Full Transcript

Welcome. You’ve landed on Share the Word podcast, and we’re so glad you’re here. If this is your first podcast you’re listening to, may I suggest that you go back one episode and listen to podcast 208, because today Pastor Paul continues in Matthew chapter 5 with the third and fourth Beatitudes. Matthew chapter 5, part 2, more Beatitudes. Picking up right where we left off, the third principle of his kingdom Jesus shared in prologue to his Sermon on the Mount was, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. When you hear the word meek or meekness, what do you think of?

In many people’s minds, it’s a word synonymous with timidity, maybe even with being spineless, anything but powerful. But that’s a negative connotation meekness has somehow taken on over time. The word itself means gentleness, and in many translations of Matthew 5, verse 5, that’s the word the translators used. It was used, by the way, for instance, by those who spoke the language of the New Testament to describe an animal, like a horse, for example, that had been tamed and domesticated. An unbroken colt is pretty useless and can actually be dangerous, but once broken, it’s useful. Old timers used to use the word gentled.

Is the horse that has been gentled any the less powerful? No. Its power is just now under control and under the control of its owner, so it can now be useful. When Jesus appeared on our planet, although in the form of a man, there had never been nor ever will be a more powerful being among us. Yet he taught his followers, Take my yoke on you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. As I described last time, Jesus, in his willingness to humble himself and come into our world as a real human, willingly put himself under the control of God the Father.

His power was only to be used at God’s direction and to further God’s plan. You and I have power too. Not on par with Christ, obviously, but we still have power. We can use it to advance our own agenda, to manipulate people to get what we want out of life. We can be destructive, driven by pride, selfish instincts, like an unbroken animal. But meekness is placing my power under God’s control, just as Jesus did.

Learn this from me, he said. If we’ll do that, we’re not powerless. We’re more useful now, being submissive to a greater and wiser power, the power of God ruling from within us and directing us to do what’s good. This is what Jesus was talking about by meekness. Here are some questions I was challenged by once that I wrote down to check whether I was displaying this quality of Christ’s. When somebody disappoints me, am I gentle with them or harsh?

People will disappoint us in small ways and large. Do you have any slack to cut them? Can you accept people who have not attained your level of perfection yet? Thank God Jesus does. How about when someone serves you? Are you understanding or demanding with them?

This is a very down-to-earth application of meekness, like a waitress when your service is too slow or the kid at McDonald’s who seems to always get your order wrong every single time, the clerk at the DMV. Your Uber driver. When things don’t go as you expect they should go, are you understanding or demanding? How about when someone disagrees with you? Are you open to learn, or do you get defensive and argumentative? How about when somebody hurts you?

Are you ready to strike back or willing to forgive? Think about how Jesus controlled his strength, how he showed meekness, patience, humility, submission to his heavenly Father. Learn from me, he said. One of my favorite passages about this was written by Simon Peter, who, if you know who he was and who he became, was certainly affected as he watched Jesus display meekness time after time. He wrote in 1 Peter chapter 2, To this we are called, because Christ suffered for us, leaving example that we should follow in his steps. When they hurled their insults at him, he didn’t retaliate.

When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. That’s the meekness and gentleness of Christ. But how about the inherit the earth part? The meek will inherit the earth, right? What did he mean by that?

Well, in one sense, I’ve heard it explained, he could have meant the person who has self-control over his emotions, who can yield to God rather than react in the flesh, the person like that controls the situations they are in and are not controlled by them. If you have that kind of meekness, you’re not a victim. You control your responses and leave the outcomes to God. There’s definitely some truth in that. But frankly, it’s a little too psychological for me. I tend to take the Bible more literally.

I believe Jesus is talking about his ultimate future kingdom primarily. The word inherit here is in a future tense. What kind of people will be there and what kind of people will be first there? The poor in spirit, those who admit their spiritual neediness and cry out for God’s grace, those who mourn the awfulness of their sin, especially their own sin, and find forgiveness, and the meek, those who yield their personal rights to God and entrust themselves to Him and leave the outcomes to Him. These are all attributes of citizens in Jesus’ kingdom, those who God is happy with. The fourth beatitude, Matthew recorded the outset of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.

Some people do not believe this, but the way I understand things, God has created people with a spiritual appetite. We have within us a hunger and thirst for something more than just the physical things that satisfy animals. Just as God has given us physical appetites that keep us foraging for food and drink to keep alive, He has also put within us spiritual appetites that I believe keep us somewhat discontent in this world and draw us toward Him and the real meaning of life. There’s something inside of us gnawing like hunger for something more. When people feel and even often confess, My life just doesn’t seem satisfying. I feel so bored.

I’m so restless. Things are even going pretty well, but still, I feel like something’s missing. Think what they are really saying is, I’m spiritually hungry and thirsty. The messages from the world keep insisting that that discontent can be satisfied with the right relationship, or with more pleasure, or more wealth, or meeting some milestone in your business or career, or some other thing that we imagine will fill the void. But the God who made us repeatedly tells us differently. For example, if you think it’s about money, the Bible says, Whoever loves money will never have enough of it.

