This week, we are exploring Jesus' third Beatitude. We are looking at the key word: meek. What does it mean to be meek? Meek souls are not weak souls, that is for sure. They have great strength, but that strength is under control and harnessed for the greater good. They can be 6'5", like my friend Marty Jacumin, or 5'0", like Mother Teresa. It is not their physical size that matters but the size of their heart.
While in college, Marty was a starting offensive guard for NC State. Today, he is a pastor who loves Jesus and his family. And most of us know the story of Mother Teresa... or do we? Most equate her with meek, lowly, and mild, but she was that and more: she was a strong, convicting voice with a prophetic tone. I enjoyed reading the book,
Blessed Are You: Mother Teresa and the Beatitudes, by Eileen and Kathleen Egan. Her call was to the poorest of the poor in India. She would teach little children the alphabet by writing in the dirt with a stick. In 1950, Sister Teresa became Mother Teresa, and in an upper room in an old house in Calcutta, India, she championed the guidelines for the Missionaries of Charity. They were to seek out all over the world the poorest of the poor, the desperate, the lost, and the outcasts, and take care of them, help them, visit them assiduously, live Christ's love for them, and awaken their response to His love. (See p. 67-68.) Years ago, when Mother Teresa visited Washington DC, she had a conversation with Hillary Clinton. Clinton asked Mother Teresa why our country had not elected a female president, and Mother Teresa responded that we had probably aborted her. Now that takes courage to speak those kinds of words in that setting to powerful people you would be tempted to please.
Who are the meek? They are those with strength under control, the humble that please Christ; they are those who do not demand their rights but the rights of others who are disenfranchised. The meek are not gullible, naïve, pushovers, indolent, or those who hold to peace at any cost. The meek person is not overly sensitive to self.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones asks, "Is it not one of the greatest curses in life as a result of the fall—this sensitivity about self? . . . To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, because we see there is nothing worth defending. . . . The man who is truly meek never pities himself. . . . The man who is truly meek is the one who is amazed that God and man can think of him as well as they do and treat him as well as they do." (Lloyd-Jones,
Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, p. 57-58)
Also, in
verse 5, Jesus says the meek are blessed and they inherit the earth. Now, those are two grand blessings reserved for the meek! Makarios means to be happy, but also much, much more. John MacArthur states on p. 104 of
The Beatitudes: The Only Way to Happiness, "Not happiness in the sense of the world's flippant, circumstantial kind of happiness, but happiness in God's terminology—an abiding, true joy, based on an eternal relationship with the living God." Notice that Jesus says the meek will inherit the earth. In Greek, the emphasis is "they", the meek only, will inherit the earth. They are the ones who will inherit the earth, not the elite, powerful, and strong. There is a present reality and certainly a future element to this promise. The meek receive the blessings of peace while on the earth today, but followers of Jesus will also live in and inherit the millennial kingdom or the thousand-year reign of Christ mentioned in
Revelation 20:4 (Ibid, p. 105).
The meek are truly blessed. Does meekness characterize your nature? If not, ask God to help you obey Jesus' call to meekness.
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