July 9th, 2008 Jeff
" ‘Tis not that I did choose Thee,
For Lord, that could not be;
This heart would still refuse Three,
Hadst Thou not chosen me …
My heart owns none before Thee,
For Thy rich grace I thirst;
This knowing, if I love Thee,
Thou must have loved me first."
– Josiah Conder, 1836
Found in the front matter of the Jesus Storybook Bible we bought Dutch. Wow, that’s the type of Christ-exalting humility and truth I hope our young son to grasp. We hope to swim with him in the deep end of God’s perfections and grace (even from this young age).
"We love becaus e he first loved us ." [ 1 John 4:19 ]
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June 8th, 2008 Jeff
“Transcendent living is Christ-centered living. Living for Christ is the only way you will ever be liberated from your bondage to the overwhelming tendency to shrink the size of your life to the size of your life. The only way to spin free of the narrow confines of your little cubicle kingdom is to live in the big sky country of Christ-centered living. You will never win the battle with yourself simply by saying ‘no’ to yourself. The battle only begins to be won when you say ‘yes’ to the call of your King, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
- Paul David Tripp, A Quest for More (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2007), 99.
“Only love for Christ has the power to incapacitate the sturdy love for self that is the bane of every sinner, and only the grace of Christ has the power to produce that love.” (p. 105)
Ripped straight from Of First Importance . I highly recommend having their RSS feed , daily email or heading to their site each day for quotes like this.
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May 28th, 2008 Jeff
I’ve recently come to see how un-humble I am (read: prideful), and am desperately in need of the Gospel, and being specifically humble before my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.
Humility is a reoccurring theme, and truly the answer for all my problems in this two-second earthly life. A right assessment of self (humility), and a proper view of circumstances, as in contentment (see here ).
On this theme, there seems to be a strange paradox at work in my life. Why is it that sometimes I am more authentic with people I know are not Christian than with fellow believers and leaders in the church. Not overall as a huge difference in character on display, but in spots and situations. Why is that? Why do I ‘edit my story’ and try to come across as competent and gifted and a good leader? Anyone else struggle with this? (It is sin, and we must repent of it, and flee it .. but how?)
An incisive quote by Tim Keller addresses part (or at least the center) of my dilemma in his book The Reason for God . He writes:
"Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him…Sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God" (p. 162).
(Thanks to Jake Belder for the reminder .)
That is my problem — making good (not at all sinful things) into the ultimate things. I suffer with this self-idolatry, being a task-oriented, generally productive and competent (with a Type-A personality fueling it all). By default I find significance in what I do , which is a perversion of identity and life purpose before God. Rather, my significance is found in Christ, my life hidden with Him in God — in fact, Jeff is dead (Col. 3:3). That’s the reordering of life under the Gospel.
Unless we are diligent in seeking humility (since we cannot simply "do" it) we will not be progressing on the trajectory towards Christ-likeness. To long to fulfill what Andrew Murray defines humility as: "simply the sense of entire nothingness, which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all " [Andrew Murray, Humility , p. 12].
A passage that keeps coming to mind is 1 Corinthians 8:1-3:
Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.
It probably took about three hours wrestling with those verses to scratch the surface of what they mean for my identity, seeking knowledge and loving God in all things. (Still wresting with it.) Knowledge is not bad, nor is seeking knowledge a vain pursuit. The issue is with motives, issues of the heart and mind. Why am I seeking knowledge? For God’s glory and my joy? Is my learning a loving act towards God and others? Loving God is the chief goal (display His infinite worth and glory, by enjoying Him through love). And all knowledge should serve to help us know, love and enjoy God above all else. But of course none of this can be done in a vacuum, to the exclusion of others. We do not live to ourselves, and even in living to God we affect (and should) others greatly. If we wish to help others see Christ as beautify and glorious as He is, then we must be actively loving others. That is how the world will know Christ is in us, that He knows us (John 13:35). And that is what I am learning. Humbled, learning contentment. Happily.
I guess that if you are a Christian reading this then I’m being authentic with you after all…
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April 16th, 2008 Jeff
"Humility is the most essential thing in true religion . . . the great Christian duty is self-denial. This duty consists of two things: first, in denying worldly inclinations and its enjoyments and second, in denying self-exaltation and renouncing one’s self-significance by being empty of self. . . . The humble Christian is more apt to find fault with his own pride than with that of other men. . . . A truly humble person who has a low view of his own righteousness and holiness is poor in spirit and modest in speech. . . . He is apt to put the best construction on others’ words and behavior and to think that none is as proud as he is. But the proud hypocrite is pricked to discern the mote in his brother’s eye. He never sees the beam in his own. He’s often crying out about someone else’s pride, finding fault with that person’s appearance and way for living. Yet he never sees the filthiness of his own heart."
- Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (reprinted, Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1984), 132-137.
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March 30th, 2008 Jeff
Pride is an issue of where your satisfaction is.
—John Piper, Future Grace , p. 91.
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March 5th, 2008 Jeff
Kari is preaching/teaching a sermon in a communications lab class on Monday, and has 20 minutes to develop the themes of Philippians 2:1-4. I was eager and to have her practice on me today, receiving her words of wisdom and exhortation as the food my soul needed.
She’s posted the rough draft of her manuscript over on her blog. Her four points are the Premise, Picture, Path and Pursuit of unity as believers in the church. One of my favorite parts is centered around verse 3 on the Path:
Verse 3 provides us with a Path to unity.
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3)
The path to unity has a steep downgrade. The road goes down, and down and down and down. At times it’s windy, at times narrow, but always always down. The amazing thing is that this downward path takes you to the mountaintop. The summit of the Christian life is experienced on the mountaintop of humility.
Amen. I needed that, especiallly these days as I learn more and more the blessings of being poor in spirit, desperate for Christ and needing God’s Word to guide our every steps.
Andrew Murray says humility is the sense of entire nothingness which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all. Humility is losing oneself in God. It is a total lack of concern for self, which sets us free.
In making the fourth point (Pursuit) we are reminded how this frees us from pride.
Tozer says, The burden of self-love is a heavy load indeed.
CS Lewis said, “The pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch; but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else (God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden and sky) instead.”
Humility, then is forgetting our precious selves. When we do this, we are freed to gain true fellowship and unity with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
She goes on to remind us that “humility truly is the most freeing quality of life,” and the entire passage is centered around making the case as to why that is.
Kari’s final words drive the full thrust of the the passage home:
So you may be wondering, how can I cultivate this? Understand the Premise—we are accepted and loved by God. Gaze at the Picture—Love, Unity, Like-mindedness. Follow the Path down to humility. And lay down your burden of self for the Pursuit of one another. Do you want the secret to this? It’s found in the Little Way. Therese of Lisieux devised a prayer-filled approach to life that is deceptively simple. Seek out the menial job, welcome unjust criticisms, befriend those who annoy us, and help those who are ungrateful. Lay down your burden of self and Live the Little Way.
That’s a sermon I’d like not only to preach, but to live.
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February 29th, 2008 Jeff
And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil! It was when the now-fallen angels began to look upon themselves with self-complacency that they were led to disobedience, and were cast down from the light of heaven into outer darkness. Even so it was, when the Serpent breathed the poison of his pride–the desire to be as God–into the hearts of our first parents, they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness into which man is sunk. In heaven and earth, pride–self-exaltation–is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell.
Hence it follows that nothing can be our redemption but the restoration of the lost humility, the original and only true relation of the creature to its God. And so Jesus came to bring humility back to earth, to make us partakers of it, and by it to save us. In heaven He humbled Himself to become man. The humility we see in Him possessed Him in heaven; it brought Him, He brought it, from there. Here on earth “He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death”; His humility gave His death its value, and so became our redemption. And now the salvation He imparts is nothing less and nothing else than a communication of His own life and death, His own disposition and spirit–His own humility–as the ground and root of His relation to God and His redeeming work. Jesus Christ took the place and fulfilled the destiny of man, as a creature, by His life of perfect humility. His humility is our salvation. His salvation is our humility.
And so the life of the saved ones, of the saints, must needs bear this stamp of deliverance from sin and full restoration to their original state–their whole relation to God and man marked by an all-pervading humility. Without this there can be no true abiding in God’s presence, or experience of His favor and the power of His Spirit; without this, no abiding faith, or love or joy or strength. Humility is the only soil in which the graces root; the lack of humility is the sufficient explanation of every defect and failure. Humility is not so much a grace or virtue along with others as it is the root of all, because it alone takes the right attitude before God and allows Him as God to do all.
Andrew Murray, Humility: The Beauty of Holiness (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, reprinted 1997)
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October 22nd, 2007 Jeff
“What we suffer from … is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays, the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought to not doubt — the Divine Reason.” (emphasis mine)
–(G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Image Books Doubleday and Company, 1959, orig. 1924), p. 31, quoted by John Piper, Battling Unbelief (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2007), pp. 41-42.)
Read some of Kari’s thoughts on that and surrounding content in that chapter in Battling Unbelief.
—
By the way, we should allow the Truth to humble us
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