Part 3 of “BLESSEDR”: A Study of the Beatitudes
October 4, 2026
Glynwood Baptist Church, Prattville, AL
James Jackson, Pastor
[Title Slide]
Good morning. Please turn in your Bibles to Matthew 5.
[Talk about memorization challenge, can’t just say “Poor In Spirit, Mourn, Meek, Hunger and thirst, Merciful, Pure in Heart, Peacemaker, Persecuted]
Of all the Beatitudes, the one we are talking about today is probably the most familiar to people outside the church.
There’s a song by Rush—my favorite band in high school—that ends with the line, “And the meek shall inherit the earth.” The line also shows up in songs by The Police, Frank Zappa, and John Cougar Mellencamp.
A Rapper named Meek Mills has the line in a song. Which make sense.
A band called Bad Religion has the line in a song. Which doesn’t make sense.
There’s a Simpsons episode called “The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth.” That same line was used on movie posters for Revenge of the Nerds.
More often than not, the line is mocked or ridiculed.
J. Paul Getty, the famous industrialist, supposedly said, “The meek might inherit the earth, but they won’t get the mineral rights.”
And then there’s Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche called Christian morality a “slave morality”—a moral system that took qualities associated with weakness and turned them into virtues.
To Nietzsche, “Blessed are the meek” wasn’t beautiful. It was bondage. To him, it was evidence that Christianity had gotten strength and weakness exactly backwards.
And while Nietzsche may be the most extreme example, at least he understood the Beatitudes well enough to be offended by them. He understood how radical and countercultural the teachings of Jesus really are.
Let’s be honest: in the modern church, we don’t hear this as radical teaching. We’re more likely to cross-stitch it onto a throw pillow.
We know the words: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
We see them as beautiful. We just don’t see them as practical.
The meek? They’re the ones who are going to inherit the earth? That’s not how the world “works.”
A few years ago, Donald Trump Jr. was speaking to a group of conservative Christians, and he said,
“We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand sort of the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing.”
And you know what? Depending on what you’re trying to get, he could be right.
If you’re trying to gain power, keep power, defeat enemies, protect your position, get ahead in the company, and make sure nobody takes advantage of you, meekness gets you nothing.
But here’s the thing: Jesus never said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall thrive in an earthly kingdom.”
He said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
There’s a difference. You see, the Sermon on the Mount is not about how to thrive in an earthly kingdom.
It is a manifesto for how to live as a citizen of God’s kingdom.
John MacArthur points out that the opening Beatitudes describe the terms of citizenship in the kingdom of heaven.
You have to see yourself rightly. That’s being poor in spirit. Realize you have nothing to contribute to your salvation except the sin that makes it necessary.
You have to see sin rightly. That’s mourning. Seeing sin Not as a bad choice, a poor decision, or a mistake, but as an offense against a holy God.
And then, you have to see God rightly. That’s meekness. And that’s where we’re going this morning.
So let’s remind ourselves of those terms as we read Matthew 5:1-12 together. Please stand to honor the reading of God’s Word:
[Read Matthew 5:1-12: Each Beatitude Will Be on a separate slide]
1. The Setting
Before we get into the teaching of verse 5, we need to establish the setting. Now, week 1, we established the physical setting. We talked about Galilee and the mountain. By the way, I love that verse 1 says, “He went up on THE mountain” and sat down. It really was just an ordinary hillside. Matthew never names it.
But once Jesus gave this teaching, it would never be an ordinary hillside again. It would forever be THE mountain!
So we don’t need to say anything more about the physical setting. But let’s talk about the religious and cultural setting. As we said in Week one, Messianic expectations were high. Everybody hated the Roman occupation.
And bear in mind that the Romans really hadn’t been in power all that long. Rome took control of Judea in 63 BC, which for the Jews in Jesus’ day was more recent for them than Pearl Harbor is for us.
So everyone was looking for a Messiah.
By Jesus’ day, there were several major groups within Judaism, and each had a different vision of what Israel needed.
The group we’re probably most familiar with is the Pharisees. They were the religious conservatives of the day. They believed Israel needed a return to strict obedience to the Torah. So they envisioned a Mosaic Messiah—a prophet like Moses who would lead the nation back to traditional Jewish faithfulness. Make Israel Great Again.
Then there were the Sadducees. We would probably call them theological liberals today. They rejected beliefs like the resurrection of the dead, and although they opposed Roman domination, the priestly aristocracy associated with them had learned to function pretty comfortably within the Roman system.
So they were looking for what we might call a materialistic Messiah—one who wouldn’t disrupt their lifestyle too much.
The third group was the Zealots. They represented the revolutionary response to Rome. Rome was the enemy, and Roman occupation had to be resisted—even violently.
And that makes it fascinating that Jesus put Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot on the same team.
The Zealots wanted a militant Messiah.
Finally, there were the Essenes. You don’t hear much about them in Scripture, and there’s a reason for that. They withdrew from mainstream Jewish society, and at least some communities associated with them lived in the Judean wilderness. They believed an apocalyptic conflict between the children of light and the forces of darkness was coming.
The community at Qumran associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls is generally identified with this movement.
