Happy Are The Harnessed - Part 1

We tend to equate meekness with weakness, a character flaw in those who lack assertiveness. But originally that's not what meekness meant at all. Today on Turning Point, Dr David Jeremiah considers why embracing the true definition of meekness is essential for a life of happiness. From how to be happy according to Jesus, here's David to introduce his message, Happy are the Harnessed.

Well, men and women, we're never more at odds with the world system than when we try to understand and live by the sayings of Jesus called the Beatitudes. We read them as his true words, but we wonder if anybody besides Jesus ever lived that way. Are they really practical?

Do they really work? And today we're going to talk about one of those characteristics, one of the Beatitudes, blessed are the meek. Let's admit it, we don't like the word, but when we understand it, we'll know how blessedness comes from it.

We're going to spend two days on this. I hope you'll join us today and tomorrow as we talk about Happy are the Harnessed. Blessed are the meek. This is Matthew 5 and verse 5.

Well, let's get started with this discussion of meekness, happy are the harnessed. According to Jesus, everything we've ever been told about getting ahead in this world is wrong. The world says believe in yourself. Jesus says believe in me. The world says strive to be number one. Jesus says the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

The world says winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. And Jesus says he who finds his life will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says don't get mad, get even. Jesus says love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. The world says stand up for your rights.

Jesus says lay down your life. The world teaches us to assert ourselves. Jesus teaches us to deny ourselves. The world teaches us how to get ahead. Jesus teaches us how to give ourselves away.

The world says the one with the most toys wins. Jesus says you can gain the whole world and lose your own soul and what have you got? Never ever are we more at odds with the world and its system than when we try to understand and implement the sayings of Jesus we know as the Beatitudes. Somehow when we read them we know that his words are true, but we wonder in our hearts if anyone anywhere has ever lived by them.

We've already talked about two of them. Happy are the humble for they shall be filled. Happy are the hurting for they shall be comforted. If you think you ran up against everything you ever believed in those two, wait till you get a handle on the one we're going to talk about today. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.

I think Don McCullough speaks for all of us when he writes meekness. Let's admit it. We don't like the word. It tastes insipid. It smells like morning mouth.

It looks like Casper milk toast. It has the strength of a cooked noodle. Coaches don't rally teams with meekness. Executives don't send sales people into the field and politicians don't promise to lead by meekness. Parents don't counsel children to develop it in their lives and generals don't embolden troops with a speech on meekness. You won't find anyone offering seminars on meekness training.

Probably should be examined, he said, by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In the Christian realm, I'm sure there are some of you who believe that this beatitude approves a passive dependent personality. That it is somehow holier to feel inadequate and inferior. That the Christian's cross in life is to be a doormat for the world. One modern critic of the Bible says it this way, okay, you want to believe that?

Go ahead and believe it. And if you do, the beatitude will come true for you. If you are meek in your life, you will inherit the earth.

Six feet of it. William Barkley says, to modern ears, the word meekness describes a weak, flabby, milk and water spineless creature, lacking in all the virility, submissive and subservient to a fault, unable to stand up for himself or for anyone else. But that is very far from the original meaning of the word.

The meaning of the word, said Barkley, is so great and so comprehensive that it almost defies translation. Blessed are the meek. Now in order to understand this word, we'll have to look in the Old Testament first and then back to the New Testament. For the use in the Old Testament is different than its use in the New Testament, but it's only as we combine the two that we really get an understanding of what it means to us today. I suppose some of you wonder where Jesus got all these sayings we know as the beatitudes.

I'm sure since he was the Lord, he could have originated them all immediately on that moment. But if you study them, you will discover that some of them came from Jesus' knowledge of the Old Testament and here is one. When Jesus said, blessed are the meek, he quoted the 37th Psalm.

Turn in your Bibles there, will you? Psalm 37. This Psalm of David is one of my favorite. And if you will notice, there are at least five different places in Psalm 37 where David gets close to saying exactly what Jesus said.

In fact, in one place, he says exactly what Jesus said and this is where Jesus quoted this beatitude from. Look at verse 9 in Psalm 37 and notice it says, those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. Verse 11, the meek shall inherit the earth.

There it is. That's where Jesus took this beatitude from. Verse 22 says it this way, those blessed by him shall inherit the earth. Verse 29, the righteous shall inherit the land. Verse 34, wait on the Lord and keep his way and he shall exalt you to inherit the land. Now if you've followed in your Bibles and read those verses with me, you will discover that two of them speak of waiting on the Lord. And perhaps nothing is as close to the understanding of meekness in the Old Testament is that truth right there. Meekness in Hebrew thought is the man who obediently accepts God's guidance, who humbly accepts whatever God sends, who is dear to God, whose life is strengthened and beautified by the gifts which only God can give to such a man.

