Disciples are quiet.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5 ESV)

Definitions of meek on the Web:

• humble in spirit or manner; suggesting retiring mildness or even cowed submissiveness; "meek and self-effacing"
• very docile; "tame obedience"; "meek as a mouse"- Langston Hughes
• evidencing little spirit or courage; overly submissive or compliant; "compliant and anxious to suit his opinions of those of others"; "a fine fiery blast against meek conformity"- Orville Prescott; "she looked meek but had the heart of a lion"; "was submissive and subservient"

Do those words describe you? Are you in fact humble in spirit or manner? Do you get in people's faces at all?

What about the Church? When people outside the Church look at us on CNN or Fox or even our own stuff like the 700 Club, do they see us as docile? Are we in fact as meek as a mouse?

Sadly, I don't think we are. I think most people (myself absolutely included) find that when they feel they are right about something, they go out of their way to prove their rightness. They will defend their rightness. They will even scream and yell about their rightness from time to time. When people feel like they're absolutely right about something, meekness leaves the equation.

Take for example our political system. When someone is running for office of any kind (with the possible exception of inspector of elections) they typically start out feeling as though the deserve the office. Perhaps they have some sort of experience that will give them an advantage against everyone else who's running. Perhaps they feel the person they're running against has no advantage whatsoever. Whatever reason it is that they feel certain that they deserve the office they're running for, politicians seem to be the least meek group of people ever.

Now, what's interesting here is that even from my desk on the other side of the computer screen, I can hear you all now bemoaning how awful and terrible and disgusting some of these politicians can be. Pennsylvania just went through our primary season, and I think we're all breathing a sigh of relief that it's over and those horrible commercials are off our TVs. But we have to ask ourselves, do we act like them?

When we're trying to spread the Gospel of Jesus, are we nothing more than a loud and annoying political commercial? Are we just annoying to the people we're preaching to, or are we actually getting somewhere? The real question you have to ask yourself is are people more likely to listen to someone who's yelling about Jesus or someone who's living like Jesus?

I think it's the later. And according to verse 5, so does Jesus.

So let's try a little experiment this weekend*. Let's be quiet. Let's not insist on our own way (1 Corinthians 13), but instead let's spend a whole weekend listening to the people around us. Let's listen to the people that we agree with, and let's even spend some time listening to the people we know we disagree with. Let's be quiet. Let's be meek. Let's try our best to live like Jesus.

More on Monday,

Godspeed,

Jason

*I've decided that weekends are too crazy to try to continue a blog series, so we'll keep this up during the working week.