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 Meekness follows poverty of spirit and mourning in a logical fashion as the manner in which a forgiven child of God lives out his life in relation to those around him.  The Scottish theologian and pastor Sinclair B. Ferguson defines meekness as follows:

 “It is the humble strength that belongs to the man who has learned to submit to difficulties (difficult experiences and difficult people), knowing that in everything God is working for his good.  The meek man is the one who has stood before God’s judgment and abdicated all his supposed ‘rights’.  He has learned, in gratitude for God’s grace, to submit himself to the Lord and to be gentle with sinners.”

Moses is described in the Old Testament as the meekest man on the face of the earth (Num. 12:3 ESV).  But in his younger days in Egypt, Moses did not start out as a meek man.  Remember how he killed an Egyptian man who was mistreating an Israelite man?  It was probably only during the self-exile years in Midian when God subdued his natural spirit that he was prepared for the call he received from the burning bush (Exodus 3) to minister to his own people as the leader of the Israelites.

Jesus Christ himself is described as “meek and lowly in heart” (Matt. 11:29 KJV).  The hymn writer Charles Wesley also describes Jesus as “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”.  We learn what it means to be meek in the way Jesus responded when he was despised and persecuted by those around him.  Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage and instead humbled himself by becoming obedient to death on a cross (Phil. 2:7-8).

The greatest irony lies in the fact that Jesus teaches that it is those who are meek who will inherit the earth!  Most of us would think that to inherit, that is, own and control the earth, one would have to be bold, self-assertive and aggressive.  What Jesus teaches goes right against the grain of the materialistic self-centeredness that seems to be the way to success and wealth that the world teaches.

But this promise of inheritance is true for the reason that the genuinely meek person is the Christian who is contented with what he already has.  He understands the Biblical truth that in Christ, he already possesses everything and is therefore in need of nothing more.  The Bible says: “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Tim. 6:6).