When We Stop Fighting for Control

Written By Rev. Paul Lawler

What if real strength is found in surrender? When Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek,” He isn’t calling us to weakness or passivity. He is inviting us into a life where our strength, influence, words, and need for control are surrendered to Him. Discover the surprising freedom and peace that come when we stop fighting for our own way and learn the meekness of Christ.

  • Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed Are the Meek

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Matthew 5:5

Oswald Chambers wrote that the Beatitudes "sound sweet and pious and wonderfully simple, but they are in reality like spiritual torpedoes that burst and explode in the subconscious mind." If that's true of any of them, it's true of this one.

Meekness has a cultural problem. We hear the word and picture timidity, passivity, someone who can't stand up for themselves. The world celebrates the confident, the assertive, the bold. Jesus says: blessed are the meek.

Before we can understand what Jesus means, we need to clear away what He doesn't.

What Meekness Is Not

Meekness is not weakness. Following Jesus should strengthen your backbone, not soften it. Jesus did not say, "Blessed are the passive." He said, "Blessed are the meek."

The Greek word translated "meek" here is praüs, and it carries a precise and surprising meaning: power under control. Godly strength, exercised under the lordship of Christ. Strong's Concordance defines it as "a humble attitude of inward gentleness that manifests humble strength under God's control—not weakness, timidity, or lack of conviction, but the gracious refusal to advance one's own cause by force, trusting the Lord to vindicate and exalt in his time."

In classical Greek, praüs was used to describe a wild animal that had been tamed—a horse that has been broken and is now responsive to its master. The horse is still powerful, still full of strength. But that strength is now under control and in service of something beyond itself.

Aristotle described meekness as the healthy middle ground between anger and indifference. He was onto something. Meekness is not indifference to problems and injustice—there are things we should be angry about, and Scripture affirms that. "Be angry and do not sin." (Ephesians 4:26) But meekness channels that anger rather than being ruled by it. And meekness is certainly not indifference to others' needs.

What meekness is, at its heart, is power surrendered to God's purposes rather than wielded for one's own.

The Beatitudes Build on Each Other

By this point in the Sermon on the Mount, a pattern has emerged. The Beatitudes are not a list of isolated virtues—they build on one another, each flowing from the one before.

Blessed are the poor in spirit—those who recognize their spiritual bankruptcy apart from God. Blessed are those who mourn—those whose spiritual poverty leads to godly sorrow over sin. And now: blessed are the meek—those who, having recognized their need and mourned their sin, stop fighting God and submit to His lordship.

Many scholars see in these first three beatitudes an analogy to the essential steps of coming to know Christ. Spiritual poverty is where it begins: I need God. I need forgiveness. I cannot save myself. Mourning is the godly sorrow that fuels repentance. Meekness is the posture that receives Christ's lordship—yielding my will, my pride, my demand to control, to the One who is Lord.

Jesus makes this explicit in Matthew 18:

"Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3-4

A child in a healthy family is humble, teachable, and yielded to a higher authority. That is the spirit Jesus is describing. And it requires setting aside two things that are deeply resistant to laying down: pride and the demand to control.

Meekness Toward God and Others

Martin Lloyd-Jones described meekness as "essentially a true view of oneself, expressing itself in attitude and conduct with respect to others." It works in two directions simultaneously—inward and outward, toward God and toward people.

Toward God, meekness means accepting His dealings in our lives without resentment, surrendering our demand to dictate outcomes, and receiving His Word with openness rather than defensiveness. James captures it: "Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls." (James 1:21)

Toward others, meekness means something practical and often costly. D.A. Carson writes that meekness is "a controlling desire to see the other's interest advanced ahead of one's own." It doesn't mean abandoning our principles—it means we stop needing to win. We stop returning insult for insult. We stop rubbing the other person's nose in it when we're proven right.

Consider the power you actually have. Every person in a room has power—relational power, positional power, the power of words. What you say to others affects them. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks (Matthew 12:34), and James says that what the tongue speaks can set a forest ablaze (James 3:5-6). That power can build up or tear down. The question meekness forces is simple: is your power under the control of Jesus?