So their idea of the Messiah was that He would separate Himself from the culture like they did, until it was time for the apocalypse.
Now, those are admittedly broad categories.
But I want you to notice what all four groups had in common.
They were all looking for a Messiah who would validate the way they already saw the world.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure that if Jesus had said to the Pharisees, “You guys are crushing it with your observance of the law! Way to go!” then they may very well have accepted Him. Same with the other groups. If He had just conformed to their preconceived ideas of what the Messiah was going to be, they probably would have been waving Palm Branches at the Triumphal entry too.
We do the same thing today. Lots of us want to remake Jesus in our image.
Some of us want Jesus to tell us we’re the only ones who got the Bible right.
Some of us want Jesus to reassure us that following Him won’t cost us our comfort, our prosperity, or our way of life.
Some of us want Jesus to take up our culture warrior causes and defeat our political enemies.
And some of us just want Jesus to hurry up and come back so they don’t have to deal with this sick world anymore.
In other words, we don’t necessarily want a Messiah who changes us.
We want a Messiah who confirms us.
But here’s the problem.
None of those was the Messiah God had promised.
Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, Zechariah said:
“Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
In the Septuagint, the Greek word translated “humble” is praus.
It’s the same word Jesus uses in Matthew 5:5.
Meek.
Who was looking for a Meek Messiah?
• Not the Pharisees.
• Not the the Sadducees.
• Not the Zealots.
• Not the Essenes.
It wasn’t that Jesus failed to live up to the promises and the prophecies.
It’s that He failed to live up to their expectations.
And that raises a question for every one of us:
Am I following Jesus as He is—or am I trying to make Jesus into the Messiah I want Him to be?
2. What Meekness is, and Isn’t
Now, we need to take some time unpacking what we mean when we say Jesus was a Meek Messiah.
By the way, that’s not something we are reading into the text. Jesus described Himself in this way. In Matthew 11:29, Jesus says, He is “gentle and lowly in heart.” Dane Ortlund points out that this is the only place in Scripture where Jesus describes His own heart. And the word translated “gentle” in Matthew 11 is the same word translated meek in Matthew 5.
So what exactly does Jesus mean by meekness?
For a long time, Christians presented Jesus as “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”—always holding a lamb, wearing a Miss America sash, with a voice so sweet the birds hush their singing. More recently, there’s been a reaction against that picture, especially among some hyper-masculine preachers. Their Jesus is the table-flipping, devil-stomping, name-taking Man’s Man who never backs down from a fight.
But both pictures fall woefully short of the Jesus of the Bible.
Jesus took little children in His arms.
And He took a whip and cleared the temple.
Jesus cried at Lazarus’s tomb.
And He cried out against the Pharisees, calling them a brood of vipers.
Jesus washed His disciples’ feet.
And He crushed Satan under His feet.
So whatever meekness means, it cannot mean weakness.
[For what its worth, I did find some pictures that tried to show both sides of this at the same time. So, hey, A for effort]
So what is meekness?
The classic—almost clichéd—definition is that meekness is strength under control.
Think about a wild horse that has been tamed. The stallion has just as much strength as it ever had. The muscles haven’t disappeared. The power is still there. Only now, instead of that strength being destructive, it can be directed toward something useful.
And here’s the key: A broken horse still has its spirit. It still has its personality. It still has its strength.
What has changed is its willingness to yield its strength to its master.
It yields the reins because it has learned to trust the one holding them.
And that’s the picture of biblical meekness.
Meekness is strength that has learned to yield to a loving master.
When you are secure in your identity as God’s son or daughter, you don’t have to spend so much strength trying to prove who you are to others. Think about how much energy we spend fighting for what we think we deserve. Fighting for our position. Fighting for our rights. That’s uncontrolled strength. Meekness is strength under control.
It’s the result of being so secure in your position in Christ that you don’t have to worry about your position in the world.
The Apostle Paul taught about this kind of security to the church in Corinth. Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 3.
The Corinthian church had divided itself into factions according to which teacher people followed. “I follow Paul.” “I follow Apollos.” “I follow Cephas.”
And while Paul is pointing out how ridiculous this is, he introduces a principle that goes way beyond arguing over who’s the best Sunday School teacher.
Look at verse 21:
“So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”
Did you catch that?
Paul’s teaching is yours. So is Apollos’s. So is Peter’s.
And then Paul just keeps going.
The world is yours. Life is yours. Death is yours. The present is yours. The future is yours.
“All things are yours, and you are Christ’s.”
So why are you fighting over who has the best teacher? Why are you so insecure about who has what?
You have Christ. You have it all.
Now contrast that with the older brother in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son in Luke 15.
Remember him?
He’s out there in the front yard kicking rocks, and when his father comes out to try to get him to join the party, he says:
“Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat…. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!”
Arrogant. Haughty. Self-righteous.
Pretty much the opposite of meekness.
He’s keeping score. He’s comparing. He’s calculating what he deserves. He’s furious about what somebody else received.
And his father says:
“Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”
What a tragedy.
He had the inheritance. He just didn’t have the security that should have come with it.
Without the security of knowing who you are in Christ, the attitude of meekness is impossible.
