If I’m honest, meekness was never a quality I aspired to as a young leader. Vision, confidence, competency — those were the things I wanted people to see in me. Meekness never made the list. And if I’m being even more honest, I’m not sure it makes many pastors’ lists. We’ve built a leadership culture, inside and outside the church, that has almost no category for meekness. When we do see it, we don’t quite know what to call it. Usually we just call it soft.
Confusing meekness with weakness is a mistake that costs us more than we realize — in our walk with God, in our churches, and in how we lead.
What Meekness Is Not
Think about that iconic scene in The Sandlot when Smalls confuses the Great Bambino (Babe Ruth) with Bambi (the Disney deer). Ham Porter looks at him with disgust as he conflates the greatest baseball player to ever live with “that wimpy deer!” Most of us have done something similar with one of the most powerful traits in God’s kingdom. We confuse meekness with someone who can’t stand up for themselves. Someone quiet. Timid. Easily pushed around. A wimpy deer.
But that’s not meekness. That’s not even close to the word.
The classic picture of biblical meekness is a wild horse that’s been broken— not broken in spirit, but brought under control. All the strength is still there. The power hasn’t gone anywhere. What’s changed is that the strength is now submitted, directed, yielded to another. A meek horse isn’t a weak horse. It’s a strong horse that now entrusts itself wholly to the one with the reins.
Moses was called the meekest man on the face of the earth (Numbers 12:3), and Moses stood in front of Pharaoh, split a sea, and led a couple million complaining people through a desert for forty years. That’s not soft. Jesus called himself “gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29), and Jesus flipped tables in the temple, cast out demons, calmed storms, and endured the cross. Again, not soft. It’s true strength.
What Meekness Actually Is
James 1:21 speaks about meekness in a way that helps us define it.
Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. (James 1:21, ESV)
James gives two commands there. Put away — rid yourself of the foolishness and twisted ways of the world. And receive — take in, accept with meekness, the word God has planted in you.
So, what is meekness? It is similar to humility but takes it a step further. Meekness is a quality of heart or an internal resolve to accept and desire the will of another over your own. It is a deep and durable trust in God.
Let’s sit with the difference for a second, because it matters. Humility is the opposite of pride. Meekness is the opposite of control. Meekness is a surrendered posture toward someone else’s will. You can be humble and still be stubborn. Meekness is what happens when you joyfully let go of the reins. James uses the word here because that’s exactly what receiving God’s word requires: not just admitting you’re not God, but actually wanting his word over your own — desiring it, submitting to it, letting it have the final say instead of you.
That’s not weakness. That is wisdom.
Meekness in the Christian Life
What does meekness in the Christian life look like? Let’s start here, because everything else builds on it: do you actually receive God’s word with meekness, or do you negotiate with it?
You know the difference. Negotiating with the text looks like reading a hard command and immediately looking for the exception clause. It looks like agreeing with Scripture right up until it touches the one area of your life you’ve decided is off-limits. Meekness looks like coming to the text and saying, before you even know what it’s going to say, I want your word over mine. I trust you with the reins. I relax into your sovereign will.
Meekness shows up when a friend or spouse brings you a hard truth about yourself. It shows up when God closes a door you were sure he’d open. It shows up in how quickly you’re willing to be corrected versus how quickly you’re ready to defend yourself. Meekness is the whole-life posture of someone who has actually decided that another’s will — God’s — is better than their own.
Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount with meekness. Before he says anything else about what kingdom people look like, he says this: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). Not the grinders. Not the decisive. Not the sure-of-themselves. Not the highly skilled five-star recruits. The meek — the ones who are yielded.
Meekness in Pastoral Leadership
How does meekness show up, or fail to show up, in pastoral ministry?
It gets tested with people first. The staff member who questions your judgment in a meeting. The member who leaves loudly and blames you on the way out. The ministry initiative that flops and you have to answer for it. Meekness doesn’t mean you skip the hard conversation or soften the truth to keep the peace — meekness is not niceness. A meek pastor can still tell a staff member the truth, correct a wandering member, or hold a firmly to conviction. The difference is that he doesn’t have to win or control the outcomes — he entrusts outcomes to God. A meek leader doesn’t have to save face — he can be corrected himself without collapsing. A meek leader can correct others without needing to pile on. A meek leader interacts with others with gentle seriousness and calm confidence.
It also gets tested by unmet ambition. Every young pastor has some picture of what their ministry will become. A certain size. A certain shape of impact. A certain trajectory, on a certain timeline, that made sense back when you were dreaming about it in seminary or in a coffee shop or on a whiteboard with a core team. And for most of us, the ideal church we dreamed about doesn’t match the ministry that is unfolding in front of us.
That’s where meekness gets revealed — in the quiet, disappointing math of a ministry that isn’t going the way you thought it would. Meekness in that moment doesn’t mean giving up. It means you trust God’s plan and purposes enough that you can actually, happily embrace them — even when they look nothing like what you set out to build. Meekness accepts his will. It stops forcing our own ministry ambition into existence and rests in the confidence that the kingdom of God was never ours to bring in the first place. We simply receive and obey.
Please don’t confuse what I am saying with indifference or resignation. Indifference lacks zeal. Resignation quits. Meekness yields — it keeps showing up faithfully to whatever God is actually doing. Meek leaders are resilient in this way.
Growing in Meekness
So ask it plainly: is meekness growing in you? In the way you love and lead?
Today, I want meekness to grow in me more than competency. Lord, help me stay yielded to you; this has become a daily prayer.
I want to encourage you to join me in this pursuit. This week, find one place where you’re gripping the reins too tight — a decision you’re forcing, a correction you’re avoiding, a plan you refuse to let go of — and hand it back to God. Ask him, plainly, to make you meek before he makes you anything else.
Lord, take the reins I keep grabbing back. Make me meek before you make me useful.
And remember – Jesus doesn’t simply command us to become meek. He shows us what meekness looks like. He possessed all authority, yet in his great love for us, he chose the cross.
If you’re a pastor or leader wrestling with what it actually looks like to trust him with the reins, I’d love to talk it through — reach out here.
