Well, if you would please stand and open Scripture to Psalm 37. We're going to read God's Word. Psalm 37, a Psalm of David. Do not fret because of evildoers, nor be envious of the workers of iniquity, for they shall soon be cut down like the grass and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and feed on his faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord and he shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in him and he shall bring it to pass. He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the noonday. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him. Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass. Cease from anger and forsake wrath. Do not fret, it only causes harm. For evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while and the wicked shall be no more. Indeed, you will look carefully for his place, but it shall be no more. But the meek shall inherit the earth and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. The wicked plots against the just and gnashes his teeth at him. The Lord laughs at him, for he sees that his day is coming. The wicked have drawn the sword and have bent their bow to cast down the poor and needy, to slay those who are of upright conduct. Their sword shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken. A little that a righteous man has is better than the riches of many wicked. For the arms of the wicked shall be broken, but the Lord upholds the righteous. The Lord knows the days of the upright, and their inheritance shall be forever. They shall not be ashamed in the evil time, and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied. But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the Lord, like the splendor of the meadows that vanish. Into smoke they shall vanish away. The wicked borrows and does not repay, but the righteous shows mercy and gives. For those blessed by him shall inherit the earth, but those cursed by him shall be cut off. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delights in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholds him with his hand. I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his descendants begging bread. He is ever merciful and lends, and his descendants are blessed. Depart from evil and do good, and dwell forevermore. For the Lord loves justice and does not forsake his saints. They are preserved forever, but the descendants of the wicked shall be cut off. The righteous shall inherit the land and dwell in it forever. The mouth of the righteous speaks wisdom, and his tongue talks of justice. The law of his God is in his heart. None of his steps shall slide. The wicked watches the righteous and seeks to slay him. The Lord will not leave him in his hand nor condemn him when he is judged. Wait on the Lord and keep his way, and he shall exalt you to inherit the land. When the wicked are cut off, you shall see it. I have seen the wicked in great power and spreading himself like a native green tree. Yet he passed away, and behold, he was no more. Indeed, I sought him, but he could not be found. Mark the blameless man and observe the upright for the future of that man is peace. But the transgressors shall be destroyed together. The future of the wicked shall be cut off. But the salvation of the righteous is from the Lord. He is their strength in the time of trouble and the Lord shall help them and deliver them. He shall deliver them from the wicked and save them because they trust in him. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. It's cozy in here. Please don't go to sleep on me. If you're wondering why we turned up the heat, it's because there will be an altar call at the end of the service. I'm just kidding. Just kidding. Hey, if I told you that anyone who's going to heaven would have a particular characteristic in their life, would you want to know what it is? And if I told you it was meekness, would you even know what that is? Because it is, it's meekness. See, as we're working our way through the Beatitudes at the beginning of Christ's Sermon on the Mount, we have a series of blessings pronounced on those to whom belong the kingdom of heaven. In short, Jesus pronounces blessing upon true Christians, those who are in Christ and who have evidence of his saving grace in their lives. The evidence of that saving grace looks like this portrait of the Christian that Jesus paints for us in the Beatitudes. And this all begins with being poor in spirit because only a person who sees their inability to earn God's favor will come to Him trusting in Christ. Now that person also mourns over their sin because that's the great thing that stands between them and God. But the blessedness of this person who mourns, who is poor in spirit, is that theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and God himself comforts him through the gospel. That's what we've seen so far. But recognizing who they are apart from Christ has an ongoing effect, and that effect is It keeps them meek. It keeps them meek. And so our text today is Matthew 5 and verse 5. