Meekness

Matthew 5:5

Lord Jesus,

I find myself pondering what you must have meant when you commended meekness as the path to rule the world!  Not my world! My world is run by rude self-promotion, crass narcissism, profanity laced intimidation, and self-aggrandizement. Meekness is weakness!

Yet, your promise lingers, its truthful reminder hanging in the air: "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth."

Is there something that I am missing? Perhaps I lack adequate understanding of what You mean by meekness! The Greek rhetorician and philosopher understood meekness as a perfect balance between too much anger and not enough! He recognized that there is a time to refrain from anger, and a time when the absence of anger is apathy. There are incidents to which we should remain calm and relatively unresponsive. Kipling characterized these moments: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you."  There are moments of injustice, abuse, and wrong to which standing by silently would render me complicit with evil.

Meekness.  Selfless anger at just the right time.  Self-controlled.  Emotions ruled by the Holy Spirit.

William Barclay said that "No man can lead others until he has mastered himself; no man can serve others until he has subjected himself; no man can be in control of others until he has learned to control himself."

Meekness.  Lord, I have not always lived with the sustained quality of meekness.  It seems that I can no longer afford to do otherwise.  I know that this quality does not abide in me apart from You.  Fill me with Your Holy Spirit and the fruit of Your Spirit... meekness.

"O the bliss of the man who is always angry at the right time and never angry at the wrong time, who has every instinct, and impulse, and passion under control because he himself is God-controlled, who has the humility to realize his own ignorance and his own weakness, for such a man is a king among men" (William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, vol. 1, p. 93).

To this I aspire.  Fill me.  Empower me.  Alert me.

In Your Holy Name,
Amen