August 27 Daily Devotional

Penniless, we own the world!
2 Corinthians 6:10 (N.E.B.)

We are to leave everything—ourselves, our rights, our cause, our whole future—in the hands of God, and especially so if we feel we are suffering unjustly.... We leave ourselves and our cause and our rights and everything with God, with a quietness in spirit and in mind and heart....

Now notice what happens to the man who is like this. ‘Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.’ What does that mean? We can summarize it very briefly. The meek already inherit the earth in this life, in this way. A man who is truly meek is a man who is always satisfied, he is a man who is already content. Goldsmith expresses it well when he says, ‘Having nothing yet hath all’. The Apostle Paul has put it still better, for he says, ‘as having nothing, and yet possessing all things’. Again, in writing to the Philippians, he says in effect, ‘Thank you for sending your present. I like it, not because I wanted anything, but I like the spirit that made you send it. Yet as for myself, I have all things and abound.’ He has already said to them, ‘I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound’ and, T can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ Notice, too, the striking way in which he expresses the same thought in 1 Corinthians 3. After telling his readers that they need not be jealous or concerned about these things, he says, ‘All things are yours’, everything; ‘whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s’. Ah things are yours if you are meek and truly Christian; you have already inherited the earth.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 70–1