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. The word meek is just not part of my daily conversation, except for this week. Meekness is a quality of the Christian that is evidence that a man has understood the gospel and that the gospel's gotten down inside of him, at the heart level. Everyone who is truly in Christ will have some relationship to meekness, because meekness is vital. It's vital to the Christian life, not in order to secure the Christian life, but because Christ secured it for us. Now, sometimes it'll be a tenuous relationship, maybe rocky at points, but there'll be a relationship to this concept of meekness. But as soon as we say that, we find ourselves in a pickle, because as I see it, there's no more misunderstood beatitude than this one, blessed are the meek. Like, what does that even mean? All right, so there's several ways that people go about misunderstanding meekness, and we should probably clear those things up before we press on to know what Jesus is really saying. And the most common misunderstanding about meekness is that a meek person is a weakling. That's simply not true, at least not in and of itself. Meekness is not weakness. And I've heard those four words more times than I can count, and it's against every grain of my being to use them, because I don't like using overdone things. Meekness is not weakness. But as often as I hear them, I can't argue with them because it's true. Whatever meekness is, meekness is not weakness. If meekness were the same thing as weakness, then some of the most esteemed heroes of the faith would be weaklings. Think of the Apostle Paul, for example. Think about him being a weakling. That's outrageous. And yet you can't read 2 Corinthians without seeing meekness in action. But if there's anything that the Apostle Paul wasn't, he wasn't a weakling. O that the Lord would grant us a fraction of the meekness of a man like Paul, a man of great strength and spiritual power, and yet who was humble, who did not lord it over anybody, but went on in his later writings to call himself the chief of sinners. a meek man indeed, or more contemporary, think of Amy Carmichael, who devoted her life to serving orphans in the lowest castes of India in the 19th and 20th centuries. She was profoundly humble, self-sacrificing, and bold to stand up for the rights of vulnerable girls. Meek? Absolutely. Weak? Not a chance. And for another thing, meekness is not cowardice or victimization. It's not cowardice or victimization. Most people don't really understand what meekness is, but they're pretty sure that if they ever become meek, they're going to get taken advantage of. And we've all talked to enough telemarketers and people who have pulled the wool over our eyes at car dealership repair shops to know we don't want that. We don't want to be taken advantage of. This is actually one of the reasons that predators of various kinds try to weasel their way into churches and find easy prey, because they know that Christians are supposed to be meek, and they misunderstand meekness for vulnerability and naivety. But that's not what meekness is. A bully likes meek people only because he misunderstands what meekness is. But it's not cowardice. It's not cowardice and it doesn't mean that someone's at risk of being a victim. On his way to becoming king, David was a picture of true meekness. And yet he was no coward, and he refused to be a victim. So Saul, if you remember, seeks his life, chasing him through the wildernesses of Israel, even though David had already been God's anointed, chosen king to come. But David would not exercise his own will to bring it to pass, but he entrusted himself to the Lord, even as he was a mighty warrior for God. To the tune of Saul has killed his thousands, but David has tens of thousands. Really? Yes, he did that as he was meek, because meekness is not cowardice. David was the mightiest warrior, the shrewdest fugitive, and all the while, he was meekness personified, as we'll see. Now, and finally, meekness is not apathy. Meekness is not apathy. When somebody's passionate about something, we don't often think of them as meek. Because a great misunderstanding about meekness is that it's simply being mild-mannered and going along with whatever anybody else wants to do. But that's not the case. Meekness is not dispassionate. Otherwise, Jesus would be saying that those who really aren't invested in things are blessed, right? Blessed are the meek. If meekness meant apathy, Jesus would be blessing the apathetic. That just doesn't seem to sync up with any of the rest of Scripture. God calls us to be passionately committed to his gospel and to his glory, and that often involves being passionately committed to many other things that do good in the world. Why? Because Jesus Christ is Lord. And so meekness can't mean apathy. Think of one of the most meek men I know from church history, William Wilberforce, whom God used in the 19th century, in the late 17th century, to fight passionately for the abolition of the slave trade. And after decades of laboring at cost to his own health, at threat to his life, and at great sacrifice, the Lord brought it to pass. but not because the meek and mild Wilberforce was apathetic. Meekness is not weakness, it's not cowardice, and it's not apathy. True meekness is something else entirely. True meekness seems elusive and hard to define, which is why I think it's the most misunderstood of the Beatitudes. And so with so much baggage around it, it might be easier just to not bother with it at all, to go, you know what, I'm gonna take two verses this morning instead of unpacking just this one, give it a passing glance and move on. But I don't wanna do that because there's so much blessing for us in understanding what true meekness is. Because meekness, if we're understanding Jesus, is a defining characteristic of a true Christian. And it's well worth taking the time to get a real sense of it. And to this end, I think the most helpful thing we can do is to let the Bible itself flesh out what true meekness looks like. And so if you'd actually turn back with me to where we just read scripture in Psalm 37, we're gonna camp out there for a little bit. Because true meekness is pictured in Psalm 37. For those who were paying close attention during the scripture reading, that does not come as a surprise. Now, don't worry, we are not gonna read the text again, we just did that. But I do wanna point out a few things that are significant here. The first being that Jesus has Psalm 37 in mind when he says, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. He's explicitly thinking of this psalm, almost quoting part of it, specifically verse 11, where it says, but the meek shall inherit the earth. Or a better translation, as many of you have