Thursday, September 16, 2010

GO DOWN TO GO UP
Thursday, September 16, 2010

Verse for Today
James 3:10 - Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.

Pride is the characteristic of man that God hates more than any thing else. This is because pride was the sin of Lucifer which made him Satan. When he deceived Adam and Eve to commit sin, they also wanted to be like God and disobeyed God's commandment. Thus the sin of pride came to man as part of his sinful nature. It is so easy for man to be proud and that too in any of his achievements. It is in our nature to be proud about who we are, what we have and what we have done. We love to brag about it so that others will know about it and eventually heap more and more appreciation on us which will give us a feeling of elation. But God abhors pride and He deals with man's pride by making him humble. This was what God did to Nebuchadnezzar, Uzziah and others. God used them as part of His plan, but when they showed pride, they had to be dealt with. It is true that the proud will not ask God anything in prayer and will feel that they are OK. They do not want their needs known even to the Father in Heaven. The proud will always find time and place to exhibit their merits and knowledge. They think that they are better than others and will seek opportunity to prove it. They would not take help or support from others. If they are criticized, their ego is ruptured and that makes them react worth anger and haughtiness. God knows very well that any one who is not willing to accept the salvation freely offered to him, is rejecting gospel because they are too proud to accept their sinfulness. But when Jesus came to this world to die for mankind, He demonstrated that the perfect man is always humble. This can be seen by His humble birth, living and death. He attracted people to Himself not through a publicity campaign about His miracles, but because the people found Him different from the religious leaders of that time who were uniformly proud and arrogant. We also find that all the men God used were humble people, because God can use only those who are humble. Many of those men were not humble when they were selected by God, but He worked on them and made them declare their emptiness before Him before they could be given missions by God.

Dear friend, do you feel that you are humiliated and humbled by the circumstances? Do you feel that you have been deprived of the kind of position or power that you ought to have? Please do not be discouraged at such humiliations. God is interested in your utter humility so that He can lift you up to responsibilities that He wants to give you. He is making you break down before Him in utter humility like that of Moses. Remember, he was a proud young man and his pride even made him commit murder. But it took him 40 years to learn humility in the wilderness and then only God could use him to redeem Israel from Egypt. God has commanded man to be humble and declare his total unworthiness to be of use to God. Such people are tested by God to measure their humility. Unless we are humble, it is impossible for us to be of use to God because God detests pride. When we are truly humble, our humility should reach a stage when we should not even have the temptation to feel that we are humble. Such an attitude comes to us when we see our own total inadequacy before God. This change in attitude will be ours when we sit in the presence of the Lord and His Word and allow His Spirit to break us in our fleshly thoughts and imaginations about ourselves. We need to cry before God that we are wretched people, as did Isaiah and Paul, and submit to the Lord to be dealt with by His fire to burn any thing that has even a smell of pride in us. When we thus crucify and kill our self with its aroma of pride, the Lord will lift us up and use us for His glory. Our testimony will then be like that of David and Jacob about our humble beginnings and how we have reached thus far, only because of the Lord. That is when the Lord gets all glory for all that we have done as we declare ourselves as unworthy servants.

James 4:6 - God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Thought for Today
Humility is a virtue a person will lose the moment he thinks that he is humble.

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