Sermon Series: Sermon on the Mount
Sermon Title: The Meekness of Jesus
Pastor Chris O’Brien

The Meekness of Jesus

If you’ll turn to your scripture insert, we’re of course continuing to work our way through the Sermon on the Mount. And we will get to a point where we’ll take bigger chunks of the Sermon on the Mount, but we won’t do that with these Beatitudes. I think they’re just so important for us to get a grasp of. And so we’re going to take our time. I’m going to read the section that you find at the top, Matthew 5, verses 2 through 10. And then the next section there, the meekness of Jesus, beginning with Matthew 11, verse 25. I’ll read that paragraph as well. So let’s hear again the word of God.

Matthew 5:2-10

And Jesus opened his mouth and taught them, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 11:25-30

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.” (He’s speaking of the gospel.) “Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

This is the word of God.

A Description of All Christians

So as we began to look at the Beatitudes last Sunday, I tried to emphasize a couple things.

We don’t have a list here of eight characteristics, possible suggestions to you of how you might act in your Christian life. Slavic, you can be poor in spirit. David, you can be a peacemaker. John Michael, you choose what characteristic you want and you choose another.

No, this is a description of all Christians. Jesus is saying, this is our character. This is what we all are, by God’s grace, the work of the renewing power of his Holy Spirit through his word. This is how he is remolding us, making us, transforming us after the image of Christ. Some people might feel their temperament is a little more toward being meek and maybe others merciful and so forth. This has nothing to do with natural temperament. This has to do with the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of all believers. This is what we should desire more and more to be like.

Spiritually Bankrupt

First, I think Jesus says it first because there is a sense in which there’s a priority here.

We must be spiritually poor, spiritually bankrupt. In terms of our relationship to God, none of us feel like, you know, I’ve got something to offer. You don’t got squat, and I don’t have squat. We have nothing to offer to God. We are rebel sinners by nature. We deserve condemnation.

But if God in his grace has transformed our hearts and we’ve come to Christ, we’re poor in spirit. Being spiritually bankrupt, understanding ourselves to have no spiritual good in and of ourselves, is not merely something you and I should exhibit at a certain point right before or while we’re coming to Christ. No, Jesus is saying being spiritually poor, having this as your disposition and mine, I am worthless outside of Christ in terms of my relationship with God. Yes, now I’m a servant of Christ and I’m a son or daughter of the living God, and yet that has absolutely nothing to do with me. Oh, but I believed. I turned from my sins and I trusted in Christ. Yes, you did. And if you didn’t do that, you’re not a believer, but you did that as a result of the Holy Spirit working grace in your heart.

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

And then Jesus says we’re blessed as those who mourn. Jesus means Christians grieve deeply. It’s something they do as part of their Christian life. It doesn’t mean that every moment of every day we’re walking around with our head down and we’re moping and we’re crying, we’re weeping. It doesn’t mean that. But it does mean that just as the Bible, as Paul says, rejoice in the Lord, again I say rejoice, and that rejoicing, or the fruit of the Spirit, joy, should characterize our life as Christians, so too we should be those that mourn, that grieve deeply. What do we grieve over? We grieve over a lot of things. The state of the church, the state of our own country. But I think the priority here is grieving over our own sin. Do we do that? Do we do that? And if we don’t, what do we do about it?

I think we cry out to God. We cry out to God to break our hard hearts, to make us grieve over our sins, not to make excuses, not to play the victim and all that kind of nonsense. The joy of being a Christian is we know that we’re right with God. We’re sons and daughters of the living God. That’s not changeable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t displease God in our life. And so we rightly grieve, and then that leads to repentance and leads to restoration, if indeed it’s gone on for some time and we’ve neglected repentance. So we move on now.

Blessed Are the Meek

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Now, who are the meek? Who are the meek? They’re not the weak. This is not blessed are the wimps, for they will be run over by everybody, okay? This is not the effeminate twerp. Sorry, I hope that doesn’t offend you. It offends me. I don’t like effeminate twerps that call themselves men, okay? The Apostle Paul tells us, men, be men, okay? We need to be men. Jesus is fully a man. Jesus is no weakling. Jesus is the Son of God, the sovereign King of kings and Lord of lords. He calls us to be meek.

I think the word we use more commonly, more often, that’s closely associated with meekness would be humility. In our normal course of conversation, we’re more prone to use the word humility, be humble. And they’re very closely related, and we’ll talk about that later. But we do wanna talk about the fact that Jesus himself exhibited meekness in his ministry, and he exhibits that and shows that, as Matthew 11 says in our secondary passage. Jesus exhibits that meekness, that gentleness toward sinners, as Jesus describes them here in verses 28 and 29.