He's a man who is compliant to the will of God. According to David, this attitude of life is the only way to be happy. It's the only way to live above the difficulties and the despairs of normal living. I don't know about you, but I often turn to the Psalms. And I want to tell you something I've learned about the Psalms. There's a Psalm for every mood you ever had. If you just read through the Psalms, you will find it.

First of all, the Psalms were written by human beings like David. David was a melancholy in many ways and a man who was very deep in his feelings and often expressed them in the Psalms that he wrote. Whenever I get discouraged, I turn to Psalm 37. Have you ever noticed how discouragement sneaks up on you? How you can take the big things in stride and be like a man? And then the little things that you never thought of sneak up on your blind side and all of a sudden you're asking yourself, why am I feeling so bad today? And you realize you've been ruminating on something that's gotten in your heart. Well, I want to show you how David says we're to deal with that.

First of all, read verse one in the 37th Psalm and read the first phrase. It says, do not fret. You see that? Does anybody know what it means to fret?

Say it out loud. Don't worry. Yeah, don't worry. Now look down in verses seven and eight and you will see that phrase twice more. Do not fret, verse seven. Do not fret, verse eight.

Now watch this. Do not fret, verse one. Do not fret, verse eight.

And in between, I want you to go back and read the verbs in the verses that I've underlined in my Bible. Verse three, trust in the Lord. Verse four, delight in the Lord. Verse five, commit your way to the Lord. Verse seven, rest in the Lord.

Now watch this. Don't fret. Don't fret. In between, rest, trust, commit, delight in the Lord. You know how to keep from worrying?

Just do what David said. Be a meek person. You know what meekness is? Meekness is accepting God's will in your life and leaving it up to him.

It's giving it up to God. God, this is yours. This is your thing. I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to rest in you. I'm going to trust in you. I'm going to delight in you.

I'm going to commit myself to you and I'm not going to fret. You say, well, Pastor Jeremiah, did anybody ever do that? Yes, they did. In the Old Testament and in the New, there's some illustrations of people who lived in meekness. Do you remember old Job? I like to call him old Job because just reading about his troubles makes him seem old. Have you ever heard of anybody who ever went through anything like what that poor man went through? He lost everything in his life. In one day, he lost his whole family.

Oh, not quite. The one that he should have lost hung around. She terrorized him through all of his trouble. Was the worst thing that ever happened to Job. He lost his possessions.

He lost everything. I'm sure there were times when Job was thinking in the midst of all of this, Lord, why is this happening to me? But you know, when Job was pressured to fret, here's what he said. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Job 1 21.

Wow. Later on in the 13th chapter of his book, chapter 13 verse 15, when pressure was at its intensity, Job cried out of the midst of his pressures, though he slay me, yet I will trust him. What had Job done? He'd given it up to God. You know why God brings us to the end of ourselves? Because that's the only way some of us will ever get to him. He lets problems come into our lives and pressure us and push us back against the wall because what he wants us to do every day of our life is to give it up to him, to live in his will.

And sometimes the only way we will do that is when we don't have any options left and there's no place to look but up. There's another one that I think of who lived like that. This is a woman by the name of Mary. It was the Lord's mother. We often underestimate what she faced as the mother of our Lord, but think of it for a moment. A young teenage girl discovering that she is pregnant and then being told by someone from another world that that which was within her womb was of God and that she was being chosen to be the mother of the Lord and that she was with child of the Holy Ghost. And you know what Mary said? Mary said, behold the handmade of the Lord.

Be it unto me according to thy word. Lord, I just, I don't understand this. You know, you've had lots of problems in your life, but most of the problems you've had, other people have had. I've had lots of problems in my life, but there's a commonality. Mary had a problem in her life nobody had ever had before or would ever have after.

And you know what she did? Gave it up to God. She gave it up to God. That's meekness.

You see, in the strength of our human personality, we're going to work it out. God doesn't want us to work it out. He wants us to give it up. Perhaps the one who did this more than anyone who ever walked on this earth was our Lord. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when the pressure of carrying the sin of the whole world finally was beginning to rest upon his shoulders, he began to feel the pressure of that weight. He said, Lord, if there's some other way, let this cup pass from me. But nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.

Lord, I give it up to you. If we think of this term in the Old Testament, then what Jesus was saying was this. Oh, the blessedness of the man who has so committed himself to God that he is entirely God controlled. For such a man will be right with God, and he will be right with self, and he will be right with other men, and he will enter into eternal life and inherit the earth in the process. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Now, that's the Old Testament sense. God controlled.

Not trying to do your own thing, but living under the control of the Almighty. Now, when you come to the New Testament, the word seems to change, and you do know that word's changed, don't you? Any of you know any words that have changed?

I don't believe in evolution except with words. Words go through a process. Their meanings change. That's why when you're reading the King James Version, and you come across the phrase, superfluity of naughtiness, you do not know what that means.

