Strength to Surrender

Strength, Surrender, and a Spiritual Appetite: What It Really Means to Follow Jesus

There is a passage in the Gospel of Matthew that has shaped the lives of followers of Jesus for centuries. It is part of the Sermon on the Mount, the longest recorded teaching of Jesus, and within it sits a collection of statements known as the Beatitudes. Each one begins with the word "blessed" — a word that, in its original meaning, points not to fleeting happiness but to a deep, unshakeable, eternal joy. A joy that no circumstance, no hardship, no difficult season can strip away. A joy rooted in the unbreakable reality that nothing can separate us from God when we place our faith in Jesus Christ.

Two of these beatitudes deserve a closer look, because they carry truths that run completely counter to the way our culture thinks. They challenge some of our most deeply held assumptions about strength, about desire, and about what it means to live a life that is genuinely transformed.

Meekness Is Not Weakness

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." (Matthew 5:5 — a promise that the humble and surrendered will receive what God has prepared for them)

When most people hear the word "meek," they picture someone passive, pushed around, unable to stand up for themselves. But that picture is entirely wrong. Meekness, as Jesus uses it here, is not the absence of strength. It is strength under control.

Think about a horse. A well-trained horse is not a weak horse. It is an immensely powerful animal — capable of tremendous force — and yet it responds to the lightest guidance from its trainer. Its power has not been removed. It has been surrendered. In fact, horse breeders have long said that the meekest horse wins the race. Not the weakest. The meekest — the one most surrendered to its training.

That is the picture Jesus is painting. Meekness is what happens when we stop insisting that we are in control and instead surrender that control to God. The opposite of meekness is not strength — it is pride. Pride says, "Look what I can do." Meekness says, "Look what God can do." Proverbs 16:18 warns that pride leads to destruction, and Proverbs 11:2 reminds us that with humility comes wisdom.

So what does meekness actually look like in daily life? It looks like not needing to win every argument. It looks like pausing before responding when emotions are running high. It looks like being willing to apologize first, even when you believe you were wronged. It looks like listening to understand rather than listening to reload your next point. It looks like asking God, in the middle of a tense conversation, to guide your words toward gentleness rather than retaliation.

One of the most powerful demonstrations of strength is having every ability to retaliate and choosing not to. Jesus himself modeled this perfectly. He had the power to stop his own crucifixion. He could have called down armies of angels. He did none of it. He was meek — not because he was weak, but because his strength was completely surrendered to the will of the Father.

That is the kind of people Jesus is calling us to be.

A Hunger That Cannot Be Satisfied by the World

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." (Matthew 5:6 — a promise that those who desperately pursue God's goodness will be completely satisfied)

The imagery here is intentional and striking. Hunger and thirst are not mild inconveniences. They are urgent, consuming needs. Jesus is describing a passionate, desperate longing — not for food and water, but for the goodness of God. A desire to be right with God and to stay that way.

The word translated "filled" in this verse is the same Greek word used when Jesus feeds the thousands in Matthew 14:20 — describing how the crowd ate and was completely satisfied, with food left over. This is not a partial filling. This is the promise of being thoroughly, completely, abundantly satisfied by God's goodness.

And yet, so many of us are spiritually malnourished. We show up once a week hoping that one hour will carry us through six more days. We sit at a table full of spiritual nourishment and refuse to pick up the fork. And because that hunger goes unfed, we fill it with other things — things that are empty, things that ultimately lead away from life rather than toward it.

The sobering truth is this: you will never accidentally develop a hunger for righteousness. It has to be intentionally cultivated. Spiritual appetite grows when you feed it.

Some practical ways to begin building that appetite: Read Scripture before opening social media in the morning. Spend fifteen minutes in prayer each day — and if that feels impossibly long at first, lean into the discomfort, because spiritual muscles grow the same way physical ones do. Memorize Matthew 5:3-6 and meditate on those words throughout the week. Take an honest look at one area of your life where you know you are chasing the wrong thing, and name it. And perhaps most powerfully, find someone who will walk alongside you and hold you accountable in your walk with Jesus.

The Thread That Connects It All

These two beatitudes are not isolated ideas. They are connected by a single thread: surrender.

To be meek is to surrender control to God. To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to surrender our lesser appetites in pursuit of something infinitely greater. Both require us to acknowledge that we cannot do this on our own. Both require us to run toward God rather than away from him.

The world will constantly pull us back toward pride, toward anger, toward the temporary over the eternal. It will tell us that strength means never backing down and that hunger is best satisfied by what is right in front of us. Jesus says something entirely different.

He says that the ones who are truly blessed — who carry that deep, unshakeable, eternal joy — are the ones who have learned to hold their strength with an open hand and to let their deepest longing be for the goodness of God himself.

That is the life we are being shaped toward. And it begins with a single step of surrender.