it, would be the meek shall inherit the land. So you can see from verse 10 just before that there's a contrast between the wicked who pass away and the meek who inherit the land. And I mentioned that David is an example of true meekness and an example that has both strength and dignity in his meekness. And he, David, is writing Psalm 37 specifically to exhort us as God's people not to fret when it seems like the wicked win the day. And that has always been a problem with which Christians have had to wrestle. Why, if we are following God, do the wicked seem to gain so much advantage? Why does it seem to be that in order to gain the highest political offices of the land, you have to do things that are completely contrary to the Christian faith? What gives? It can be very discouraging. But Psalm 37 says, don't fret. In fact, I love it right there. Don't fret, it tends only to evil. Verse eight, that's very handy to remember. The point is that while it may seem like the wicked win, it's only for a time. The righteous, the meek, will inherit the land that the wicked seem to gain for a moment, but it will go to the meek forever. Now how often does it seem like the world goes to those who are willing to do evil in order to excel? If you've looked at any best-selling books on how to grow your business, meekness isn't in the title of any of them. That's usually not a great business strategy, according to the world. The question of why do the wicked prosper has been on the minds and lips of believers since the wicked have been around. And that's a real struggle and we need to be able to account for it. And into a world full of momentary injustice like ours, we're told to be meek because the meek will win in the end. Why? Well, because the meek by definition put their trust in the one true God who is the savior of the world and he's coming back. The phrase inherit the land or inherit the earth shows up five times in Psalm 37. And looking at who is said to inherit the land in each one of those instances is actually helpful for getting a well-rounded picture of what meekness actually is. If the meek inherit the land, and take it that God's not splitting the inheritance up between different types of people, then that means that all of those who inherit the land in these five instances in Psalm 37 are actually describing the same type of person, the person who is meek. And that's really just like the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are not describing eight different types of people. Like, that guy's poor in spirit. Oh, she is so meek. That guy, he really knows how to mourn. Right? No, it's describing the Christian, like a full picture of the Christian. And in Psalm 37, all of these things are describing the picture of the person who is also meek. And so, of course, verse 11 is what Jesus is quoting. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land. But the first time we see anyone inheriting the land, it's back in verse 9. Evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. And so we see that one of the defining qualities of meekness is patiently waiting on the Lord, even when others seem to be getting ahead through sin. Now, the next time we see the phrase is over in verse 22, in a description that sounds an awful lot like the theme that Jesus takes up in the Beatitudes, verse 22. For those blessed by him shall inherit the earth, or shall inherit the land. In his sermon, Jesus says, blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. And in Psalm 37, David has told us that the meek inherit the land. And then in verse 22, he calls these people those who are blessed by the Lord. You see, this is very much in Jesus's mind as he's going through the Beatitudes. And then in verse 29, These people, the blessed people, the meek, are called the righteous. The righteous shall inherit the land and dwell in it forever. And how do we know that they're righteous? How do we know what righteousness looks like? Well, coming full circle, the last time this shows up is in verse 34, which says, wait on the Lord and keep his way, and he shall exalt you to inherit the land. When the wicked are cut off, you shall see it. So there's this contrast through the whole thing. The wicked may win for a day, but they're going away. The righteous, the meek, those who wait on the Lord, who trust to his purposes, they will inherit the land that the wicked will do anything to get. And yet God is the Lord, and he sees all of it. And he will let no injustice win. And that's something we call walking by faith. We walk by faith, not by sight. Why? We believe it because he says it, but sometimes we look around and it's not so evident. But don't worry. The last day hasn't come yet. And God is not sleeping. And so this hits the heart of it, verse 34 does. The meek are those who entrust themselves to God as they focus on obeying his word. That is the essence of true meekness, trusting God while occupying yourself with obeying his word. It's a blessedly simple business that is especially difficult when times get tough. The wicked may prosper for a time, but it's the obedient, humble saints who trust the Lord and will be given inheritance from God. And so this well-rounded picture in Psalm 37 puts us in a place to locate what true meekness looks like in contrast to the rampant misunderstandings that there are about it. Right? And so let's locate true meekness. After all, this isn't something that's been well understood in the modern church. And so it's especially important that we take our cues from scripture to understand what's in Jesus's mind so that we can make sense of what it means to be the blessed meek ones who will inherit the earth. After all, this is one of our defining characteristics as believers. So it matters that we be able to talk about it, much less pursue it. And to pursue it precisely. I would much rather know what the center of a target is that I'm shooting for