JESUS CALLS US TO HIS REST: MEEKNESS IS HIS METHOD
“With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love” (EPHESIANS 4:2)
Jesus calls us to His rest, and meekness is His method! The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort. He develops toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, “Oh, so you have been overlooked? They placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all. And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to care what men may think!”

Rest is simply release from the heavy, crushing burden borne by mankind and the word Jesus used for “burden” means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. The “rest” is not something we do—it is what comes to us when we cease to do.

The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is in the sight of God of more importance than angels. In himself nothing; in God, everything. He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own values!

A. W. Tozer