Matthew 5:5 - June 16, 2024

Mount Zion Community Church

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And as we get started this week we're gonna look at our third beatitude in Matthew.

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We're in Matthew chapter 5 verse 5 but today I want to start by sharing a story with you and this story is not my story in fact

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I got this story secondhand I got it from someone else so maybe it's even apocryphal I don't know but I do trust the person who gave it to me and some of you will probably recognize the story that I'm about to tell you you might even know exactly who

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I'm talking about so maybe this will be interesting to you but once upon a time there was a man this man recognized the need for Jesus in a certain town in a certain in a certain part of the country and being a man of God he decided to take it upon himself to answer what

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I can only assume it was what he believed to be the call of God on his life the call of God to bring

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Jesus to the people that he saw so what he did was he found a location and he began to build a church and when

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I say he began to build a church I don't mean he just went to where a church was and started preaching and started inviting people no he physically started building the building itself now

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I don't recall exactly whether he finished building it or not or started holding services or whatever but but that's not what's what's terribly important to the story what is important to the story is that this man was seen as something of an outsider to the community where he started building this church where he wanted to bring the

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Word of God and a lot of times in small towns you may know people don't always care for outsiders they don't always care for people who come in and try to you know establish themselves in their town so the people burn the building down to the ground now what

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I want you to do this morning is put yourself in this man's shoes you felt like you were called of God to come to a certain community to bring the

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Word of God to them and you start building your church and in response these folks destroy it essentially telling you that you're not welcome here now what would you do just just think for a second about what your gut response would be to something like that like I have a few ideas of how

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I would probably respond and I'm not particularly proud of any of them and and I can imagine what quite a few of you are probably thinking as well but this man according to the story

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I was told he did something completely unexpected in response to this building being burned down he didn't say a word he didn't do anything except for go out and get some more materials and start rebuilding the church now

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I want you to keep that story in the back of your mind and again I know that some of you at this point probably know exactly what it is that I'm talking about and you probably know the story way better than I do but but this story illustrates the principle that we're talking about today and in fact it does a really good job illustrating a lot of the principles that we've been talking about so far in the

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Beatitudes because again the Beatitudes this part of the Sermon on the

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Mount they're not they're not trivia or they're not suggestions to us they're not just something that might be a good idea for us in the way that we live our lives no what the

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Beatitudes are our behaviors that are outgrowths of a life that are truly dedicated to Christ they're outgrowths of a soul that's truly been transformed by the

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Holy Spirit and as we said before they're not behaviors that we're allowed to just put off till some unknown time in the future when when we've been redeemed when we're actually part of the the return of the kingdom of God we're all glorified no the

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Beatitudes they're for us here and now they're for you and they're for me and the way that we live our lives and we don't always like this and we don't always agree with it because it means that we have to do something that none of us really want to do and it means that we have to submit ourselves to Jesus Christ and we have to submit ourselves to Jesus as the

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Lord of our lives and and we all we all want to claim

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Jesus as our Savior right because that's awesome that's great that's amazing but it's also easy it's easy to say that Jesus is our

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Savior but it's a lot harder to swallow and it's a lot harder to understand that he's also

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Lord of our lives and everything that that means and if he's

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Lord that means that we are to be slaves to Christ we're to be slaves to the will of Christ slaves to the will of God the

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Father and I use the word slave and I repeated it over and over because it's significant but in our culture the word slave it just has it has so many negative connotations that you know a lot of us just sort of cringe when we hear it we cringe when we hear somebody say it we have this visceral reaction but the truth is there's not a better word that describes the depth of our submission or the depth of the submission that's required in our lives to the will of God but that's actually a good thing and it's a good thing because Jesus is the only master whose will is entirely for your good there's nothing bad that comes from you submitting your life entirely to what we read in Scripture or what we see that Jesus has for us and in 1st

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Timothy 2 for reminds us this it says that God desires all men to be saved and all to come to the full knowledge of truth and I keep reminding us this because this really is what the

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Beatitudes are about and this is what the Sermon on the Mount is about I want to want you to listen to these words from Sinclair Ferguson about the

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Sermon on the Mount he says living out the Sermon on the Mount can never be divorced from a right relationship to Jesus Christ that is what is so unique about this sermon we can be helped through sermons given by preachers we do not know and never meet but that is not the case with this preacher his sermon this teaching will change us only when we submit to the sovereign and gracious reign of the one who preaches it for the

