Mourning and Meekness

Alexander the Great was one of the few men in history who deserved his nickname. He came to the throne at the tender age of twenty, and by the time he was 33, he had conquered most of the known world. His empire spread from the shores of the Adriatic to plains of India.

Throughout all that vast territory, Alexander never met an enemy that he couldn’t conquer. Until he looked in the mirror. The man who was the master of the whole world was never able to master himself.

One day, one of his top generals became drunk. This man had known Alexander from childhood—they had grown up together in Macedonia as boyhood friends. In his drunkenness, this man began to ridicule and make fun of Alexander.

Alexander became more and more enraged at these insults until suddenly he grabbed a spear and hurled it at his friend. He intended only to scare him, but the spear struck his friend in the chest and fatally wounded him. The man died moments later in Alexander’s arms.

Alexander was griefstricken. He fell into a depression. He tried to take his own life with the same spear, but his men stopped him. For days he lay on his bed in despair. When people came to comfort him, he confessed to them over and over again his stupidity and selfishness which had cost the life of his friend.

Alexander the Great subdued mighty cities and entire nations. He defeated the greatest kings and armies. He conquered the world, but he was unable to conquer the man in the mirror. Within his own soul was a stronghold that resisted him to the very end. And in that way, Alexander the Great is exactly like you and me.

Within each one of us, there is a kingdom—the kingdom of selfish pride. It broods like a dark fortress over our comings and goings. It controls and dictates our attitudes. It makes us do the most despicable and foolish things. Try as we may to storm its ramparts, and bring down its walls, the kingdom of selfish pride stands invulnerable to all our assaults.

There’s only one person who can conquer this fortress within each one of us, and that is the great king from heaven, Jesus Christ. And in the Beatitudes, which are found in Matthew 5, he reveals his plan of attack.

The Beatitudes describe the changes which God wants to accomplish in our hearts in order to bring down the walls of our selfish pride. The motive of his mission is love. The only weapon he uses is grace.

Last Sunday, we looked at God’s first objective—to bring us to the place where we are poor in spirit. We discovered that a person who is poor in spirit is a person who finally recognizes that he stands before God in spiritual rags. He finally sees himself as he really is.

He’s come to the realization that he has nothing good to offer God. He has cast away his self-righteousness; thrown down his self-justification. And he stands before God in utter and abject spiritual poverty.

And that, in God’s mercy, is his first objective for us. Jesus says that unless you arrive there, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Unless you come to that point, you cannot even begin to experience blessedness.

Now the second great objective of God described in the Beatitudes is found in verse 4: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” What does this mean?

I think you realize that it’s one thing to understand that something is true, and quite another to actually feel it.

On an unseasonably cold January day in 1986, several thousand people stood on the beach at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with their necks craned back and their eyes squinting into the sky. The thunder of the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger still echoed in their ears, and they were intently watching it race heavenward.

In the crowd stood an older couple, Ed and Grace Corrigan. Their daughter Christa McAuliffe, a school-teacher, was aboard that shuttle. She had won a nationwide competition to become the first teacher in space.

As Christa’s Mom and Dad stared into the sky, suddenly a huge explosion engulfed the shuttle in a cloud of orange and white smoke. There was a stunned silence among the onlookers as they struggled to grasp what had just happened. Some thought that this might have been a normal procedure, where the first-stage rocket boosters separated from the spacecraft.

But it soon became obvious that something terrible had happened. As the dawning realization of disaster began to sink in, Grace Corrigan put her head on her husband’s shoulder and began to cry softly.

You see, there’s a difference between knowing something and actually feeling it.

The second Beatitude speaks about the feeling that comes with knowing that the first is true. It’s the awful realization that we are separated from God by our sin. It is the sense of helplessness and hopelessness that comes when we see that we have made a career of turning our backs on God to go our own way.

When Jesus used the word mourning here, he used the stongest possible word he could use. He used the same word that was used in the Greek translation of the OT to describe how Jacob wept bitterly when he thought that his dear son Joseph had been torn apart by wild animals.

