serve and carry out the Gospel mission. This idea of serving from your strengths is encapsulated in the Great Commandment when we are told the greatest commandment is “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30).” It’s a call to serve God outwardly with how He has gifted you internally. Even though we are given freedom to accomplish God’s will in the ways we have been created and gifted to, there are still standards which must mark the lives of all believers according to God’s will for us. So far we have seen two of those standards in our study of the Beatitudes. We have seen that a follower of Jesus must first be poor in spirit. They must realize that they bring nothing spiritually or righteously to the table when they must stand before God in judgment. The second standard we saw was that of an attitude of mourning, first over one's own sins, then the sins of others, and finally mourning with others who mourn. Both of these Beatitudes start as internal realization and values, but for them to mold and shape your life in what Jesus wants from all His followers they must be acted upon outwardly. Once you realize your utter and total sinfulness and your desperate need for a savior, you must understand that through His death, burial, and resurrection Jesus has offered you His righteousness, His forgiveness, and a new life. You cannot have just a head knowledge of your spiritual bankruptcy and think that knowledge will save you. You must put your faith in Jesus as your Lord and Savior in order to be saved. In the same way, last week we saw that it’s not enough to weep over your sin, its consequences, and the shame it brings. You have to do something about it. You have to bring your sins into the light and kill them in the light just as we are instructed in God’s Word. However these are not the only outward actions that are required after you understand and embrace these first two internal attitudes. We see another one in the very next Beatitude that Jesus shares.
Matthew 5:5
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
In verse 5, Jesus shares the first external Beatitude. It is that someone who is poor in spirit and mourning over their sin will be meek. The word meek is very interesting in the Greek because it is primarily a word that is reserved to describe horses. Now this is the part of the sermon where the Pastor usually gives an illustration to help people understand what meekness has to do with horses, but there is one thing I’ve learned since moving to San Juan County. There are more true Cowboys and Cowgirls per capita here than anywhere else that I have ever been to in this world (and I mean that as a compliment). Most of you have forgotten more about horses than I will ever know. Therefore I’ll make a simple statement about how meekness relates to horses and if you would like to know more in depth just ask anyone else around. Meek was used to describe a horse that had been broken. When their power and their energy had been harnessed and brought under control so that it could do more good than if the horse was allowed to do whatever it wanted. It was not a weakness, but power under control. That is horses, how does that apply to us? Again to understand the implications of this beatitude we must do what we did last week and look to the life of Jesus. In Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” It’s the same word that Jesus uses to describe Himself here that we translate as gentle. He used it in the Beatitudes and it is closely related to the word humble. Jesus is saying let me teach you how to be meek, because that is who I am. Paul expounds upon what this looks like in a passage that Pastor Craig shared a few weeks ago (Philippians 2:3-8). In those few verses I want to quickly look at 3 things we can do — to be meek like Jesus.
Meekness is not Selfishness. - Philippians 2:3-4
Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.
There are a handful of things you don’t have to teach a baby and one of those things is selfishness. It comes naturally to them and the older they get the better they get at it. So when Jesus says blessed are the meek it’s a call to bring selfishness that comes so naturally under the authority of Christ. This is easier said than done. We have been practicing selfishness our entire lives and we’ve grown good at it. However Paul gives us two very practical ways through the power of the Holy Spirit to become meek in the parts of your life that you once were selfish. Both ways go hand in hand with each other. They are thinking of others as better than yourself and taking interest not only in yourself, but in others too. Now this is not a call for Christians to think less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less and thinking about others more. This type of selfless meekness was a defining feature in Jesus’ ministry. While there are many examples found throughout the Gospels, this can be seen in no greater place than the cross. On the cross he was not dying and paying the price for any sin that He had committed, but rather He died for those who were His enemies, those who despised Him, and those who caused Him to have to suffer there. Last week we mentioned one of those people, His half-brother James. We saw that he did not believe anything that Jesus said during His ministry and even thought of Him as crazy. Yet Jesus still thought of James and went to the cross and we saw the fruit of that selflessness when James is mentioned as a key figure as Jesus established the first century church. We don’t even need to look at James as an example, we can just look into the mirror. We are all sinners and if we got what we deserve, which is fair, we would all have to pay the price for all of our sins. That’s what would be fair. Praise God, life isn’t fair and Jesus thought of us above Himself and laid down His life for us, so that we could be offered the free gift of forgiveness and salvation and have the right standing before God. When Jesus speaks of meekness, He is not asking us to do anything that He didn’t do. We must bring our natural selfishness under control, by bringing it to the cross and under the authority of Jesus so we can treat others as Jesus treats them.
