Excerpted from A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (1948).
The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather, he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is, in the sight of God, more important than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto. He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring. He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own values. He will be patient to wait for the day when everything will get its own price tag and real worth will come into its own. Then the righteous shall shine forth in the kingdom of their Father. He is willing to wait for that day.
In the meantime, he will have attained a place of soul rest. As he walks on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle to defend himself is over. He has found the peace meekness brings.
Then also he will get deliverance from the burden of pretense. By this I mean not hypocrisy, but the common human desire to put the best foot forward and hide from the world our real inward poverty. For sin has played many evil tricks upon us, and one has been the infusing into us of a false sense of shame. There is hardly a man or woman who dares to be just what he or she is without doctoring up the impression. The fear of being found out gnaws like rodents within their hearts. The man of culture is haunted by the fear that he will someday come upon a man more cultured than himself. The learned man fears to meet a man more learned than he. The rich man sweats under the fear that his clothes or his car or his house will sometime be made to look cheap by comparison with those of another rich man. So-called “society” runs by a motivation not higher than this, and the poorer classes on their level are little better.
Words of Grace for Strength
“Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you seems to be wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their own craftiness” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile” (1 Corinthians 3:18-20).
The world looks at the meek person as a fool, yet one who is meek in the Lord is strong and wise in God’s eyes, and has achieved a level of peace and inner calmness that is lost to, and frankly incomprehensible, to the world at large; because the world confuses meekness with weakness. Matthew 5:5 has Jesus proclaiming the blessedness of the meek and their inheritance of the earth. Imagine the freedom of placing all of our cares and concerns at the feet of our Lord, and caring only to hear from Him one day, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21).
Imagine the freedom of being able to ignore the taunts and jeers, the “tsk, tsk, tsking” of neighbors and colleagues, of even possibly family and friends, knowing your strength, security and salvation is sealed in the Lord. What power, what freedom! And you can well imagine how agitated it will make those lovers of the world to see and know you have rejected their value structure, you believe worthless what the world holds dear and is willing to pay the greatest price to get, the turning from and defiance of a Holy God. We will inherit the earth one day as we rule with Him at His Second Coming, but for now our inheritance is that the earth is powerless in its hold on us, if we are in Christ.
Meekness is power and strength under control; it is living a disciplined life under the control of the Holy Spirit. Our example is our Lord Jesus, He who has at His fingertips the ability to create worlds and destroy worlds, because He as the Son of Man is still the Son of God, and therefore is; Very God. When we read the passages which describe the torturous beatings and scourging He endured during the trial before His crucifixion, when we read of the scorn and cursing He endured, and then read how after all of this He is compelled to carry His own cross up the Via Dolorosa to Calvary, and then we read how they nailed Him to that cross, and hung Him there between heaven and earth to die.
Nowhere in the Scripture is it recorded that He begged for relief, nowhere in the Scripture is it recorded that He cried out declaring His guiltlessness, nowhere in the Scripture is it recorded that He showed any weakness, but throughout the entire time of His trial and crucifixion He was the perfect example of meekness. Jesus Christ who possessed all of the power in heaven and earth subjugated all of it to the will of His Father. Meekness is not weakness, but instead is subjugating our will to the will of our Father in heaven in the understanding that any power or strength that we may have come solely from Him, and that He in our meekness will enable us to endure anything, all things, for the cause of Christ; because we are in Christ.
We of the true church, His remnant church, have that meekness at our command and at our fingertips if we just allow the Lord to work in our lives through His will. If we will enjoy and use that portion of the inheritance already realized, as we await the glorious inheritance to come, we can exemplify Christ like meekness. We will need that meekness as we move forward in a troubled world which is spinning more out of control daily. We will need it to face the onslaught of persecution that is coming our way. It may seem ironic that the very thing that will get us through those times, meekness in the Lord, is the very thing that may attract the attention and attack from a sinful and defiant world. It is not irony; it is God at work in us. For as He told His disciples;
“Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:11-12).
And again He said: “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:18-20).
Friends, in these last days we need to not only understand meekness, but to be examples of it, and we need to remember these words the Holy Spirit gave to Peter:
“And who is he who will harm you if you become followers of what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you are blessed. “And do not be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled.” But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed. For it is better, if it is the will of God, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil” (1 Peter 3:13-17).
Knowing that in displaying meekness, the strength and power given to us by Jesus Christ will enable us to endure whatever may be in store for us, until He comes for us. Patiently living disciplined obedient lives, we find no reason to be anxious because…
Jesus is Coming Soon!
Dr. Tuck Whitaker and Andy Coticchio
Rafter Cross Ministries