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Sermon on the Mount enshrines in its teaching the authority and the lordship of Jesus himself and he also says this as you turn to the

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Sermon on the Mount you ought to ask yourself if you have settled these issues in your own life and you ought to pray that through hearing

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Christ's voice in the sermon you will grow in settled obedience to whatever he says to you anyway this is where we find ourselves today as we consider

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Matthew 5 5 when the LSB this verse says blessed are the lowly for they shall inherit the earth and I'm sure a lot of us are more accustomed to seeing this translated as the word meek rather than lowly because that's the vast majority of them say blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth and I'm honestly not a hundred percent sure the reason for this particular translation but I will say that this beatitude is very much calling back to Psalm 37 11 that was one of the verses that we read as our call to worship just as a reminder

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Psalm 37 11 says but the lowly will inherit the land and will delight themselves in abundant peace so maybe we use the term lowly to align with the

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Old Testament verses because after all these Old Testament verses are what Jesus would have been teaching from these are the things that he would have been quoting directly to the people that he was preaching to but however you want to translate it this is another concept that would have been completely radical and completely shocking to the people that were hearing it because remember the people that were listening to the

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Sermon on the Mount and just like we're reading it 2 ,000 years later they've just heard some other things that are challenging they've just heard a couple of other concepts that are fairly difficult to rationalize based on their ideas of what it meant to be religious and based on our ideas of what it means to be a

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Christian remember what they've been told the first thing they've been told is that we have to be poor in spirit that means we have to we have to be humbled by the recognition of our spiritual status and what it is before God which is very low and then they were told that we have to be in a state of mourning over what we just realized is our spiritual state before God and we have to be in a state of mourning over those sins that we've just learned that we're committing all the time and not only that now we and they have been told that we must be lowly or we must be meek in order to be blessed because it's the lowly or the meek that will inherit the earth and the thing that's funny for us is that you know we're taking a week or even more between each one of these phrases we have all this time to process what it means we're dissecting it and we're analyzing it and just you know spending 45 minutes to an hour on it but the people that are listening to Jesus as he's preaching they're getting these things just one after another they're just getting hit with one shocking statement after another imagine showing up coming to church to hear a prominent preacher a visiting preacher you're expecting to hear things and learn things from him but then all of a sudden he starts telling you stuff that's just completely contradictory to everything that you think completely contradictory to everything that you've been taught but not only that what he's telling you is completely contradictory to what you see in the lives of the religious leaders that you're attending services with so the first two phrases are disorienting but the third one this one's basically just completely outrageous and it's really not hard to understand particularly if we move past just a surface level understanding of what's being said here because when we think of leaders and we think of people who are in charge and we think of people who we want to take over the earth you probably have an image in mind of who that person is you know not just not just the physical characteristics but you probably have an image in mind of the personality that goes along with that again we think of politicians we think of people that that just seem important and that person is probably bold and that person is probably assertive maybe they're even aggressive it's somebody who's not gonna back down from a challenge you know it's that sort of type -a person the person who knows what they want who's not gonna stop until they get it the person who is also not gonna let anybody else get in their way before they get it we think of terms like survival of the fittest and only the strong survive that's the type of person that we're thinking about because this is how we're culturally conditioned to think about these kind of things and as much as this is the case for us now it was perhaps even more so for the

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Jewish believers that would have been in Jesus's audience at the time because as we've discussed before the

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Jewish believers in these days even even despite all the differences in the different types of Jews the

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Pharisees the Sadducees and some of the other ones they believed different things but they were all anticipating a

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Messiah and not only that they were anticipating a Messiah who was gonna come as a military leader a

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Messiah who was gonna come as a conqueror maybe even a political hero who was gonna use supernatural powers to overthrow the government because one thing that we remember is the

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Roman government was was pretty oppressive I mean they protected people but at the same time there was oppressive taxation you know they were physically afraid of the soldiers there so the

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Jews were picturing somebody who was gonna come and crush the government and restore

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Israel so they expected the same things that we expect of a natural leader but they probably expected these things on even a grander scale but whatever it was that they pictured what they did not picture was a

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Messiah who was and also talked about being meek or who talked about being lowly or who was gentle and humble in heart like Jesus says in Matthew 11 29

