Jesus Calls Us to His Rest: Meekness Is His Method

By A. W. Tozer

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!

---

Yours in Christ,
Paul N. F.