than just a general direction. Sometimes I have a hard, actually a lot of times, I have a hard enough time hitting the center of the target when I know right where it is, right? Well, God's word helps us here to be precise. Now, I don't know about you, but anytime I'm trying to locate anything that I'm not sure exactly where it is or what it looks like, I pull out my phone, and I say, Google, and I go to Google Maps. And it is extremely helpful. It's extremely helpful. And so I thought that it would be genuinely helpful, as we look at a description of the meek and righteous person from Psalm 37, to boil it down to three basic things that just so happen to be our GPS. Listen, I could apologize for it, but it is so good I'm not going to. I mean it. If something is hard to define, isn't it helpful to have a handy little tool? And I'm not making this up. The qualities were there. I just discovered them. So one defining quality of true, and I'm a Baptist preacher, so cut me some slack. One defining quality of true meekness is gentleness. That's something that is abundantly clear. from what Jesus is saying in examples that we're going to look at of meekness, and what we see in Psalm 37 is gentleness. In fact, the word that Jesus uses for meek only occurs four times in the New Testament, but it's also the root word that Paul uses for gentleness in the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. Gentleness is one of the telltale signs that somebody is meek. It's not that the meek man is weak, But it's that he will not express his strength or his will at the cost of someone else. He is a gentle person, determined to show the character of Christ his savior. And Christ, for all his glorious power, is the supremely gentle one. When we're treating those around us roughly, in either word or action, we are betraying the meekness of Christ. Because Christ's meekness is a gentle meekness. And a related quality to that is patience. It's patience. When you see gentleness paired with patience, you can be sure that you've met a meek person. I mean, isn't this a prime factor of the kind of person we see in Psalm 37? I mean, look at the second half of verse 9. Those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. What is waiting? It's patience. Those who are patiently waiting on the Lord, His timing, His will, His way, that is a meek person. Those who wait on the Lord, who are patient as they trust in God, are the meek who inherit the earth. And one of the great temptations facing many Christians who don't go our way is the temptation to be fussy. There are far too many of us who are fussy Christians on any given day. Complaining and grumbling and fretting and fussing, these are contrary to the meekness of Christ and surefire ways to cut off meekness in our hearts. In fact, look at what David says about fussing or fretting in verse eight. Cease from anger, forsake wrath, do not fret, it only causes harm. What do we do when we're wringing our hands over things we can't control, struggling to trust God, thinking that maybe if I just am anxious a little longer, I can make it work, is the testimony of no one ever. It only causes harm. It only causes harm. In other words, be patient when you're tempted to respond in anger and anxiety. Respond with gentleness, and Lord, give me more grace. And why? What is it about meekness that makes it especially defined by gentleness and patience rather than fretting? Well friends, it's because these things flow out of what true meekness is grounded in. The grounding of true meekness is submission to God's will and sovereignty. It's submission to God's will and sovereignty. This is the basis on which we're commanded in Psalm 37.3 to trust in the Lord and do good. Because when David's writing this, wicked people are flourishing. And so he has to remind the saints, trust God, he's got this. By distracting your attention between fretting on the one hand and then trying to control things on the other, and then maybe trusting God where you can, you end up trusting God not at all and having a miserable time and doing nothing good. That is the true irony of worry, and we know it too well. Trust in the Lord and do good. Sounds an awful lot like what Jesus is going to say later in the Sermon on the Mount. Don't worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow's got enough trouble of its own. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you as well. These words capture the heart of what meekness looks like in action. It's a settled trust in a good and holy God who loves his people and who promises that he will not exercise his power for their harm, but for their good. Again, we walk by faith, faith in that kind of God. And if that's God, that's an invitation to be meek, because we can trust a God like that. In a world as broken as ours, with sin being as rampant as it is, including in our own hearts, it can be tempting to lose hope and become discouraged. And yet, the psalmist elsewhere says, our God is in the heavens. He does all that he pleases. And we know that he pleases in nothing bad. He pleases in nothing bad. Meekness doesn't look at its circumstances or its surroundings and then decide how it's gonna act. Meekness looks to Christ and aims at trusting obedience. And thankfully, God has a very clear word that shows us what obedience looks like. Nobody's having major theological debates about should we be patient? It's just not that clear that God wants us to trust him. Let's have R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur debating whether or not anxiety is good. No, let's have them debate the mode of baptism and the timing of it. God's been pretty clear about the other stuff. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and feed on his faithfulness. Because our triune God is who he is, we can submit ourselves to his sovereignty and make obedience our aim. And so what does a meek person aim for? Gentleness, patience, and trusting submission to a God who is good. Now before we look at the blessedness of the meek, I want to mention two of the greatest pictures of meekness in scripture. It's always helpful to have an example that really puts flesh to the bones of what this is. And the first picture is Moses, of course. God's great prophet to lead Israel out of slavery in Egypt and then to give them the law that would lead them in the promised land. Moses, he had everything going for him. He had an incredible education. He was a prince among princes. He met with God face to face. And God continued to vindicate Moses in the face of all of his enemies. The ground opened up and swallowed enemies who were challenging Moses. He could have easily sat back on his laurels and gone, I'm Moses. I'll bow. But he didn't. If there was ever a man who had cause to make much of himself and defend himself, it was Moses. And yet time and again, when faced with threats and dishonor, even from his own brother and sister, what does he do? He responds with gentleness and patience, trusting in the Lord. But not for a moment was he weak or cowardly. It took a supreme strength to respond that way to those threats. And what is God's inspired commentary on Moses? In Numbers 12, it says that now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth. And yet Moses was but a precursor of the greater Moses, whose meekness is unsurpassed, of course, the Lord Jesus. If Moses had cause to make much of himself, Jesus is nothing less than the eternal son of God who became a man and kept God's law perfectly on our behalf. Moses was excluded from the promised land by breaking God's law. Jesus keeps God's law perfectly. And instead of using his righteousness, his divine power, his status as the eternal son of God to exalt himself, he submitted himself in gentleness, patience, and trust of God even to the point of death. And along the way, he cries out, Father, if there's any way besides this, let it be so. And the Father says, no, this is the way. And Jesus, in meekness supreme, submits himself to the Father's will. And that, we are told in Philippians 2, is the path to his exaltation. Luke tells us that Jesus came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for his people. And Jesus' invitation to all who would trust in him shows his meekness. In Matthew 11, he says, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Gentle and lowly, this is meekness. The bravest and most powerful man who ever lived, Jesus, was also meekness incarnate. And he died for all of us who are not meek. He died for all of us who, even knowing him, would still continue to struggle to be meek. Entrusting him, he makes us meek. And one day, the work will be finished. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. If meekness is entrusting yourself to God as you obey his word, then friends, as is true with a gracious God, there is blessedness involved in it. There's blessedness involved in it. So let's end by talking about the blessedness of the meek. Jesus says that the blessedness of the meek consists in something particular. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. They shall inherit the earth. Now, as I'm seeing it, that's a pretty sweet deal. I love my parents, but there's no way that whatever inheritance they leave me, it's going to compare with inheriting the earth. Love you, dad and mom. I'll go with the earth. So cool. The poor in spirit who mourn over their sins and flee to Christ alone for refuge from the judgment they deserve, these are the ones who, to whom belong the kingdom of God, right? The blessed of the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And what does that look like? It looks like inheriting the earth. So here he gets more specific about what the kingdom of heaven entails when he gets to this third beatitude because it's not merely a spiritual kingdom, though that's true, It's also a very real reign of a very real king over a very real earth forever. An earth over which Jesus has been given all authority. And this is where Jesus moves us beyond Psalm 37 to reveal the trajectory on which that Psalm is set. And that trajectory is from Palestine to now the whole planet. From Palestine to the planet. You see, when God inspires David to write Psalm 37, the promise is primarily here in the Psalm to the Jewish people who read and sung it as they were being called to be the meek who would inherit and prosper in the land. The English Standard Version and most modern translations get this right. The New King James Version doesn't do as good of a job of it. Look at Psalm 37.11 in the ESV. It says, And back in verse 3, when God commands his people to dwell in the land and feed on his faithfulness, this is getting at the very same thing. And the point is that as God's chosen nation, the Jews were to be devoted to one thing, glorifying God by obeying his law in his land. And Deuteronomy 28 lays out a litany of what kind of blessings would come to them if they were to do that. And all of those blessings are connected with the land, because the land is connected to a covenant. That covenant was given to Abraham. And the Jews, as the children of Abraham by physical descent, were spiritually called to walk in his obedience. and find that they would inherit the land. They didn't need to fret about the evildoers all around them, and there were many, both from within Israel and outside among the pagan nations, not least of which were the Philistines. God would take care of it. In our family worship this week, we were reading a time that David and his men went to fight some Philistines. And God said, hey, wait until you hear the mulberry trees. When you hear the mulberry trees, then go in. And God simulates this whole army coming against these Philistines. And then Israel wins the day. God can take care of the enemies. You worry about faithfulness. That's what David is saying. Patiently