God Still Seeks The Humble

"....God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble." - 1 Peter 5:5b

         How have we missed this so badly? When I look at our world today, including myself and the Church in America, I see an astounding lack of humility. It's not just that we aren't humble enough. It's that we are overtly prideful. We celebrate people and ideas that do not deserve our attention. We use the underprivileged and oppressed as props to support our good works. We seem to have missed the entire point of the Gospel.

         Yet God has always sought after the humble. He has always resisted the prideful. Think about the classic Bible story of the Exodus. God chose Moses, a humble shepherd to deliver His people from a pride-riden tyrant. When God chose, in the fullness of time, to deliver the world from sin, He sent His Son to be born in a humble manger.

         And when God's Son had come in the flesh, to whom did He send His angels to tell the world? Surely Caesar Augustus or King Herod, right? No? Maybe the magi of the east? No. He gave them a sign, but His heavenly messengers were reserved for the truly humble:

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid." - Luke 2:8-9

        Whether you hear it from the Bible itself or the beautiful monologue of Linus Vanpelt in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, the same truth rings clear - God chose to reveal His glory to the most humble members of society. I don't think anything has changed. I think, in fact, I know that God still seeks the humble and rejects the proud. He isn't looking to do anything with the prideful but to humble them.

"For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." - Luke 14:11

         It is when the prideful are humbled that they are able see themselves through the proper lense. One often overlooked passage of Scripture is Daniel chapter four. Nebuchadnezzar is being his usual prideful self when God strikes him and humbles him.

         The king of the known world becomes nothing more than a beast, walking on all fours, eating grass. When the time of the curse was passed, Nebuchadnezzar came to his senses and honored God. Not unlike Kuzco in "The Emperor's New Groove" (incidentally one of the greatest cartoon movies ever), sometimes we have to be humbled in order to be lifted up as James reminds us:

"Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up. - James 4:10

         Often, God  has to remove the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh as the prophet Ezekiel points out. The reason for all of this is simple - humility is to be desired over pride. God is even declared to prefer them that have "a broken and contrite heart" (Psalm 34:18). And God desires that we be of the same mind as Him when it comes to humility (Philippians 2:3-8, James 2:1-10)

         I know I have been heavy on quoting the Bible here, but I don't want us to miss this important truth that I believe God desperately wants us to embrace. I could tell you in my own words all day how imperative it is that we be humble, but it is more beneficial for you to hear it from God's own Word. The question now is, am I humble? Is the Church encouraging humility? What could it mean for our society if we embraced humility?

         It would be life-changing. And what is life-changing eventually becomes world-changing. 

         I leave you with a quote from Richard Baxter:

“The very design of the gospel is to abase us; and the work of grace is begun and carried on in humiliation. Humility is not a mere ornament of a Christian, but an essential part of the new creature. It is a contradiction in terms to be a Christian, and not be humble.”