The Greek word can be translated gentleness or meekness. Whichever word we use we need to bear in mind that gentleness includes meekness and meekness includes gentleness.
First, meekness is not weakness. Many people think that but as a matter of fact the exact opposite is the truth. Meekness is the demonstration of strength.
One good way, I think, to illustrate this from the natural world is to consider a jet airliner. One of the things that is amazing is in the gentleness with which they touch down. I couldn’t conceive how such a tremendous construction, weighing so many tons, carrying maybe nearly 400 human bodies, could come down with such amazing gentleness. Think of that vast construction of metal and all the other elements that make up a jet airplane coming down so gently that it doesn’t even wake up a person dozing in a chair.
Will you say, is that gentleness weakness? Obviously not. It’s an excellent demonstration of skill and strength.
That’s what meekness is. It’s a superb demonstration of skill and strength. Suppose that big jet had come down with a loud bang and a bump. What would that have indicated? Strength or weakness? Obviously, weakness.
And that’s how some people are, who think they’re strong. They shout, they stamp their foot, they raise their voice, they’re abusive. That’s not strength, that’s weakness.
Another thing we need to understand is that gentleness or meekness go together with authority, which is contrary to natural thinking.
If you have to raise your voice, you don’t have authority. The key to authority is being under authority. If you’re under authority, you have it.
Numbers 12:3, Now the man Moses was very meek above all the men who were upon the face of the earth.
So, Moses in his day was the meekest man on the earth. Was Moses a weakling? Did Moses lack authority?
Very much the opposite. There probably is no one in the Scripture that ever-had greater authority than Moses, but his authority came out of his meekness.
How did Moses acquire his meekness or his gentleness?
The answer is, by submitting to the dealings of God in his life. At the age of 40, Moses was all ready to deliver his people Israel in his own strength. He went out and got angry, and killed an Egyptian, and had to run for his life. His attempt to do it in his own strength was a total failure.
Then came 40 years in the desert, looking after his father-in-law’s sheep. I imagine that’s a humble way to live, to look after your father-in-law’s sheep, what the King James calls the backside of the desert. Moses spent the next 40 years doing that.
At age 80, was he finished? No, he was ready to begin. Why?
Because he’d been drained of his own strength and self-confidence, it took… God 80 years to drain Moses of what human beings call strength.
But once he was drained of his own strength and his own self-confidence, then there was room in him for God’s strength, which is manifested in meekness.
You see, if we’re operating in our own strength, we don’t make room for God’s strength.
Isaiah 40: 29 He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might He increases strength.
In other words, when we come to the end of our own strength, that is when God’s strength can begin in our life. Coming to the end of our own strength in conduct is manifested in meekness.
Now, how did Moses hold out during those 40 years in the desert when there was very little in his circumstances to encourage him?
The answer is he kept his eyes on the Lord.
Hebrews 11: 27 By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible.
How did Moses see him who is unseen? That is, how did he keep his eyes on God all through those 40 years in the desert? The scripture says, by faith.
Keep that in mind, it’s faith that enables us to see the invisible, and its faith that keeps us going when there’s nothing in our circumstances to encourage us?
What does God have to do in us to produce gentleness or meekness?
I believe the answer lies in a phrase that’s used in the Scripture, a broken spirit.
Psalm 51: 17 My sacrifice [the sacrifice acceptable] to God is a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart [broken down with sorrow for sin and humbly and thoroughly penitent], such, O God, you will not despise.
This statement by David, comes in his prayer of repentance after he realized the awfulness of his sin of adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and then killing him to hide it.
In tremendous contrition, repentance, he humbled himself before God and poured out the beautiful prayer that’s contained in Psalm 51.
The kind of sacrifice that God is looking for in us today is not a bullock or a sheep on an altar, but it’s something deep down inside each one of us, a broken spirit.
There’s a great difference between a surrendered will and a broken spirit. A surrendered will says, I’m going to do God’s will, no matter what it costs. And then when God’s will is unattractive and not what we thought it would be, we grit our teeth, we clench our fists, we hold out and we say, I’m going to do God’s will. I’m going to do God’s will. But there’s a tremendous amount of internal struggle.
And there’s a lot of Christians that resist God’s will, whether they realize it or not. We may conform outwardly, but inwardly there is still opposition to the will of God.
There was a little boy in church who was sitting beside his father and kept standing up on the pew. And every time he stood up, his father pulled him down and made him sit down. The third time that it happened, the father pulled him down and spanked him. So, the little boy remained seated, but he looked up at his father and he said, I may be sitting down on the outside, but on the inside, I’m standing up.
Well, that often is like our attitude to God. We’re conforming outwardly, but inwardly, we’re still resistant.
Now, that’s the difference between a surrendered will and a broken spirit. A broken spirit does not react. It does not fight back. It does not answer back, it does not justify itself, but it makes room for the Holy Spirit to work.
There was a teenage girl who’d been having tremendous problems in her relationship with her mother. Every time her mother rebuked her or demanded that she do something, she wanted to answer and justify herself. But one day she gave this testimony. She’d had a run-in with her mother, and she said, you know, the marvelous thing was I didn’t even want to answer back. That’s a broken spirit.
Well, how can a broken spirit come in your life or in mine?
There are two possible ways.
One is through a gradual process, like Moses, 40 years in the desert.
But the other is through a crisis. That’s like David. Suddenly he was confronted with the terribleness of his sin and his spirit broke.
Will you give God permission to work in you a broken spirit, true gentleness, true meekness?