The Meekness of Jesus Toward Sinners

He describes them as those that labor and are heavy burdened. What is Jesus referring to here? I think he may be referring to a lot of things, but certainly two things I think stand out. People that haven’t come to Christ yet, but they’re burdened by their sins. Their sins now, as God is working conviction in their hearts by the Holy Spirit, they’re beginning to see the sinfulness of their sin in the light of the holiness and the righteousness of God. But it could also be the case, since Jesus was so often interacting, arguing, debating with the Jewish leadership of his day, that took the law of God and distorted it by adding other things to it, putting laws on top of laws. So Jesus could be thinking here of those that are heavily burdened, not just by their own sin, but by the false teaching of the Pharisees and the Sadducees that were basically preaching and teaching salvation by works, which of course is impossible.

So Jesus is saying, you who are burdened down by your sins and your guilt, you who may be further burdened down by false teaching related to these things, Jesus says to those people, he’ll give them rest. He says, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. And then Jesus says, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Gentle, Meek, and Humble

So the word there, gentle, is the same word in Matthew 5 that is translated there as meek. And that same word, if you look on down to Matthew 21, is also translated as humble. So as Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he doesn’t come on a gigantic horse like a victorious king ready to enter Jerusalem and take on Rome. That’s not the kind of kingship Jesus is running, if you will. Jesus comes humbly, as Matthew quotes Zechariah. Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, mounted on a donkey. Again, the same word there for meek and gentle. Here it says Jesus enters Jerusalem humble on a donkey. Of course, we know that he enters Jerusalem humbly, but the next thing that Matthew records Jesus doing is violently… now the word violent is not in the text, but I can defend it. Jesus in Matthew’s gospel in chapter 21 comes into the temple where they’re selling the animals and all this, more than likely in the court of the Gentiles.

So they’re desecrating the temple to make money off the people that are buying animals to sacrifice. They can sell them elsewhere, but they don’t. They do it right there in the temple. And Jesus comes in there, and he pushes over the tables, and Matthew says he drives them out. Now Jesus doesn’t drive them out by meekly saying, boys and girls, will y’all kind of move along here? I’m sorry, that wouldn’t have gotten the point. Jesus violently pushes them out. He does not sin. He does not do anything inconsistent with his holy, righteous character. But these people are desecrating the temple and Jesus removes them.

Gentle and Lowly

Now back to this word and back to this concept of Jesus being meek, I could just race over it and say, let’s get to the meekness of Christians. Because I do think the main point of our text, when it says, blessed are the meek, Jesus’ concern there is to us. We are to be meek, we are to be gentle, we are to be humble, and we need to discuss that and how that applies to our lives. But brothers and sisters, this passage of Jesus being gentle and lowly in heart has been distorted, in my estimation, by a pretty well-known book.

The author’s name is Dane Ortlund. The title of the book is Gentle and Lowly. Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t like criticizing books or anything else just to do it, just for fun. That’s not my point. My reason for criticizing this book and its teaching, number one, it distorts biblical truth. And number two, I think there’s a danger there because it distorts Jesus.

It may make it more difficult for us to understand what Jesus is doing in our lives in difficult times. Basically, the writer, though he seeks to qualify himself, and he seeks to make boundaries so as not to make himself appear unorthodox, and to appear to be overstating the case, nonetheless he says over and over again that Jesus being gentle and lowly in heart is the most instinctive and basic thing about Jesus when he’s dealing with sinners. Now, it is a biblical fact, as best I know, that this phrase of Jesus, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, is, in fact, the only place in scripture where Jesus speaks explicitly of his heart, okay? But that doesn’t mean this is the only thing in his heart and it’s the most important thing. That’s just the distortion of the Bible’s teaching.

Zeal for Your House

You see, Jesus didn’t cleanse the temple once, he cleansed it twice. Unless you think that the Apostle John took the incident from three years later and moved it all the way forward to the second chapter of John, I think what Jesus did, if we look at the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John together, Jesus cleansed the temple once at the beginning of his ministry, and once at the end, right before he went to the cross. And in that situation where John describes Jesus cleansing the temple, and you’ll recall John’s language, a little more vivid, or at least vivid in a different way, Jesus made a rope and he used that to run the people out of there. And then we’re told that the disciples remembered this, and they remembered how the psalmist spoke of the Lord and his temple. They remembered this teaching of scripture: zeal for your house, that is God’s house, will consume me. You see, John is saying that when Jesus ran people out of the temple, Jesus was consumed with zeal for his holy, holy God.

You wanna tell me that’s not part of his heart? Because the text doesn’t literally say in his heart? That’s nonsense. That’s a misinterpretation of scripture. To say Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart is not saying the most important thing about Jesus.

Not Anti-Compassion

Now don’t get me wrong. I love talking about the compassion of Jesus. I think I’ve spent the four years of my preaching here calling on sinners to turn from their sin, inviting them, according to what Jesus says and does, to turn from their sins and trust in Christ. I think you know that I believe in the loving compassion of Jesus. You know that. You know I’m not anti-compassion.

So what’s the problem here? Is the preacher just off his rocker a little bit? Does he just want to fuss at Dane Ortlund because I don’t like his name? No, it’s not that. It’s so much more important. 