Meekness is not Pride. - Philippians 2:5-7a
You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, He did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, He gave up his divine privileges; He took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being.
C.S Lewis summed up the issue of Pride wonderfully in writings about Mere Christianity when he said “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” As Christians we are always supposed to be looking up to Jesus and following His example in our lives. That is impossible for us to do if we are looking down our noses at someone. In the Kingdom of God pride has no place because we are all sinners, saved by grace and not of anything we have done so that none of us can brag, but we can still struggle with that pride on this side of eternity. Paul again gives us a practical solution on how we can combat pride in our lives and to be like Jesus. If we are going to be meek in the area of pride, we are going to have to stop being entitled and start being servants to all. Jesus gave up His divine privilege which He was entitled to, all of when He came in the incarnation. Not only did He give up everything, He also came to serve just as we are told in Matthew 20:28 - “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.” To be blessed and meek, we are going to have to serve others and learn to give up any privilege we have or we think we have. After all this is the reason we have been gifted in all the ways we have by God. It's not to bring ourselves fame or glory, it is to serve others and edify the church. Even if you are considered leaders, there should never be anything beneath us, we should be servant leaders just like Jesus. He was God, but still washed the nasty and dirty feet of a bunch of men who were about to cause His murder and abandon Him. Remember the words that a Christian should be striving for at the end of their lives. It's not well done good and faithful Pastor, faithful leader, faithful teacher, faithful parent, faithful spouse. It is “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord”. Jesus' call to meekness calls for us to bring our pride under the authority of Jesus Christ and be just like Him. We are called to be servants.
Meekness is not Independence. - Philippians 2:7b-8
When He appeared in human form, He humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.
As we said before, humility and meekness are very closely related and we see that as Paul shares the final way that Jesus showed us what it is to be meek. It was through obedience, obedience led Him all the way to die on the cross. Everyone is born with a fiercely independent streak. Even if it doesn’t manifest itself in ways this world would consider “bad”, we can still see it. We can see it in OUR plans for our lives. We can see it in OUR dreams for our family. We can see it in OUR aspirations for the future. The problem is all of those are OUR plans and not God’s plans. When we seek after them, we are seeking after our own will in our lives and not the will of God. It’s a scary thought to submit all of our plans and our will to God. It's scary because we have been hurt so many times when we trusted others in this broken world. We can carry a lot of trauma because of it. However, we need to understand that God is not like anyone else. He does not lie. He does not manipulate. He is love (a love you will never experience anywhere outside of Him). He is good and His goodness cannot be found anywhere outside of Him. He never fails. He never gives up. He never runs out and He is perfect in His relationship with you. That’s why we can be assured that when He calls us in obedience into a part of our life or in a plan we have, that it’s ALWAYS going to be for good. You will never be able to claim any of that goodness without walking in obedience to God. That’s what meekness does. It trusts God totally and leaves behind what we thought was best for us. Embraces what God knows is best and walks in obedience to what He wants for us. This is the meekness God calls us too and with this type of meekness there is a promise — they will inherit the earth.
When Jesus promises that the meek will inherit the earth, we see it’s an echo of a promise that was made in Psalms 37:11, but in the Psalm the promise to the meek was the land God had promised to the Israelites. In Matthew 5:5 the promise to those who follow Him in meekness is a much broader scale. While there are some eschatological implications to what Jesus says concerning this, I want to focus on the contemporary promise. Those who walk in meekness, that bring their selfishness, their pride and their plans all under the will and authority of Jesus they will be given everything. Everything that He promises those who follow after Him will only be inherited by those who follow Him in obedience. You were created with all the potential in the world to glorify and serve God in ways that you could only imagine, but in order to reach your maximum potential for the Lord you have to be walking in obedience in everything you do. That includes walking in obedience to this Beatitude. “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”
