Dear Friends,

Not all virtues are popular. Today’s devotional feature one that is unpopular with almost everyone but Christ. See how you fell about it. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• Numbers 12:3 & Matthew 5:5

  Numbers 12:3   English Standard Version (ESV)
  3 Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth.    Matthew 5:5     English Standard Version (ESV)
  5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Numbers 12:3;  Matthew 5:5

“In this world, as a rule, it is not the meek who appear to get the victory; they are trodden on, and trodden down, and a meek-spirited man is often much despised among his fellow-men. Hence, when Moses writes of himself, ‘The man Moses was very meek,’ I do not see the least reason why he should not have written it, though many think it would have been impossible; but, indeed, in that age and now also, it is not self-praise but rather self-humiliation to confess that you are meek. When a man is not willing to go to war when others clamor for it, when the sacred honor of this dignified country needs that we dip our spears in blood, it is with a sneer that a man is called ‘white-livered and meek;’ and if he were himself to say, ‘Yes, I am meek,’ there would be no pride in that confession, for the most of men would count that he was confessing to a weakness. Therefore I think that Moses might deliberately write, ‘The man Moses was very meek,’ for nobody would accord him any honor for such a declaration in that age, and not very much even in this age, for men have not yet come to value meekness as God values it, but still look upon it as a kind of cowardice. They like a man who goes about the world with his fist always doubled ready to knock down everybody who dares to think that the braggart is not the king of all his fellows. They admire the great hero who will not have anything said or done against his superlative dignity, and although that pride be earthly, sensual, devilish, yet there are many who admire it, and when it goes by the name of ‘British pluck,’ then, probably, ‘a mean-spirited man’ is the mildest appellation that they give to one who is really meek.”

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLIII, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1897), p. 122]