If the second Beatitude teaches us anything, it teaches us that the pathway to blessedness does not mean having a casual attitude toward sin. We cannot dismiss our sin by saying “Well, I’m not perfect, but neither is anyone else. And besides, I’m not so bad. I can think of a lot worse things that other people have done.”

The second Beatitude means feeling—not just understanding—the fact that we are in a desperate situation; that our sin and our selfishness puts us in dire straits. That we stand before God utterly ruined. He is holy and we are not; we are unclean.

A little boy was saying his prayers at bedtime one night. His mother was sitting beside him as he knelt by the 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, the little boy jumped up and said “Just a minute, Mommy, 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.

The little boy said, “Well, 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, a little while ago, I 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 her dollhouse like that. And it would make God pretty embarrassed to have somebody in heaven who would treat his sister so mean.”

That’s what it means to mourn for your sin. It’s owning up to what you’ve done. It’s a sorrow that leads to action. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 7:10 “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation.” And until we experience the mourning that leads to repentance, we can never experience the comfort of God that brings blessedness.

The third Beatitude is closely related to the second. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Poverty of spirit and mourning have to do with your standing before God. Meekness has to do with your standing before other people.

When the Spirit of God brings you to the place where you are poor in spirit and mourn over your sin, then and only then can God begin to make you meek. That’s the third objective in God’s mission to bless us.

A person who is poor in spirit and mourns over his sin is a person who has a true view of himself. Far from being inflated with pride, he’s been deflated. Selfish pride evaporates when you realize that you are standing in the presence of a holy God. You see yourself in a new light. That’s what Beatitudes 1 and 2 are about.

Beatitude #3 deals with the outward evidence of that inner change. When God brings you to that place, you begin to see other people as more important than yourself. You start to see their interests and their well-being as more important than your own. You become willing to be a servant to them.

Meekness sets you free from the dictatorship of pride. Meekness is the opposite of wanting your own way in relation to other people. Meekness is letting others have priority over you.

When God makes you meek, He teaches you that you longer have to look out for #1. He cures you of that knee-jerk reflex to defend your reputation and your interests. He takes away that zeal to protect your pride, because he’s taught you that there’s nothing worth protecting. So you’re no longer stung when people criticize you or insult you. And you don’t have that desperate desire to lash back at them when they treat you wrong.

When God makes you meek, He sets you free from that insatiable appetite for recognition, appreciation, and praise. He sets you free from the slavery of caring what people think about you and say about you, because He’s brought you to the place where you understand that the only person whose opinion of you matters is God.

The world has little use for meekness because “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 the Bible whom God made 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 Lot and fight a battle on his behalf. Abraham was meek, but he wasn’t weak.

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 began to whine and complain about his leadership, Moses didn’t defend himself. He could have lashed out at them and destroyed them, but he was content to let God take care of the matter. Moses was meek, but he certainly wasn’t weak.

When you look at leadership, you have to realize that if you truly want to make an impact on people, meekness is where you begin. Because people will not respect you, people will not listen to you, people will not want to emulate and follow you unless they become convinced that you truly have their best interests at heart; that you are not just looking out for your own agenda.

That means listening instead of talking. It means giving in relationships instead of taking. It means putting more effort into understanding others than making sure that they understand you. It means asking “What can I do for you?” rather than “What can you do for me?”

When Jesus said: “Whoever wants to become great in the kingdom of God must learn to become a servant.” he was talking about the principle of meekness.

Without meekness, you cannot truly know blessedness. Jesus said that the meek will inherit the earth. How ironic! Because the world says that if you want to “inherit the earth”, if you really want to enjoy the good life, you have to go out there and get it for yourself. You have to look out for #1, and if you run over a few people in the process, well, that’s too bad.

But Jesus said “Whoever would find his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake, the same shall find it.” That’s meekness.

God wants you to have a blessed life. But he can only give it to you by breaking down the fortress of selfish pride. And the way he breaks it down is by making you poor in spirit, making you mourn, and making you meek. You have to go down before you can go up.