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Glorious Life: Part 4

Glorious Life: Part 4

Glorious Life; Blessed are the Meek for they Will Inherit the Earth!
The 4th part of our Glorious Life Matthew 5-7 Series.

 

Glorious Life
Blessed Are the Meek
The Sermon on the Mount pt 4
06/05/2018

Prelude… what would you do?

  • You’ve been running a small business in your area and a rival company has just set up shop. You check them out on Google and discover that you could quite easily write a scathing review of their business that prospective customers would see if they found it on Google like you did.  They are undercutting you in order to steal your customers, do you strike back?  You have a suspicion they’ve done the same thing to you anyway or they would do if they thought of it.  All’s fair in business and you have a family to feed.
  • You have a brother who you were estranged from many years ago. He had continual money problems because of foolish decisions and ripped your parents off many times, breaking their hearts.  You’ve faithfully cared for your aging parents, supporting your mum as she grieved for her husband and now eventually being with her in her final moments in this life.  In their wills your parents left you their entire estate, but as she senses her time coming your mother asks you to forgive your brother and share the inheritance with him as he needs the help.  No-one else heard that conversation.  You have a dozen reasons why you don’t have to treat those wishes as a lucid and reasonable request, but what do you do?
  • There’s a girl in your class who’s always putting you down and making fun of you. She takes credit for your ideas in group projects and blames you whenever things don’t work out.  She is mega annoying!  Now everyone is about to hand in some individual projects and you can see that she’s forgotten to include some work.  You can let her know before she hands in her assignment so she can fix it up, or you can let her get what she deserves.  If you stay quiet, you’ll definitely get a better mark than her for once.
  • All your friends are using VPN’s to access the US Netflix library instead of the much smaller Australian one. It’s not illegal, but it does breach the agreement you make with Netflix when you sign up.  Do you do the same thing your friends are doing or do you keep your word to a humungous corporate entity who you’re not really going to affect anyway?
  • You’ve been living in your nice neighbourhood for 30 years and your neighbour whose been there for 25 years comes over with a petition. There’s been an application to build a mosque alongside the shopping centre down the road and local residents are trying to stop it.  They don’t want these outsiders flooding their streets and they’re worried what it might do to property values.  You wouldn’t mind if it was a church, but what should you do about this?
  • You’re in a crunch game and the opposition is trash talking and playing rough. You don’t want to let them get away with that, so do you change the way you play to follow suit?  Why let them win by being bad sports?  Two can play that game!

Just like on a sporting field or a battlefield or a marketplace, we work with some people and against other people in order to get what we want to get out of life.

Some outcomes feel like we’re losing, and others feel like we’re winning.  So we fight to win.

The strong get ahead while the weak get eaten up!

Hence the counter-cultural, topsy-turvy statement of Jesus… Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.

If you’ve been here for the 3 sessions we’ve already had in the Beatitudes, you’ll see how there’s some consistent themes that weave through them all.  Jesus is turning our idea of blessedness on its head.  He’s saying the kind of people who are in His Kingdom live by different rules, different values than those who are of this world.

This world basically says you need to go after what you want and sometimes you have to play hardball.  Sometimes you’ve got to leave niceties behind.  Sometimes you’ve got to be prepared to walk over people.  Sometimes you’ve got to adjust your moral compass.  Sometimes you’ve got to fight fire with fire.

You might define winning as

  • Your business getting stronger and that rival business going broke!
  • Keeping the full inheritance, which is probably less than what you’ve paid out on your parents care anyway!
  • Finally getting the top mark in your class.
  • Enjoying all your favourite movies and tv shows
  • Keeping your nice neighbourhood with people who don’t make you feel uncomfortable
  • Showing those punks that they can’t push you around so easily.

But what if God defines it differently?  What if He bestows His blessing in ways that look nothing like that?

Psalm 37:1-11

 1 Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong;
2 for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.
3 Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
4 Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this:
6 He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.
7 Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when men succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes.
8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it leads only to evil.
9 For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.
10 A little while, and the wicked will be no more; though you look for them, they will not be found.
11 But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy great peace.

Those who heard Jesus teach would have recognised the promise – the meek will inherit the Earth.  (Not just the land of Israel as they thought the Psalm was referring to, Jesus expands it to the whole Earth).

We know that this will happen when Jesus returns and makes all things new.  The renewed Earth that we shall inherit will be a place of unsurpassed glory where no evil will remain to mess it up.  It will be better than anything we could strive to attain in the world as it is now.

In the meantime we can delight ourselves in the Lord.  We can love Him and serve Him and wait patiently for Him, refusing to buy in to the competition to win in this life as tempting as that might be.

And that’s what leads us to the question of meekness.  What is it anyway?

Meekness is to restrain ourselves to the will of another.  To not pursue our natural desires, ambitions or instincts but instead use whatever strength we have to serve our master’s will.

It was a word used of animals that had been trained to serve human masters.  Think of a horse trained to carry a soldier into war, an ox trained to plow a farmer’s field, a dog trained to guide someone with impaired sight or a pigeon trusted to carry messages back to its owner.

These animals are meek.  They are not doing whatever they feel like.  They are doing what they have been trained and entrusted to do.  They serve a higher purpose than their own.  Just like each of us has been shaped by God and entrusted with particular tasks to do for the sake of His Kingdom.

Do you see yourself as someone free to pursue whatever you think of as winning in life, or have you been called to a higher purpose?  Are you being trained and entrusted to serve our King and His Kingdom?  Is that calling strong enough that you will restrain your own natural inclinations?

That’s what meekness does.

It’s definitely not the same thing as weakness.  Weakness would be to give in to our own natures and live by the law of the Jungle.

We’ve been called to live by God’s law and to find that the law of God brings freedom where the old law just brought death.  It brings blessing to those who once were under a curse from which we could not escape.

A meek person would rather give away money than earn or keep it dishonestly against the wishes of their king.

A meek person would rather do the hard work of learning cultures and customs because the Bible says to welcome the stranger and the alien; than preserve their property values and their familiar ways.

A meek person would rather not see blockbuster movies and shows than break God’s command to not lie or deceive.

A meek person will obey the command to treat others the way they want to be treated, even if doing so means that crummy classmate or pushy opponent gets an undeserved benefit.

It might seem like all of those things are losing, but in God’s economy they’re winning.  These kinds of people belong in God’s Kingdom.

They get to enjoy being in a right relationship with Him now.  They get to rest in the fact that He’s in charge and can be trusted.  They get to see glimpses of His surprising work in their lives and all around them.  They get to live free from the law of the jungle – with all the striving and stress and jealousy and anger and resentment and fear that it brings.

And one day, at the time God has set, they will inherit the Earth.

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