Evening Reflection
Encouragements To Meekness
By Matthew Henry - Edited by RPW. Sr.
Have we not reason to labor and endeavor, since there is such a virtue and such a praise, to attain these things? Should we not lay out ourselves to the utmost for this ornament of a meek and quiet spirit? For your direction in this endeavor, if you be indeed willing to be directed, I shall briefly lay before you some Scripture precepts concerning meekness; some patterns of it; some particular instances in which we have special need of it; some good principles that we should abide by; and some good practices that we should abound in, in order to our growth in this grace. In opening these things, we will endeavor to keep close to the law, and to the testimony. If we lay the word of God before us for our rule, and will be ruled by it, we shall find the command of God making meekness and quietness as much our duty as they are our ornament. We are there told, as the will of God that we must seek meekness.
Number one;
This command we have in Zephaniah 2:3, and is especially directed to the meek: "Seek ye the Lord, all ye meek of the earth—seek meekness." Though they were meek, and were pronounced so by Him that searches the heart, yet they must seek meekness; which teaches us that those who have much of this grace, have still need of more, and must desire and endeavor after more. He that sits down content with the grace he has, and is not pressing forward towards perfection, and striving to grow in grace, to get the habit of it more strengthened and confirmed, and the operation of it more quickened and invigorated, it is to be feared has no true grace at all; and that, though he sits ever so high and ever so easy in his own opinion, he will yet sit down short of heaven. Where there is life, one way or other there will be growth, till we come to the perfect man. "He that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger." Paul was a man of great attainments in grace, and yet we find him "forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching forth to those that are before." Those who took joyfully the spoiling of their goods, are yet told that they "have need of patience." Thus the meek of the earth—who being on the earth, are in a state of infirmity and imperfection, of trial and temptation—have still need of meekness; that is, they must learn to be yet more calm and composed, more steady and even and regular in the government of their passions, and in the management of their whole conversation. They who have silenced all angry words, must learn to suppress the first risings and motions of angry thoughts.
It is observable that when the meek of the earth are especially concerned to seek meekness, when the day of the Lord's anger hastens on, when the times are bad, and desolating judgments are breaking in, then we have occasion for all the meekness we have and all we can get, and all is little enough: meekness towards God the author, and towards men the instruments of our trouble; meekness to bear the trial, and to bear our testimony in the trial. There is sometimes an "hour of temptation," a critical day when the exercise of meekness is the work of the day: sometimes the children of men are more than ordinarily provoking, and then the children of God have more than commonly need of meekness. When God is justly angry and men are unjustly angry, when our mother's children are angry with us and our Father angry too, there is anger enough stirring, and then "blessed are the meek," that are careful to keep possession of their souls when they can keep possession of nothing else.
Now the way prescribed for the attainment of meekness is to seek it. Ask it of God, pray for it: it is fruit of the Spirit, it is given by the God of all grace, and to him we must go for it. It is a branch of that wisdom which he that lacketh must ask of God, and it shall be given him. The God we address is called "the God of patience and consolation;" and he is the God of consolation because the God of patience—for the more patient we are, the more we are comforted under our afflictions—and as such we must look to him when we come to him for grace to make us "like minded," that is, meek and loving one towards another, which is the apostle's errand at the throne of grace. God's people are, and should be, a generation that "covet the best gifts," and make their court to the best Giver, who never said to the wrestling seed of Jacob, Seek in vain; but has given us an assurance firm enough for us to build upon, and rich enough for us to encourage ourselves with, Seek, and ye shall find. What would we more? Seek meekness, and ye shall find it.
The promise annexed is very encouraging to the meek of the earth that seek meekness: "It may be you shall be hid in the day of the Lord's anger." Though it be but a promise with an "it may be," yet it ministers abundance of comfort: God's probabilities are better than the world's certainties; and the meek ones of the earth that hope in his mercy, and can venture their all upon an intimation of his good-will, shall find to their comfort, that when God brings a flood upon the world of the ungodly, he has an ark for all his Noahs, his resting, quiet people, in which they shall be hid, it may be, from the calamity itself, at least from the sting and malignity of it—"HID," as Luther said, "either in heaven or under heaven, either in the possession or under the protection of heaven."
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