The Perplexing Love of Jesus

The problem is the stress in this book with Jesus’ gentle, lowly heart. Jesus’ gentle, lowly heart. This is Jesus’ primary instinct. This is the way Jesus deals with repentant sinners. What about the perplexing Jesus? John tells us in John 11 that Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Now, Jesus loves us all if we’re in Christ, right? No question, the scripture teaches that. But in this passage, it says specifically, you see, Mary and Martha have sent word to Jesus, the one you love is sick. In other words, the message may be very truncated. It may be very brief, but basically Jesus knows what it means.

Lazarus is dying. Jesus, you gotta get here so you can keep him from dying. The text says Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, but Jesus stayed where he was for two more days. In other words, Jesus not only… he did love them, but he didn’t come. He did love them, but Lazarus died and stayed in the tomb four days.

Don’t play the, well, Jesus is gonna raise him card. That doesn’t count. Yes, he does raise him. But for four days, Mary and Martha do not understand how it is that Jesus didn’t get there in time to heal their brother. And I’m sorry, I don’t see how the perplexing love of Jesus jives with what I see as this distortion that somehow you’re always gonna seemingly get a hug from Jesus when things are hard. Because sometimes it doesn’t seem like that. Now the biblical truth is, as Paul says in Romans 8, nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

That is true. And yet, we as Christians, in our own experience, sometimes doubt it, and sometimes we’re like the psalmist in Psalm 13. Why? Why, O Lord, have you forgotten me? Now, the psalmist ends, as I preached that psalm this summer, singing about the grace of God, but in the midst of his trial, it sure seems like God has forgotten him.

I’ll Take the Crumbs

Think about the Syrophoenician woman in Matthew 15. She’s a pagan, but she calls Jesus the son of David. She’s a pagan that knows Jesus. She’s a pagan that’s a daughter of Abraham. She’s a pagan that’s already come to Christ. And Jesus has taken the apostles and they’ve gone to a little retirement village. It’s not actually a retirement village, but they went there to relax. And all of a sudden this crazy lady comes into the house and she’s screaming and she’s saying, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And do you know what Jesus does?

Because Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart, he ignores her. He ignores her and the apostles act like bouncers. Hey, Jesus, can we get rid of this chick? She’s making a lot of noise and she is a pagan, by the way. Well, Jesus eventually decides to go to her and talk to her.

What does he say? Sorry, I’m not here for the Gentiles. That’ll come… he doesn’t say this, but it’s implied. That’ll come after Pentecost. Sorry, you’re a pagan, can’t help you. He doesn’t say that. He says something worse. He says you don’t give the food to dogs. He seemingly insults her. You see how I’m wrestling now with Jesus gentle and mild? She’s not thinking right now, Jesus seems gentle and mild.

But she is the daughter of Abraham and she has genuine faith, and she says, yes, Lord, but even the dogs get the crumbs under the table. And she says, in all of her misery, in all of her struggle to get her daughter healed, she says to Jesus, who seems to be ignoring her, who seems to be insulting her, but she says to Jesus, I’ll take the crumbs. I’ll take the crumbs. Jesus is full of compassion, brothers and sisters. He’s full of compassion. But this side of glory, in our Christian experience, it doesn’t always seem that way. We have to wrestle sometimes very hard with what the Lord’s doing.

What Did I Do Wrong?

Ms. Brenda, when I got to see her a couple of weeks ago, right after her house got hit by a drunk, and it seems to have moved it in a major way. And Ms. Brenda, I think, responds like a lot of Christian people do. What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong? And I said, Ms. Brenda, you didn’t do anything wrong.

Now, I have to be careful, of course, I’m the pastor, but unless there’s some obvious sin, like 1 Corinthians, they’re getting sick and they’re dying in church. Well, but they are getting drunk at communion. So you can kind of connect the dots there. Paul has this thorn in the flesh, he doesn’t know why, but God reveals to him it’s to keep him from sinful pride. I know of no reason why Ms. Brenda is being chastised for some sin that she hasn’t confessed, so I think my job as a pastor is to reassure her. God is still sovereign, and she’s still a daughter of her heavenly Father, but he has taken her through a trial right now.

Now, brothers and sisters, we did not get to how we’re supposed to be meek and mild, how we’re to deal with one another humbly. But if the Lord tarries, we’ll do that next Lord’s Day. Let’s pray together.

Let’s Pray

Heavenly Father, we do thank you that Jesus our Savior is gentle and lowly in heart. He is full of compassion to those that turn to him in repentance and faith. And he is full of compassion to us who are his sons and daughters by grace. And yet, Father, sometimes that love of Jesus is a perplexing love.

And so, Father, we must do justice to that side of Jesus and the triune God’s character, lest we damage our own souls with a distortion of the teaching of Scripture. Remind us, Father, that nothing in all of creation separates us from the love of God in Christ. And yet, Father, we do struggle and wrestle with sin and the trials that you bring in our lives, and we have the assurance that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. But sometimes, Father, we don’t see how. Give us grace and give us strength and help us to hold tightly to the compassion of our Savior Jesus. We pray it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Meekness of Jesus

Fairfield Church, PCA