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John MacArthur says the Jews understood military power and miracle power they even understood the power of compromise unpopular as it was but they did not understand the power of meekness so as we as we roll into this beatitude this teaching of the person that they thought was gonna be the

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Messiah this teaching of the person that they thought was gonna be their Savior was not only shocking but it's confusing as well but we have to acknowledge that there were also clues there were references in their scriptures about the nature of this person particularly in Isaiah Isaiah 52 verses 2 through 53 excuse me verses 2 through 3 describe the suffering servant and it doesn't exactly paint the picture that we have in our minds or that they had in their minds those verses say this and again this is absolutely about Jesus it says for he grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of parts ground he has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him he was despised and for the sake of men a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and like one from whom men hide their face he was despised and we did not esteem him so this is this is the description or part of the description of the

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Prophet Isaiah regarding Jesus so back to this idea of lowliness or back to this idea of meekness and I'll probably just use both of those words but what does it mean to be lowly or meek

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I've got three three different definitions that I found and they all are a little bit different and they all have helpful helpful context and so I'm gonna read them all this is the first one this author said meekness is not weakness and that's a phrase that came up over and over in my reading meekness is not weakness but meekness does not use its power for its own defense or selfish purposes meekness is power completely surrendered to God's control that's important too it would be looking at that in a minute another one says that meekness or lowliness is submissiveness under provocation it's the willingness to suffer rather than to inflict injury the meek person leaves everything in the hand of him who loves and cares and then finally one more for you meekness is essentially a true view of oneself expressing itself in attitude and conduct with respect to others to be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves because we see there is nothing worth defending and why would that be nothing worth defending and what we really stop to reflect on on this in light of what we've already seen in the other

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B attitudes is how they're all just tying together it starts like we just said a minute ago with the the the true recognition of your own poverty of spirit in the face of the holiness of God and when we recognize this we realize the nature of our sin we realize the nature of our offense to God which causes us to mourn in that position of mourning though it ultimately leads to comfort as as we talked about last week makes us realize that ultimately before God apart from Jesus that we have nothing of true eternal worth and it's really hard to try to assert yourself over someone else when you're in that position when you have that true understanding and this reminded me of a quote that Charles Spurgeon said that's in line with this idea of being lowly he said this brother if a man thinks ill of you do not be angry with him for you are far worse than he thinks you to be a sense of electing love will render you base in your own sight

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I've always loved that quote don't be mad when somebody thinks you're bad because you're worse than they even know that you are and if they were to find out truly what was in your heart they would really think you're bad not that they're in any position to judge anyway but this is the recognition of the truth of your soul before God and like I said it makes it hard to put yourself in front of somebody else it makes you hard it makes it hard to elevate yourself over someone but remember that very first line in the first definition we can't forget that meekness is not weakness being lowly does not stop somebody from asserting themselves for what is truly right but remember there's only one thing that's truly right and it's not your opinion and it's not your reputation how do we figure out exactly how to balance this well obviously we're gonna look at Scripture because Scripture provides us with a variety of examples that we can look to the first one we're gonna look at today just in general is the example of Moses so numbers 12 3 tells us this it says now the man

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Moses was very humble more than any man who was on the face of the earth and of course that's fine to say and it's in Scripture so we know that it's true but I want to show you some specific examples of what this looks like in practice and specific examples of how this played out in the life of Moses now the first is how

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Moses decided to forego the comforts of life as Pharaoh's daughter to rejoin his people the

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Israelites because if you remember the story of Moses when they were killing all the male children his mother dropped him in a basket and he floated down the river and Pharaoh's daughter picked him up and then

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Moses though mother was able to raise him but he would have he would have been able to just continue a life in luxury as royalty with Pharaoh but when he saw the way his people were being treated by the

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Egyptians he killed one and then he went off in hiding and he went back to live with his own people so this is again this is

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Moses giving up everything giving up all worldly comforts and riches things that we would find desirable in order to follow

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God and that was before he was even called by God so the second thing that we see in the life of Moses is his response to the complaining of the