But the more secure you become in who you are in Christ, the freer you become to live meekly.
Examples from Scripture
Quickly, because I know time is short, let me give you a couple of examples of this in Scripture. The first is Abraham. In Genesis 12, God makes a promise to Abraham (only he was called Abram at the time). He promised He would make of Abram a great nation. That He would make his name great, and that He would bless those who blessed him and cursed those who cursed him. And when Abram arrived in Canaan, God said, “To you and your offspring I will give this land” (Gen 12:1-7).
Now, flip over one chapter. There’s strife between Abram’s herdsmen and Lot, his nephew’s, herdsmen. They’re like, “This Promised Land ain’t big enough for the both of us.”
And Abram totally could have powered up. He could have said, “Listen here, Sonny. God promised this land to me, not you. You’re only here on my good graces. Take what I give you, and be happy with it.”
Instead, he said, “Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left.”
That’s meekness. Abraham was so secure that God had given him the entire house that he didn’t care if Lot got the first pick of the bedrooms.
One more example from Genesis. Think about Joseph and his brothers. Joseph was secure in his position as his earthly father’s favorite son. And through everything Joseph endured, one refrain keeps showing up in his story: “The LORD was with Joseph.”
So years later, when his brothers came to him, Joseph was able to exercise meekness— strength under control. He was able to say, in Genesis 50:19-20
But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?…
Joseph knows God’s place, and therefore he knows his own. That’s meekness as seeing God rightly.
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
But as good as these examples are, they pale in comparison to the example we have in Jesus. Go with me to Philippians 2
Beginning in verse 5:
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant…”
There it is again.
He did not grasp.
Abraham didn’t have to grasp for the land. It was already his.
Joseph didn’t have to grasp for position. It was already his.
And Jesus didn’t grasp for equality with God. It was already His.
So He had no issue with emptying Himself of anything that could be pressed to His own advantage. The One who possessed all the power and glory of God chose the position of a servant.
That’s meekness.
And look how far He was willing to yield:
“He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Don’t ever mistake that for weakness.
Jesus said in Matthew 26 that He could have called on His Father and twelve legions of angels would have been at His disposal.
The nails didn’t hold Jesus on the cross because He wasn’t strong enough to come down.
He stayed because His strength was completely yielded to the will of His Father.
And then look at what happens next:
“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name…”
Do you see the pattern?
Abraham didn’t insist on his rights, and God exalted him
Joseph didn’t seek power or authority or revenge, and God made him second in command over all Egypt.
Jesus didn’t use His equality with God to His own advantage, and God gave Him the name that is above every name.
Conclusion: How to Be Meek
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
By the way, this third Beatitude just happens to be an almost direct quotation of Psalm 37:11:
“But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace.”
Which is perfect, because Psalm 37 reads almost like an instruction manual for how to be meek.
How are we supposed to exercise meekness in the twenty-first century, when violence masquerades as strength, compassion is ridiculed as weakness, and power is revered regardless of what it does to the person who wields it?
How do you become meek in a world like that?
Psalm 37 tells us.
Psalm 37 is full of imperatives. In the first nine verses alone, it gives us about fifteen commands—things to do and things not to do.
And I think we can summarize them with four action steps:
Fret Not. Trust In. Wait For. Commit To.
Let me show you.
Fret Not
Verse 1: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!” Verse 7 repeats it. Fret not. And then again in verse 8: “Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.”
It’s easy to fret over other people. What they’re doing. What they’re getting away with. How they’re prospering. What they have that we don’t have.
And verse 8 tells us why fretting is dangerous. It tends to evil. Eventually we start thinking, “Well, if that’s what it takes to get ahead, maybe that’s what I need to do too.”
That’s when meekness begins to disappear.
Remember what meekness is: strength that has learned to yield to God.
So stop people watching. Fret not.
Trust In
Instead, verse 3 says:
“Trust in the LORD, and do good. Delight yourself in Him, and He will give you the desires of your heart” There’s the alternative to fretting.
I don’t have to control everything because I trust the One who does.
I don’t have to manipulate the outcome.
I don’t have to compromise my character because somebody else compromised theirs.
I don’t have to become more ruthless than the ruthless people around me.
I can trust in the LORD and do good.
That’s meekness.
Wait For
Then verse 7:
“Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him.”
Waiting may be one of the hardest expressions of meekness because waiting means accepting that God’s timetable is not mine.
We want justice— now.
We want vindication— now.
We want recognition— now.
But meekness says, “I don’t have to force the outcome. I can wait for God.”
Jesus promised the meek will inherit the earth, and that inheritance isn’t going anywhere.
Commit To
And finally, verse 5:
“Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act.”
That word commit carries the idea of rolling something onto someone else.
Roll your anxieties onto the LORD. Your plans. Your reputation. Your rights. Your future. Your need to be vindicated. Your need to control how this turns out.
Roll it onto Him.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the dawn, and your justice as the noonday.
I get it. It seems like a dark world, where only the strong survive, where only the ruthless get ahead.
The night is long, but dawn is coming. And the true Light, which came into the world, piercing the darkness, came gentle and meek.
And calling us to follow in His steps.
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