Mourning and Meekness

When I was training for the ministry, one of the things I had to do was acquire a working knowledge of the Hebrew language. As you probably know, Hebrew is written from right to left - just the opposite of English. One of the hardest things I had to learn to do first was to train my eye to start on the right hand side of the page. When you pick up a Hebrew book, it begins on what, to us, is the last page. The title page is at what we consider to be the back of the book. So when you learn Hebrew, the first thing you have to learn is to reverse your thought patterns.

When we come to the Sermon on the Mount, we have to do something similar, only in a much bigger arena - the arena of life. As creatures of the world, we are used to looking at life from a certain perspective. As we go along through life, we pick up a kind of “conventional wisdom” about how life works. Thinking this way becomes second nature to us.

But then, when we look at the Sermon on the Mount, we find Jesus making statements that blow our conventional wisdom right out of the water. He says outrageous things about life that are the total opposite of the way we’ve been trained to think.

The world teaches us “Believe in yourself. You’re OK. Everything will turn out alright in the end if you just keep trying. The Lord helps those who help themselves.” But Jesus says “It’s a good thing to be poor in spirit. In fact, until you get to the place where you realize that you are nothing, and can do nothing to help yourself, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The world teaches us “Be happy. That’s what life is all about - the pursuit of happiness.” But Jesus says to us “You can’t be happy until you know how to mourn.”

The world says “Be assertive. You’ve got to look out for #1 because nobody else will. Get ahead. Win. Show everybody what you’re made of. Prove that you are the best.” But Jesus says to us “Hey, you want to get the most out of life? You want to inherit the earth? Be meek.”

What is Jesus driving at here? What’s all this talk about happy mourners and meek winners? What does it all mean?

I would remind you that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is teaching us about how to become a citizen of His kingdom. He is not teaching us about how to improve our lives, he’s teaching us about how to exchange our old lives for a totally new way of life. Jesus is teaching us the essence of what it means to be a Christian.

One day two caterpillars were crawling along and suddenly a butterfly flew by. The caterpillars looked up at the butterfly and one of them said to the other “You’ll never catch me up in one of those things.”

Becoming a Christian is not like gluing wings onto a caterpillar. It’s like the way that God turns a caterpillar into a butterfly. A Christian is a totally new creature.

2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

And the Sermon on the Mount is all about the difference.

Last week, we found out what it means to be poor in spirit. It means that when you stand before God, you stand there in abject poverty. You are naked. You aren’t trying to cover yourself with the rags of your supposed good deeds. No, when you are poor in spirit, you realize that you don’t have anything to offer God on behalf of yourself - nothing that you can do or say to make yourself acceptable to a God who is pure and holy and perfect. You are like the tax collector who cried out to God “Be merciful to me for I am a sinner.” You’re like Peter who said to Jesus “Depart from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” You are like Isaiah who, when confronted with God’s holiness and majesty, cried out in anguish “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips.”

That’s what it means to be poor in spirit. Unless we start there, God cannot do anything for us. Unless we start there, we cannot enter His kingdom.

Now today, I want to consider the next two Beatitudes with you, because they stem from the first one.

Jesus says in v. 4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” When he used the word mourn, he used the strongest word possible in the Greek language for mourning. This word was used in the Septuagint Greek translation of the OT in Genesis 37, when Jacob thought that his son Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. It is a strong word. What does Jesus mean by it?

A person who is poor in spirit is a person who realizes that he stands before God in spiritual rags. And furthermore, he realizes that the reason for his spiritual poverty is because he is a sinner.

The Bible says that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

So the person who is poor in spirit realizes that it is his own sin that is making him fall far short of God’s glory. And as he looks into his own heart, he realizes just how deep-rooted that sin is. It pervades every area of his life. It affects his thought life, it affects his relationships, it affects his motives, it affects everything. And when he considers just how sinful he is in the presence of God, his reaction is sorrow and mourning.

You cannot become a Christian unless you reach this point. Conviction must precede conversion. You must have a sense of your own sinfulness before you are ready to receive the salvation of God. The mourning that Jesus is talking about here is what Paul referred to in…

2 CO 7:10 Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation.

The closer you get to the kingdom of heaven, the more you will become aware of your own sinfulness. That is why the people in Scripture who walked closest with God were the ones who most clearly realized their own sinfulness. Moses… David… Peter… Paul. Their attitude was not “well, I have my faults, but so does everyone else.” No, they were soberly aware of their own sin, and they marveled that God could love them. If you don’t think you’re such a bad person, that says more about your relationship with God than it does about you.

A little boy was saying his prayers before bedtime one night. His mother was sitting beside him as he knelt beside his bed. He came to the part that went “if I should die before I wake…” and he stopped right there. After a moment of silence, his mother gently said “Go ahead son, you remember the rest.” But the boy jumped up and said “Just a minute, Mom, I’ll be right back.” He scrambled downstairs and in a couple of minutes he came huffing and puffing back, knelt down and finished his prayer.