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Israelites once he became their leader none of us like it when people complain and none of us like it when we're the ones that have to make decisions and people complain about that and Moses was in such a lofty position but his response to the complaining of his people was to pray it wasn't to just sort of snap back at them for example in Exodus 15 24 through 25 we see this so the people grumbled at Moses saying what shall we drink then he cried out to Yahweh this is him praying and Yahweh showed him a tree and he threw it into the waters and the waters became sweet and keep in mind this was after he had led them through the

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Red Sea this is after he had saved them from the Egyptians when God parted the

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Red Sea and they were able to all walk through and they're still complaining about stuff when they say well what are we gonna drink

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I'm like I don't know bring your own water right Moses praise to God about this you know and these people they complained a lot

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Exodus 16 they complained about not having food God delivered the manna and birds and then another verse that struck me on this topic is

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Exodus 18 8 Moses was talking to his father -in -law Jethro and Moses recounted to his father -in -law all that Yahweh had done to Pharaoh and to the

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Egyptians for Israel's sake all the hardship that had befallen them in the journey and how

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Yahweh had delivered them and that struck me as really interesting because it was

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Moses despite being the leader of these people giving all the glory to God for what had happened giving all the glory to God for everything that had been accomplished he could have taken credit for a lot of this stuff but he acknowledged that it was all for God's glory and on that note

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Moses would defend God but he would not defend himself so again we're looking at lowliness and what it means to be lowly but not to be weak so when

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God called Moses Moses felt completely inadequate to the task and he pleaded with God he said in Exodus 3 11 who am

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I that I should go to Pharaoh but Moses said to God who am

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I that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt and then Exodus 4 10 is similar then

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Moses said to Yahweh please Lord I have never been a man of words neither recently nor in times past nor since you have spoken to your slave for I am one with a hard mouth and a hard tongue so he wouldn't he would never stand up for himself even with God asking him to do these things his heart was humble and he recognized his unworthiness to the point that he's pleading to God that he would not do these things but more on the topic of meekness not being weakness even though he would beg and plead to not be in that kind of position of leadership he would be bold for God and the story of the golden calf is a perfect example of that we find that in Exodus 32 and I want to read verses 15 through 29

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Moses had just been speaking with God on the mountain and God told him that something was going on down there he had left

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Aaron in charge and this is what happened then Moses turned and went down from the mountain and the two tablets of the testimony were in his hand tablets which were written on both sides they were written on one side and the other now the tablets were the work of God and the writing was the writing of God engraved on the tablets then

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Joshua heard the sound of the people as they shouted and he said to Moses there is a sound of war in the camp but he said it is not the sound of the cry of triumph nor is it the sound of the cry of defeat but the sound of singing

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I hear now it happened as soon as Moses came near the camp that he saw the calf and the dancing and Moses's anger burned and I should say

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I didn't read this part this is where Aaron collected gold from all the people and then he melted it down and they turned it into the figure of a calf and then they started worshiping it despite the fact that God had brought them from through all these things and all these places the second

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Moses leaves they're worshiping a golden idol now as it happened that as soon as Moses came near the camp that he saw the calf and the dancing and Moses his anger burned and he threw the tablets from his hand and shattered him at the foot of the mountain then he took the calf with it which they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it over the surface of the water and made the sons of Israel to drink it like this is this is a guy who just said no

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God I can't lead people God I can't speak to people I can't talk to Pharaoh he got so mad that these people were dishonoring

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God that he ground the calf I put it in water and he made him drink it then Moses said to Aaron what did this people do to you that you have brought such great sin upon them and Aaron said do not let the anger of my

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Lord burn you know the people yourself that they are prone to evil indeed they said to me make gods for us who will go before us for this

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Moses this man who brought us up from the land of Egypt we do not know what has become of him because he was gone for 40 days and I said to them whoever has any gold let them tear it off so they gave it to me and I threw it in the fire and out came this calf now

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Moses saw that the people were out of control for Aaron had let them get out of control to be a derision among their enemies so Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said whoever is for Yahweh come to me and all the sons of Levi gathered together for him so again we're talking about meekness that's not weakness because this next part is crazy and he said to them thus says

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Yahweh the God of Israel every man among you put his sword upon his thigh and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp and kill every man his brother and every man his friend and every man his neighbor so the sons of Levi did according to the words of Moses and about 3 ,000 men of the people fell that day then

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Moses said be ordained today to Yahweh for every man has been against his son and against his brother in order that he may bestow a blessing upon you today so when it mattered

