"The Best Pursuit"

“But blessed are those who trust in the LORD and have made the LORD their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8, NLT)

“Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” (Matthew 6:33, NLT)

“God blesses those who patiently endure testing and temptation. Afterward they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” (James 1:12, NLT)

In the middle of Jesus’ most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, he gives the crowd listening a list of blessings, which we call the beatitudes. In that list, Jesus flips worldly wisdom and counsel on its head with his directions on how we are to live: being poor in spirit, hungering for righteousness, being merciful and pure in heart. But he also says this statement—words that could change everything if we learned to live them out: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5, NIV).

Inherit the earth? What does that mean? Are meek people written into God’s final will with some kind of massive treasure in store? Yes, actually, but the treasure doesn’t have anything to do with money or power. There is a lot of rich biblical scholarship on the interpretation of that sentence about meekness, but what we know for sure is that if Jesus said it, he means for us to take it seriously. First, to be meek, and, second, to trust that we will be recipients of his promises in return.

John Piper summarizes meekness like this:

Meekness begins when we put our trust in God. Then, because we trust him, we commit our way to him. We roll onto him our anxieties, or frustrations, our plans, our relationships, our jobs, our health. And then we wait patiently for the Lord. We trust his timing and his power and his grace to work things out in the best way for his glory and for our good. . . .

Meekness begins with God and ends with God. And therefore whenever we see a person like that, we give God the glory.*

Meekness is the wild mustang—powerful and strong, capable of striking fear into its challengers but made gentle by the power of the Holy Spirit and the new heart offered to those who trust in Jesus by grace through faith. The mustang is always listening to the nudges of his leader. But being tamed and gentled doesn’t make a mustang lose his strong and bold nature; it simply brings it under loving submission. A truly meek person has been tamed and gentled into a life that looks different from everyone around them because their mission is no longer their own—it’s God’s. We are his partners, moving in the power of the Holy Spirit, part of a plan and purpose that is more than we could have ever asked for or imagined.

There is no better pursuit for your life than that.