“What was all that about, son?” his mother asked. “Well,” he replied, “I got to thinking about what I was praying. I was asking God to take me home to heaven if I should die before I wake. But then I realized that I’d better go downstairs and fix my sister’s dollhouse. You see, I had turned all her doll furniture upside down just to see how mad she’d be in the morning when she found out. But I got to thinking that if I should die before I wake, I wouldn’t want her to find them like that. And God would be pretty embarrassed to have somebody in heaven who had treated his sister so mean.”

If we are going to walk with God, if we are going to be citizens of His kingdom, we are going to sense the seriousness of sin.

Thank God that he has taken away the penalty of our sin, that now He is working in our lives to give us victory over the power of sin, and that one day He is going to take away even the very presence of sin.

Revelation 21:4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

When the Spirit of God has brought you to the place where you are poor in spirit and mourn over your own sinfulness before God, then and only then can He make you meek.

The first two beatitudes talk about becoming humble before God. This one refers to becoming humble before other people. A person who is poor in spirit and who mourns over his sinfulness is a person who has a true view of himself. He is a person who is not inflated with pride. All cause for self-pride has been eliminated as he stands in the presence of a holy God. He has learned to see himself as he really is through God’s eyes. A dramatic spiritual transformation has taken place in the way that he thinks about himself, because he is no longer focusing upon himself as his point of reference, he is focusing on God.

Meekness is the expression of that transformation in our relationship with other people. A person who is meek is a person who is willing to see others as being more important than himself. He is willing to see their interests and their well-being as higher than his own. He is willing to be a servant to them.

The world finds meekness repugnant. Meek rhymes with weak, and that is what the world thinks it means. But a truly meek person is not a weak person. Far from it. Look at the people in Scripture who were meek.

Abraham meekly gave Lot first choice of the land, although by rights of eldership that choice belonged to Abraham. Later on, Abraham had to come and rescue his nephew because Lot had chosen so unwisely.

Moses was used by God to perform mighty wonders and deeds. He may have been the greatest leader who ever lived. Yet he was meek. When his critics raised a hue and cry about his competence as a leader, Moses meekly refrained from defending himself. He could have lashed out at them and destroyed them, but he was content to let God take care of it.

David was a mighty warrior who had been anointed by God to be king of Israel. Yet he found himself a fugitive, hunted relentlessly by Saul. Several times David was presented with the opportunity of killing Saul. David’s followers urged him to. Yet David meekly said “God forbid that I should raise my hand against the Lord’s anointed.”

None of these three men were weak. But all three were meek.

When God makes you meek, he really sets you free from the dictatorship of pride. You no longer have to look out for #1. You no longer have to fight to defend your own reputation and your own interests. You no longer are stung by criticism or insult. You no longer are a slave to what others think about you and say about you. You no longer are prone to self-pity and complaining if things don’t go your way. You no longer need to get back at others who’ve done you wrong. Being meek means that you no longer act in the interests of your own personal pride.

In the words of the great English preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones…

“To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, because we see there is nothing worth defending. To be meek means that you have finished with yourself altogether and you have no rights or desserts at all.”

John Bunyan said “He who is down need fear no fall.”

But being meek doesn’t mean that you simply become a doormat for anyone to walk over. Being meek doesn’t mean that you cannot stand up in the defence of God’s principles of truth and justice and righteousness. Jesus was meek, but that didn’t prevent him from taking a whip in his hand and driving the merchants out of the Temple. He sure didn’t look like a pacifist! He was righteously angry because those people had made a mockery of God’s holy Temple. Being meek doesn’t mean that you can’t defend your family against the attack of a mugger. Being meek doesn’t mean that you can’t come to the defence of someone who is being oppressed.

I say this because there are people in the peace movement who sincerely believe that non-violence is the more spiritual way. They rather self-righteously feel that they have claimed the moral high ground by advocating that we should never fight, that we should never kill people or hurt people for any reason whatsoever.

That is a total misrepresentation of what the Bible teaches. The forces of darkness laugh when they hear such talk. The Bible says that there is a time when it is right to fight. There is a time when resistance is not only proper, it is our God-given responsibility. There is a time when the only way to counter the forces of darkness is to take up the sword. The Bible is full of such battles. And I am proud that our nation is involved in such a battle today.

The principle of meekness that we have been talking about operates in the area of our personal attitude toward others. Meekness operates wherever pride raises its ugly head. Being meek means having victory over the pride inside of us that alienates us from others. When Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that we should turn the other cheek, he was referring to our own inner battle against pride. He was saying that there will be times when, in order to conquer your own pride, you need to accept bad treatment from others without trying to retaliate. He wasn’t saying that if a man should hold you at gunpoint and try to rape your wife that you should let him. That would be ludicrous!

A meek man is a man who is conquering pride. A meek man is a man who is amazed that God and others think as well of him as they do, because he recognizes that he is a sinner.

That is the man who will inherit the earth. Notice that Jesus said he will inherit the earth not acquire it. The world is full of people who are out to acquire the earth. They think that by pushing themselves forward, by advancing their own cause, by accumulating money and power and fame, they will gain the good life.

But Jesus said that’s not how it works. The man who gives himself to finding the good life will lose it, but the man who is willing to lose his life for my sake will find it. What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? But blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.