entrust yourselves to God and obey him. But Jesus picks up on this command which was given originally to the nation of Israel, and now he applies it to his people under the new covenant, which he comes to bring by his blood. Whenever there's a change of covenant, something significant is happening. And so instead of Just saying, hey, what David said in Psalm 37, same thing, apples to apples, it gets better. You see, when Jesus came, he came to bring the entire Old Covenant Scriptures to their fulfillment, and that's why one of the interpretive keys to the Sermon on the Mount is chapter five and verse 17, and I'm excited to get there. Do not think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill. As God's old covenant people, Israel inherited the land of Palestine according to God's gracious promises. God always keeps his promises. But the Jewish nation and that small tract of land were no more the end game than the sacrifices in the temple were. They all of them pointed to something greater. What was that? Jesus. The last words of Matthew are Jesus' declaration that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And it's on the basis of that authority that he says to go and teach the nations what it means to trust God and obey him. And the good news is they don't have to move to the Middle East to do it. Because what? The whole earth belongs to that king. And so what Jesus does in the third beatitude is he pronounces that his meek people are blessed, not because they would inherit the land of Palestine, but because they would receive his kingdom, which eventually will spread to cover the whole planet. If you've read the end of Revelation, it's so good that it's called a new heavens and a new earth. And in case anyone thinks I'm playing fast and loose or bait and switch with the promise of Palestine to Abraham friends, this was always the plan. Don't take it from me, take it from Paul. In Romans 4.13, he focuses on the covenant with Abraham. And he says this, for the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. Therefore, it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. Jesus knows this. Jesus inspired it. Jesus fulfills it. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. God's covenants unfolded throughout the Old Testament in stages, layering promise upon promise upon command upon command until the coming of Christ, in whom all the promises of God are yes and amen. All of them. No stone left unturned in our Bibles. If you find one, pick it up. Jesus is there. Abraham was promised Palestine and Israel received it. And when Christ came, the promise of Palestine becomes the blessedness of the planet under his kingship, which will have no end. The promise of blessedness to the meek is nothing less than eternal life with God in the new heavens and the new earth. This is where the story's going. You see how important it is that we understand what meekness looks like and means? It comes loaded with blessings. And the reason for this is because of the believer's union with the king of the cosmos. All of this blessing comes to us in no other way than our union with Christ, who is the king of the cosmos. The reason the meek inherit the earth isn't because they've somehow earned it by their meekness. It isn't because their meekness somehow earns them a seat at the table. It's because of their salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone. And this salvation is realized as believers are united with Christ from the moment of their salvation and then forever. Why forever? God always keeps His promises. Jesus is the eternal Son of God, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, and His is the inheritance of the nations. And so the Father speaking to the Son in Psalm 2 says, you are my Son, today I have begotten you. ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession." Do you think there's a chance that Jesus didn't ask? No, he asked and the Father answered. The blessedness of the meek is in the fact that their meekness is evidence of their salvation. We are united with Christ as his beloved bride, and what's his is ours, even as we are wholly his. His is the inheritance of the ends of the earth, and that's exactly what the meek inherit. Meekness is entrusting yourself to God as you obey his word until he makes all things new. So rest in him. Trust in Him. Delight in Him. Get as many glimpses as you can of Him. Don't fret about the other stuff. Yes, make your plans, be godly in your stewardship, and then sleep well. Labor hard for His glory as if it all rested on your shoulders, and then sleep at night because it doesn't. Let him be the king that he is. You obey his word and look for that blessed day when he will make all things new. Because friends, you're gonna be there for him. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we praise, bless, and magnify you for the blessed promise that you give, that we, your people, who are called by your name, will inherit the earth as you reign over all things. We thank and praise you for the clear revelation of your scriptures that show us all the joy that there is in you. Knowing our proneness to wander, we ask, Lord, that you would guard our hearts from lesser delights. May we settle for nothing less than having our great joy be in you. Add to us all these other things as well, not for the sake of the things and not for the sake of satisfying something that you don't, but because you delight to show your goodness. Make us a meek people who gently and patiently bless those around us, who entrust ourselves to you, especially in the moments when it just doesn't make sense not to be up in arms about everything that's going on in our lives. And through this, may you show your sufficiency and your power, which is made perfect in our weakness. And it's in your name, Lord Jesus, by your spirit and for the glory of the Father that we pray. Amen. Let's stand and worship.