Humility

The “it” is quite simply humility, servant hood, and meekness. The western church has rationalized and reasoned humility away. I was raised with the “you’re not a door mat, speak your opinion” mentality. So I’ve lived it-to my own detriment and strife.

The scripture and the life of Jesus gives a very different picture. Jesus said it was His joy to lay down His life. It was His pleasure to give up His eternity to forever be clothed in flesh. It was His honor to stand before those that accused Him in silence.

The story of the money changers is always used to defend our actions. The temple incident was a matter of defending the honor of the Father-not Jesus himself. Jesus was also moved by Holy Spirit. Most of the time we are moved by pride and self preservation which is a fleshly response. The question to ourselves is who are we defending? What are our motives? We lie and tell ourselves they are noble, but the truth is they are not.

The question always asked is “How far do I let people go? How far do I let them abuse me? God didn’t make us to be other people’s slaves!”

Really? Because Jesus said He was a slave of all. He said “I come to you as a bond servant.” He also said those who weren’t willing to drink His cup have no place with Him with His Father. I’m also sure the Father didn’t intend to watch His son be abused, lied about, and killed, but He stood by and allowed that to happen, knowing that the resulting glory was of far greater worth than the immediate pain.

That brings us to the current state of affairs and the lack of God in our lives and churches. People in and out of the church are done. They’re done with life and they’re done with us and our smiles and relevant sermons and ideals. We don’t need another sermon, program, series, idea, or plan. We don’t need another scheme or manipulation to get people to what we call church. We don’t need to try and be relevant and meaningful. WE NEED JESUS. In a real way. I don’t think we understand that. WE NEED JESUS.

God is omnipresent, but His manifest glory isn’t. His glory is His goodness and His goodness is His glory. It’s the glory that changes us. Scripture says that “the kindness of the Lord leads men to repentance”.

The simple principle of the kingdom is God honors humility. God honors those that are willing to be servants of all. But no one wants to do that. I don’t want to and you don’t want to. If we did and if we were doing it, God would show up and there would be so many people in our churches we wouldn’t know what to do. We wouldn’t need to market or mail or witness people into the pews or seats.

There’s no eternal, everlasting heat change because there’s no glory. There’s no glory because there’s no humility, and there’s no humility because of unforgivness. We think that people owe us something, that we don’t deserve to be treated “that way”. Why do we think that? Because we’re a child of God we should be treated with respect? Really? Jesus was the real son of God and He received nothing but grief, strife, and death. We’re just the adopted bunch and we think we deserve better?

So really what we’re saying is that we’re better than Jesus and deserve to be treated better than He was.

So what about forgiveness? As a servant and slave, forgiveness is a requirement. Forgiveness without remembrance or retribution.

A quote from Henri Nouwen sums it up well:

“Forgiveness means I continually am willing to forgive the other person for not being God-for not fulfilling all my needs. When you forgive people for not being God, you can celebrate that they are a reflection of God. You can say ‘since you are not God, I love you because you have such beautiful gifts of God’s love. You don’t have everything of God, but what you do have to offer is worth celebrating.’ By celebrating I mean lift up, affirm, confirm, to rejoice in another’s gifts. You can say you are a reflection of that ultimate love.”