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Moses still meek would stand up and defend the holiness and defend the righteousness of God and there's plenty of other examples of meekness from great people in the

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Bible but only one man showed us what it means to be perfectly lowly and obviously that's

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Jesus in the case of Jesus we'll start with the example of boldness we're probably all familiar with the story of Jesus cleansing the temple that's in Matthew 21 so let's just take a quick look at that I want to read a couple of those verses to you this is verses 12 and 13 and Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves and he said to them it is written my house shall be called a house of prayer but you are making it a robber's den a lot of people like to use this example of Jesus flipping over tables in the temple as to why they should be able to go out and insult or abuse or do whatever to people that they disagree with and that's not that's not what's going on here you know

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Jesus wasn't doing this for himself he wasn't doing this for his own purposes or glory but he was doing this to stand up for the purity of the temple and to stand up for you know where the worship of God was happening because the religious leaders were corrupting this so just like Moses did the things he did for the glory of God that's why

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Jesus in his anger was overturning tables at the temple and driving people out we also know that on multiple occasions

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Jesus was questioned by religious leaders or by politicians and he never felt the need to defend himself so this is this is again where meekness meekness comes in this is

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John 18 verses 19 through 23 the high priest then questioned

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Jesus about his disciples and about his teaching and Jesus answered him I have spoken openly to the world

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I always taught in synagogues and in the temple where all the Jews come together and I spoke nothing in secret why do you question me question those who have heard what

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I spoke to them behold they know what I said and when he had said this one of the officers standing nearby gave

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Jesus a slap saying is that the way you answer the high priest and Jesus answered him if I have spoken wrongly bear witness of the wrong but if rightly why do you strike me and and this this one scene this one example it is is a perfect example of lowliness it's a perfect example of meekness because Jesus is not putting up some kind of grand defense of himself to try to restore his reputation or try to get out of something that's going on Jesus is subverting himself to the will of God because we all know what happened not too long after that and we know that Jesus could have gotten out of that situation at all but again he's acting according to the will of God he's not acting out of self -preservation he's not acting out of a desire to gain credit for what he deserves in fact it's exactly the opposite Philippians 2 8 tells us this it says being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death even death on a cross and it was in that ultimate sacrifice this is where Jesus laid down his life for you

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Jesus laid down his life for me because it was the will of the father that he would do so but he didn't do this out of weakness he didn't do this because God the father is browbeating him into it and he kind of didn't really want to do it but he was afraid to say anything about it he did it out of the strength of his meekness and again

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I hope I hope that I'm connecting these dots well enough that that meekness is complete submission to God but it doesn't mean that people walk all over you in whatever way they want to that's not meekness either so what does lowliness or meekness look like in our lives today that's the thing that I want to spend the rest of our time talking about so as we as we think about these scriptural examples we think about what we've seen in the story of Moses and Jesus and you could find many other examples there's two ways that we can look at meekness the first way is meekness towards God and the second way is meekness towards others now first we'll look at lowliness towards God and again this is what what we've been saying is submission to God's will meekness toward God lowliness toward God comes along with acknowledging that Jesus is the

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Lord of our lives but not only the acknowledgement but it comes through the living in ways that align with his will and a lot of times this is in conflict with conflict with our own preferences or it's in conflict with our comfort zone and a lot of times it's very much in conflict with our fleshly desires it's in conflict with the things that we want to do but know that that we shouldn't and there has to be an acceptance that God knows best even when it doesn't seem that way to us even when we don't quite understand why that is and we see this spirit in the life of Samuel and and in the life of Eli actually this is who is saying this when

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Samuel was called by God Eli asked Samuel to tell him everything that had happened and first Samuel 318 after Samuel had told

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Eli this Eli says it is Yahweh let him do what seems good in his eyes so the first the first way that we're meek towards God or that we're lowly before God is when we accept his will and we live according to his will now the second way that we can be meek or lowly towards God is flexibleness to God's Word but not with God's Word and this is what we've been talking about with the

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Beatitudes this is why I stand up here every week and and you're probably getting tired of me saying that this might be difficult this beatitude the behavior that this requires might not be something that you want to do but a lowly spirit takes

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God's Word and conforms itself to that Word it doesn't try to take the

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Word and bend it and shape it you know take take the Bible and sort of like work it in there that way no this