If you think it’s about wanton pleasures, the Bible says, The pleasures of sin last only for a short time. You imagine it’s reaching some goal you associate with success. If you can get there, you will be satisfied. The Bible says, Just as death and destruction are never satisfied, so human desires are never satisfied. The things you spend your life chasing are a mirage. Even if you catch up to them, they won’t satisfy you very long.

You may have heard one of C. S. Lewis’s more famous observations. Christianity says that creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. He was talking about the design God built into the world. A baby feels hunger, he went on.

Well, there’s such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim. Well, there’s such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desires. Well, there are ways to satisfy those. But if we find in ourselves, he said, a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

Jesus in the fourth beatitude says that what will satisfy us is righteousness. Hunger and thirst for that. What is righteousness, and how do we hunger and thirst for it? You know, we spent a lot of time when we were in Romans talking about righteousness. If you’ve been listening for a while, and if you’d like to read up on that big idea, episode 93 would be a good one. It’s called Good News, Bad News, and it’ll fill you all in on righteousness.

I defined it there as perfectly conformed with God’s character. If you’ve been with us a while, I’m sure you also understand by now that there is no one who, in and of themselves, is righteous before God, perfectly conformed to His character. There’s no one who is righteous, not even one, is how Romans chapter 3 puts it. We’re all infected with sin. God’s character, on the other hand, is holy and righteous, perfect. None of us comes anywhere close to measuring up to it.

The writer Max Lucado clarifies this in one of his books like this: All of us occasionally do what is right. A few predominantly do what is right. But do any of us always do what is right? Some might object to me, Max, I’m not perfect, but I’m better than most folks. I’ve led a good life. I don’t break the rules.

I help people. I like people. Compared to others, I think I could say I’m a righteous person. I used to try something like that on my mom, he wrote. She’d tell me that my room wasn’t clean, and I’d tell her, You should see my brother’s room. His is way messier than mine.

But that never worked. She walked me down the hall to her room, and when it came to tidy rooms, my mom was righteous. Her closet was just right. Her bed was just right. Her bathroom was just right. When she’d show me her room, she’d say, This is what I mean by clean, Max, and it was obvious that, compared to hers, my room was, well, falling short in a lot of ways.

God does the same. He points to Himself and says, This is what I mean by righteousness. If we’re honest, we must admit we fall short in many, many ways. In fact, a person who feels that they are righteous in and of themselves is light years away from the kingdom of God. The first step toward righteousness is to realize we don’t have it, to confess how far short we fall of it. But there is good news for those of us who will own up to that.

The good news is we can have a righteousness that is not our own. We can have a real righteousness that is not ours. The Bible uses the word imputed in Romans chapter 4, or your translation might say credited. It’s an accounting term and means we can have righteousness credited to us that we have never earned. Using the Old Testament figure Abraham as example, the apostle Paul wrote in Romans chapter 4, Abraham was persuaded that God had power to do what He had promised. That’s why it was accredited to him as righteousness.

The words, it was accredited to him, were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness, for us who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. So, earned righteousness, we can have that credited to us? Jesus Christ promises that through His sinless life and His sacrificial death on the cross, when we put our faith in Him. Jesus came offering Himself as our righteousness, and He did so often and in these very terms of hungering and thirsting, so that people could understand. He boldly proclaimed, I’m the bread of life, or I’m the water of life. I’m the river of life.

He who comes to Me will never go hungry. The one who believes in Me will have his thirst quenched. Jesus used words like come, believe, eat, drink. The point is that appetites are not filled until we do something about it. You can be hungry, your stomach growling, and you can stay hungry unless you will get up and get to some food, put it in your mouth, chew it up, and swallow it. Just like that, Jesus challenged people to take action regarding what he came to offer.

When you’re physically hungry, you eat food. When you’re spiritually hungry, Jesus said, you need to come to me, believe in me, drink the water of life, eat the bread of life I’m offering you. Believing into Jesus and what he did to make us righteous in God’s eyes, that’s how we find the satisfaction of forgiveness of sin and reconciliation to God. That’s the gospel’s offer, and I hope every one of you listening has taken up God on it. It’s the only way to put yourself in the place of his favor, the only way to become a citizen of his kingdom. But even for those of us who have hungered and thirsted and found the righteousness of faith in Christ, we still have, maybe now more in fact than ever, the inner desire to see the actual righteousness of God come and fix this world, see its wrongs righted, see what’s sick in it healed, what’s broken restored.

The more closely we follow Christ and the more attuned we become to God’s heart, the more we’ll hunger and thirst for that righteousness to not only fill our lives but flood our world. And Jesus was assuring his followers that all that longing, that deep-seated desire, will in fact completely be satisfied. That’s what his future kingdom will be all about, the literal kingdom of God that he establishes at his second coming. Many messianic prophecies tell about that. For example, Jeremiah chapter 23, verses 5 and 6: The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up from David a righteous branch, a king who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. And this is the name by which he will be called: the Lord our righteousness.