When we experience power that is out of control—a boss who manipulates, a coach who intimidates, a colleague who weaponizes their authority—we feel it. We know the difference. The meek believer refuses to be that person. As Peter writes: "Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing." 1 Peter 3:9

The Peace That Meekness Brings

There is a reason meekness and peace belong together. A.W. Tozer wrote: "The meek man will attain a place of soul rest. As he walks on in meekness, he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness brings."

The soul—the mind, the will, and the emotions—finds rest when it stops fighting. The will is often where the battle is fiercest. We want to control outcomes, protect our reputation, ensure justice is served on our timetable. Meekness says: I trust the One who is actually in control. And that surrender, paradoxically, is where the deepest peace lives.

John Wesley's Covenant Prayer captures this posture:

I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will. Place me with whom you will. Put me to doing. Put me to suffering. Let me be put to work for you or set aside for you, praised for you or criticized for you. Let me be full. Let me be empty. Let me have all things. Let me have nothing. I freely and fully surrender all things to your glory and service. And now, O wonderful and holy God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, you are mine. I am yours. So be it.

That is not a prayer to be prayed mechanically. It is a prayer to be prayed from a place of genuine surrender—and Wesley believed that praying it was the pathway to rest.

The Promise: They Shall Inherit the Earth

Jesus doesn't leave meekness without a reward. "They shall inherit the earth." Matthew 5:5

This is not metaphorical. Scripture teaches that Christ has been appointed heir of all things (Hebrews 1:2), that all who are in Him have "obtained an inheritance" (Ephesians 1:11), and that those who are His children are "heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ." (Romans 8:17)

The inheritance begins now—in the peace of God, in His presence, in a life no longer burdened by the crushing weight of needing to be in control. But it will be fully realized in the life to come, on a redeemed and recreated earth, in the full presence of Jesus.

Only the meek will inherit this. Not because meekness earns it, but because meekness is the posture that receives the kingdom rather than trying to seize it.

How We Grow in Meekness

Meekness is not a character trait we manufacture. It grows. Here are three pathways.

1) Become poor in spirit

Meekness flows naturally from what comes before it. Recognizing our spiritual poverty, mourning over our sin, trusting in Christ's mercy for forgiveness and cleansing—this is the soil in which meekness grows. We cannot truly submit to God's lordship until we've stopped pretending we don't need it.

2) Learn from Jesus

He told us how: "Come to me, all 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." (Matthew 11:28-29) We learn meekness by coming to Jesus with our burdens, yielding to Him, and taking His yoke. When two oxen are yoked together, they can move far more than the sum of their individual strength. Jesus is not asking us to work harder. He's asking us to be yoked with Him—to do life side by side with the Son of God—and in that union, to learn what meekness looks like from the One who modeled it perfectly.

3) Be filled with the Holy Spirit

Paul writes in Ephesians 5 that being filled with the Spirit is the alternative to being controlled by lesser things. And Jesus promised that the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask: "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:13) The pathway is simple—come to Christ through the gospel, and ask. Ask daily. Drink regularly.

Blessed are the meek.

Not the passive. Not the timid. Not those who have surrendered their convictions or lost their voices. But those who have surrendered their wills—who have placed their power, their pride, and their need to control into the hands of a sovereign God and found, to their astonishment, that this is where rest lives.

They shall inherit the earth.

TL;DR

  1. Meekness is not weakness or passivity. It is power under control—our strength, influence, words, and will brought under the lordship of Jesus.

  2. Following Christ should change how we relate to both God and other people, replacing pride, harshness, self-will, and the need for vindication with humility, patience, and peace.

  3. Every person possesses some form of power or influence. The question is whether we use it to control and advance ourselves or surrender it to Jesus for the good of others.

  4. Surrendering control does not guarantee easier circumstances, but it opens us to the peace of God even in pain. As we come to Jesus, learn from Him, and depend on the Holy Spirit, He forms His meekness within us.

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Rev. Paul Lawler
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When Sorrow Leads to Joy