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Word is a firm foundation for our lives and that means that we shape our lives according to what the

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Word says we don't try to insist on ways to conform

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God's Word to what we want it to be because ultimately what that is it's not lowliness it's not humility it's pride and like we said last week pride has no place in the

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Christians life so lowliness towards God it can be challenging but most of us would say that that's something we could do it's easier because it's

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God but the second category is a lot harder and that's lowliness toward others again it's easier to be meek before God it's easier to be lowly before God it's much easier than it is to be lowly before someone else like your spouse or your friends or your family or your co -workers because whether we want to admit it or not pretty much all of us like to keep score and we do it out of self -preservation we do it to make sure that we don't get taken advantage of but even more so we do it to make sure that we get everything that we think we deserve everything that we think other people owe to us we desperately want the honor or the love or the respect or the submission that we think we should be getting from other people we also have this desire to protect our reputation when someone insults us we want to make sure that we get our response out there we want to make sure that we present our case we want to make sure that if someone insults us or says something bad about us that everybody knows how wrong they are and we want to insult those people back too because it might have hurt us and in turn we want to hurt them just as much as they hurt us and guess what this is exactly what we do to our family members as well this is what we do to the people there's not just people out in the world this is people that are closest to us

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I've done it I've been guilty of this absolutely and this is not what the beatitude says this is not meekness and this is not lowliness towards others

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Thomas Watson said meekness is a grace whereby we are enabled by the

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Spirit of God to moderate our passion and again here we go with the countercultural type of concepts but lowliness lowliness involves several things and this won't be an exhaustive list but it's a few of them but lowliness involves bearing the insults and injuries of others lowliness or meekness requires us to endure those things for the sake of our witness to God lowliness or meekness does not allow us to quickly respond in anger or revenge

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Ecclesiastes 7 9 says do not be eager in your spirit to be vexed for vexation rests in the bosom of fools and Romans 12 19 says never taking your own revenge beloved instead leave room for the wrath of God for it is written vengeance is mine

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I will repay says the Lord so being meek and being lowly is completely counter to taking revenge on someone else for something that they've done or for something that they've said it's it's counter to having to even the score lowliness also involves the decision not to speak poorly of others we had this verse up on our wall for a long time and I think it's really a great one it's

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Ephesians 429 which says let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth but only such a word as is good for building up what is needed so that it will give grace to those who hear there's also verses in James about taming the tongue so much damage can be done with the tongue and lowliness and meekness is completely in contrast to that sort of attitude or that sort of lifestyle lowliness also involves forgiveness and this one should be obvious as well and it should be obvious why but just in case

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Ephesians 432 says instead be kind to one another tender -hearted graciously forgiving each other just as God and Christ also has graciously forgiven you so forgiveness is important for all of us and again we go back to the other

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Beatitudes that we've read and if you think this is gonna change it's really not they're just all gonna start stacking on top of each other and we're gonna have to keep going back and look at how they tie in but I want to get across the message if I haven't already that understanding your position before God that is only made right through Jesus should help you see that you don't deserve anything from other people and again it's hard for me to write

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I'm not just telling you this stuff to lecture you these things are so important for each and every one of us now thankfully for some of you this is not a situation where we're gonna spend one week talking about the first half in one week talking about the second half this time because the second half of the

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Beatitude is for they shall inherit the earth and honestly I think that's pretty self -explanatory comfort wasn't quite as self -explanatory which is why we did what we did but I think this one's pretty straightforward

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I just do want to say as a point of clarity that inheriting the earth is not necessarily a promise of earthly riches and wealth it's not a promise of stuff we have to be careful when we read these things and be aware of when we're trying to make

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God work things out the way we expect them to work out so you know we can't

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I can't come to you next week and be like I was really meek before Amy last week

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I should get stuff it just it just doesn't work that way we know that God is coming back to claim what is his which is everything and I want to read to you

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Psalm 149 it's just so we get a picture of what exactly this means

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Psalm 149 says praise YAH sing to Yahweh a new song his praise in the assembly of the

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Holy Ones let Israel be glad in his maker let the sons of Zion rejoice in their king let them praise his name with dancing with tambourine and lyre let them sing praises to him for Yahweh takes pleasure in his people he will beautify the afflicted ones with salvation let the