That’s Jesus, the king Matthew followed and wants us to accept and follow too. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, he promised. You will be satisfied. Let’s squeeze in Beatitude number five, quoted at verse 7, and I’ll try to be like the fast talker at the end of commercials. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. There were two dominant power structures that dominated Israel when Jesus lived there: the religious culture of the Pharisees and the military culture of the Roman occupiers.

And neither one of them prized mercy at all. The kind of religion the Pharisees practiced was all about self-righteousness, and they readily condemned others who didn’t live up to their standards. These were the guys that could drag a woman caught in adultery before Jesus and demand she be stoned, who could stand in the temple praying aloud, I thank God I’m not like that sinner over there. People who heard this sermon from Jesus that day certainly did not know anything about mercy from those religious leaders. And how much more unlikely were they to see it demonstrated by the hated Romans who occupied their country? One of the criticisms of the movie The Passion of the Christ was that many thought it was too brutal.

But the Romans were brutal. They glorified discipline, order, power, not mercy. They ruled by terrorizing the peoples they occupied. Their philosophers taught that mercy was a disease of the soul, character weakness, not a virtue. So, so mercy was a thing those Jesus was addressing on the Mount that day saw a precious little of. And even though that was the case all around them, he was highlighting that mercy would mark those in his kingdom when he said, Blessed are the merciful.

And I’m sure that struck his hearers as surprising. One reason Jesus came into our world was to show us what God is really like. The New Testament says he was the exact representation of God’s nature. Psalm 145 says, The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and great in loving kindness. Think about how many times on the pages of the Gospels already we have seen Jesus showing that, and not just to desperate people he healed, like the lepers or the blind Bartimaeus who kept calling out in Jericho, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. He also responded in mercy to those others looked down on, like that immoral woman he met at the well outside Sychar, Samaria, or the little Roman collaborator Zacchaeus who collected taxes for Israel’s enemies in Jericho.

Matthew, as one of Jesus’ closest disciples, witnessed this time and again. In fact, he himself had experienced that kind of mercy from Jesus. Remember, he ran the customs office collecting taxes for the Romans in Capernaum when Jesus first met him. Working for those oppressing your nation, that took a special kind of bad character. But mercy, that’s compassion in action. Jesus even washed Judas’s feet.

He prayed for those who crucified him. He looked beyond and beneath the things that put others off. He felt people’s real pains and regarded their worth to God. Our human nature, our fallen sin nature, urges us to do evil to those who mistreat us. When people hurt us, find a way to get even, gossip about them, strike back at them in some way. Be sure to let them know you will not take it.

But Jesus demonstrated the exact opposite. What does that look like in the real world? Like tomorrow when you go to work, you know the guy there that’s constantly criticizing you, trying to get under your skin, the big jerk. Mercy means doing good to that guy. How would it be if every time he criticized you, you complimented him? If you look for ways to go out of your way to help him.

You go to school, and those kids who are there who are always putting you down, maybe putting you down because you’re a Christian. Every time they act that way, how about if you think of ways to build them up, to say something or do something nice for them? That would blow their minds. And that’s what Jesus shows us. That’s what being merciful is like. The best way to eliminate an enemy is to turn him into a friend.

And the best way for us to show people what God is really like is to actually act like Jesus. I remember visiting a man I admired in the hospital once who was deathly ill. His name was Gary Curran. He was a young guy at the time, really only in his late 30s, if I remember right, but he had a rare form of meningitis. The reason I admired Gary was because he was the most merciful and gracious person I had ever met. He had started a funeral home business in our community, and soon, just because of the kind of person he was, word spread and everybody who was hurting, grieving, going through a loss, wanted to be ministered to by Gary.

And for him, that’s how he saw his work, as a ministry. The day I saw him, his brain was severely swollen. He was burning up with fever. I was not sure he even knew I was there in the room, or could even hear what I was saying. But I told him, Gary, I heard you were really sick, and I just wanted to come by and pray with you and thank you for being the kind of person that you are. He didn’t seem conscious, but I took his hand, and as I was beginning to pray over him, I heard him, I think, say, It comes full circle.

I didn’t know whether he was responding to me actually or was in delirium, honestly. But later, as I thought about it, I realized, I think he meant that he had experienced what Jesus promised: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. He had shown mercy to others because, as one forgiven by God as a follower of Christ, he realized God had shown so much mercy to him. And as he extended mercy to others, God kept extending more and more to him. That’s exactly what Jesus promised. If we realize how desperately we need God to be merciful to us, then we should, like Jesus, like Gary, be merciful to those who others look down on or don’t have time for, to those who are weak and needy, to those who have even messed up their lives by bad choices they’ve made, or even those who have hurt and offended us.

It comes full circle. Blessed are those who are merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. As we continue bringing you the big idea of each chapter of the New Testament, Pastor Paul, in light of the importance of this chapter, has chosen to go more in depth and has split up the chapter into separate parts. I suggest that you make sure that you listen to all of the parts in chapter five in order to get the fullness of all the wonderful insights and teachings that Pastor Paul has put into this lesson.

If you have any questions or comments, please email us at info at sharetheword dot org. And remember to visit us at sharetheword dot org for more content and information. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.