Those words have changed. Well, the word meekness, when it comes to the New Testament context, takes on a different sense, and listen, watch carefully. In the Old Testament, it's being under the control of God. In the New Testament, it's kind of brought down into a smaller circle, and it means to be self-controlled, to have yourself under control.

Now, obviously, the words are not mutually exclusive, because if you're controlled by God, then in a sense, when people observe you, they will say, that man is self-controlled. But in the New Testament, the word means power under control, meekness. When Paul listed the fruit of the Spirit, the eighth in the cluster of nine fruits is meekness. The fruit of the Spirit is what? It's meekness. Now, in the Bible, there are two people who embody this concept.

One is Moses in the Old Testament, but the other is Jesus Christ in the New. And in the book of Matthew, chapter 11 and verse 29, we hear Jesus say this about himself. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest under your souls. Jesus said about himself, I am meek. The best definition I ever heard of New Testament meekness is this, power under control. In the New Testament sense of the word, a man who is meek feels anger on the right grounds, against the right people, in the right manner, at the right moment, for the right length of time. He does not become angry with those he ought not to become angry with, and he does not fail to become angry with those he should be angry with.

It is power under control. It is the virtue of the man who acts with gentleness when it is in his power to act with severity. And if ever there was a man who did that, it was Jesus Christ. I always get exasperated when I hear, and usually they're liberal preachers, and they talk about Jesus in terms that would let you think he was an effeminate, weak, mamby-pamby kind of a person, and I have never understood where they have gotten that from the Bible. And it's no wonder a lot of men reject Jesus. They don't reject the real Jesus. They reject the Jesus we've created by our own inability to read the Bible.

But I want to tell you something. Jesus was a man's man. And even though the Bible says he was meek, and Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 10 about the meekness of Jesus, there are times when Jesus got angry.

In fact, I went through the New Testament and reminded myself of some of them. Do you remember the time when Jesus was healing a man with a withered hand, and the Pharisees and the scribes got all over his case because they said, Lord, you're doing this healing thing on the Sabbath, and you shouldn't be doing this. And Mark 3, 5 says, Jesus looked around at them with anger, being grieved by the hardness of their hearts. Jesus got angry. On another occasion, the disciples were trying to keep the little kids from getting next to Jesus. Do you remember that story? And the Bible says in Mark chapter 10 in verse 14 that when that happened, Jesus was greatly displeased.

There are two very intense words which means he was angry. On one occasion, Jesus was giving a little speech about people who cause little children to stumble. Everyone who's tempted to be involved in anything like that today should read Jesus' words. And these are the words of Jesus.

Listen to this. Jesus said, it would be better for somebody like that if they put a millstone around his neck and they drowned him in the deepest sea. Those are the words of Jesus. You say, Pastor, are you sure you got the right version?

Yeah. Jesus said that. But my all time favorite story of his manhood took place one day when he walked into the temple.

We don't often understand the legitimacy of what he did, but let me tell you what he did. In the temple, there was a court that circumvented the temple proper called the Gentile court. And into that court alone, Gentiles were allowed to come. They weren't allowed in any of the other temple proper, but they could come there and often they would come there and they would hear about God. Well, in the process of time, the priest who cared for the temple got greedy.

And here's what they did. In order to come to offer a sacrifice in the temple, you had to bring an animal and the animal had to be kosher, had to be blessed, had to be right. The priest would disallow any of the animals that were brought to sacrifice and they would tell the people, you have to buy your sacrifice at one of our shops, which we have set up in the Gentile court. So they had an absolute monopoly on the business. People would bring their sacrificial animals. They'd walk in, not accepted, not accepted.

You have to go over there and buy one. And if they were going to worship, they'd go and buy. And so extortion was going on.

It was fraud. Hard to believe that was happening in a church whose record is in the Bible. I don't know that I know anything quite that awful that I'm aware of in churches today, but I'm sure a lot of stuff like that may go on. And the Lord Jesus was not very happy about that, as you know. And we'll have more of this tomorrow as we open our Bibles together again. We're talking about the Beatitudes. This series is called How to Be Happy According to Jesus. From the fifth chapter of the book of Matthew, we're going through every one of the Beatitudes and discussing them and explaining them and applying them to our lives. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series, How to Be Happy According to Jesus, visit our website, where we offer two free ways to help you stay connected, our monthly magazine Turning Points, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org. Now when you do, ask for your copy of David's new Bible study, John, The Divinity of Christ. It's part of the Jeremiah Bible Study series, perfect for group or individual study. And it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard and New International versions, as well as in standard or large print in the New King James, in your choice of several attractive cover options. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hoogfleet. Join us tomorrow as we continue How to Be Happy According to Jesus. That's here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.