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Holy Ones exult in glory let them sing for joy on their beds let the exaltations of God be in their throats and a two -edged sword in their hand to execute vengeance on the nation's and punishments on the people's to bind their kings with chains and their honored men with fetters of iron to execute on them the judgment written this is the majesty of all his

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Holy Ones praise YAH and that goes back to the idea that we read in Romans 12 19 a minute ago where revenge is

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God's revenge is not ours we are not righteous enough to ever enact judgment on anyone and we don't know who that kind of judgment will be enacted on so again that's that's never our place but if we are doing what is right and righteous before God then that gives us a hope for the future it also gives us comfort now because as Christians I think that we're able to appreciate a lot of what is the glory of God in ways that other people can't but again it gives us hope for the future as well and just like the other

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Beatitudes there's no there's no step -by -step program for becoming lowly or for becoming meek but it's simple it's just not easy we have to stay in God's Word first of all this is just like last week right it's almost like a rerun we have to stay in God's Word and we have to stay in constant prayer this is an opportunity to pray for lowliness to pray for meekness of spirit to pray to help us understand what it means to be poor in spirit and to be humble and at the risk of repeating something else again and again it's not an optional way for us to live it's not an optional way or something that we can just decide we want to do in one moment or decide that we don't want to do in another moment because what someone else did was just too much and we have to respond as redeemed

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Christians we're expected to live our lives in the light of the fact that Jesus has saved all of us and that we didn't do it ourselves and I want to close with just a few more verses to help us orient our hearts and our minds to the idea of what lowliness is now the first is

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Philippians 2 Philippians chapter 2 verses 1 through 4 therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ if there is any consolation of love if there is any fellowship of the

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Spirit if any affection and compassion fulfill my joy that you think the same way by maintaining the same love being united in spirit thinking on one purpose doing nothing from selfish ambition or vainglory but with humility of mind regarding one another is more important than yourselves that's lowliness right there not merely looking out for your own personal interests but also for the interests of others then we have a verse from Zephaniah Zephaniah 2 3 it says seek

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Yahweh all you humble of the earth who have worked his justice seek righteousness seek humility and why would we do this perhaps you will be hidden in the day of Yahweh's anger

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God is love but never forget that God is wrath as well

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God is judgment it's all part of who he is it's all part of his perfect holiness we can't paint over the part that we don't like and and some of these prophetic works will really highlight that for us seek righteousness seek humility perhaps you will be hidden in the day of Yahweh's anger because that day will come and in the last verse that I want to read or two verses or three verses is

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James 1 verses 19 through 21 know this my beloved brothers but everyone must be quick to hear slow to speak and slow to anger for the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God a lot of us need to hear that the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God therefore laying aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness in gentleness receive the implanted word which is able to save your souls so being meek or being lowly as Jesus is teaching us here is is something that goes against everything that we want to do it's something that goes against the way that most of us want to respond in just about every situation because we want people to know that we're right we want people to know that we're better than them or we want people to know all these different things but meekness just like these verses tells us that we're not it tells us to put other people ahead of us but most of all it tells us to stand up and to live for the glory of God not for the glory of ourselves not for what we can do not for what we can get not for what we can accomplish but for what

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God has already done for the completed work that Jesus has done on the cross for each and every one of us and that's why we are able to live this way according to the teaching of Jesus please pray with me

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Heavenly Father we come before you this morning with the recognition that we often do not live the way that you teach us in your word and that's why it's so important that we spend this time and it's so important that we look at all these verses and we look at all these words and we understand the ways that we fall short and we can pray to you and we can pray to the

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Holy Spirit for the strength to live that way for the indwelling of the

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Holy Spirit to help conform our minds and our hearts and our lives to your word and to what you expect of us

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God because it's not to our own glory that we are here it's not to our own glory and praise that we are living our lives and it's not to our own credit that salvation has come to us but it's only to you it's only through the work of Jesus Christ on the cross and through the transformation of the

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Holy Spirit which you have so graciously given us God help us to love you better help us to understand your word and help us to live out the

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Beatitudes the way we were taught by Jesus God we thank you so much for your word and we thank you so much for the opportunity that we have to gather here today

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God just be with us this week as we go out and as we face situations that may cause us problems we pray that the

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Holy Spirit would bring to mind these verses and other verses that would teach us the right way to respond